Wolf Interviews: Sujan Sundareswaran

If you’re interested in being interviewed in the future, please fill out this form.

Sujan Sundareswaran

is a nihilistic nerd, who likes to do hardcore treks in the high Himalaya, away from people as much as possible. That fuels ideas for both his work-in-progress novel and utopian societies, while he’s fuelled by copious amounts of ginger tea and spite. Is obsessed with em—dashes.

Read his serialized novel Project Fable.

I don't often encounter Indian inspired epic fantasy, so Project Fable is instantly fascinating. Can you tell me a bit about the influences behind your novel?

I grew up in a deeply religious Hindu household. My father’s side of the family, we have a lot of priests and officiators, and I’d be taken along to religious events and that was most of my childhood. I grew up on a lot of mythological stories and legends, and there’s no dearth of those in India. India also has incalculably voluminous literary history, and that spurred my reading habit as well. I’m an atheist now, but that is no reason to not enjoy these religious texts or the mythologies, right?

The sciences, especially astronomy and cosmology, also greatly interested me. I was a hardcore nerd, but with none of the academic prowess, ha. I failed my eleventh grade, which was unheard of in my family of overachievers. I curiously wondered how this came to be—I was in denial about my laziness to actually sit down and study, it had to be the Universe’s fault!—and this also got me interested in the concept of causality. One of the core tenets of Hinduism is karma, which is pretty much causality with a traditional twist. So, three things—mythology, cosmology and the thread of causality that connects these two, at least in my mind. I kept mulling about these over the years.

After a sub-par performance in school, I eventually got to college, where I had to choose Game Design, because I wouldn’t get an admission into any of the more established disciplines. As a simple exercise, I decided to use those concepts: mythology, karma, causality into an idea for a game. The first version of Fable was born, but with a vastly different setting and characters. I worked on some initial drafts, but those went nowhere. Around 2015, I decided to polish it up again, and worked on a version, but it didn’t feel right, so instead of explicit levels, I decided to flesh out the story first. I started on a couple of chapters, but I knew it was bad, and dropped it.

Then, around 2020, we were all stuck at home during the pandemic, doing nothing much else, and I decided to polish up Fable again, and here we are, in its current form.

Interestingly, I have a similar background, but my family was Catholic rather than Hindu. I became an unbeliever very young and the sciences, as well as world mythology, guided me for a long time.

Being non-religious, what do you see in myths and folktales? Or to put it another way, What is the relationship between myths and what we may call Truth?

Interesting. I think myths and folktales are manifestations of the human condition, across cultures and societies. If you ask me, I like to think of religion as just a way for people to lead a good life, and to provide general guidelines to live by, or rather used to be—I don’t think it started out as the politicised, radicalised extremism it’s used as today.

That said, I think Truth is something else entirely. Today, my world-view is what I like to call “objective truth”—meaning it’s closer to science than anything else. I’m extremely open-minded, and I’m willing to accept anything new into my world-view, as long as it’s rooted in identifiable, empirical, reproducible fact, or at the very least, a solid backed-up theory. I’m not a big fan of faith or belief.

On the flip side, it’s also hard not to draw some parallels between ancient myths and society today—for example, according to the Hindu calendar, we’re now in the Kali yuga, an age characterised by increased negative traits amongst humans, such as greed, lust and disease. Given the events around the world today, it’s laughable how easy it is to draw this parallel indeed. So, I haven’t written off all legends and myths as complete hokum, either. There’s a lot to learn from the wisdom of the ages, but sadly, most of it is lost today.

Myths and folktales relate more to philosophy of life and the human psyche more than anything else. They form the bedrock of a particular society’s belief system—it’s what differentiates different cultures and their heritages. It’s what adds diversity to our human race, why the Japanese think very differently to the Incas or the Aboriginal people. Even when that’s the case, there’s an underlying uniformity to the way these myths are constructed and the themes present in them. Christianity is an amalgamation of many older religions, Hinduism and Buddhism are almost always intertwined in the rituals and central tenets, many central American cultures share similar traits, and so on.

Did that make sense? I’ve tried to condense my answer, this is a vast subject to unravel :D

Would you say that your background in Game Design influences your writing or how you think about narrative?

Surprisingly, not at all! Building a game, or writing for a game is very different to how a novel is approached. 

In Game Design, you have to make early considerations as to what is playable, and what narratives can translate into good gameplay and level progression and characters worth playing. 

In writing a novel, there are far fewer constraints, you can just let your imagination flow, ha.

What made you decide to serialize your novel on substack rather than seek traditional publishing or simply self-publishing the novel all at once?

I plan to make Fable into a multi-volume saga, along the lines of LotR and Dune. It’s nowhere close to finished, I’m still in the initial parts of the story. But I have been working on it for a few years now, and had shared it with a handful of folks occasionally. I had gotten some very positive feedback, and I just wanted to get it out there, instead of it simmering on my laptop for years. So I decided to put it out there bit by bit, as and when I write. 

I’m not familiar with traditional publishing, but I don’t think I can do that with just a few chapters, can I? Plus, I like the control self-publishing and Substack gives me, rather than an opaque editing process done by unknown people at a publishing firm.

Plus, I liked the idea of getting paid while still writing, thanks to Substack, ha.

Do you have a general outline for the rest of the story? Or are you setting sail into the great unknown?

I know what the ending is going to be, and a few milestones in between. Everything else is pretty much vague and nebulous, and I’m adding form as I go on.

I’m exploring Fable just as much as any other new reader, ha.

You keep the lore behind paywall. I think this is a very interesting and clever decision. The novel itself is freely available, but those who want more can pay for a subscription. In some ways, it makes me think of the Appendices of Lord of the Rings or even The Silmarillion. What went into this decision?

My initial plan was to make the first few chapters free, everything else behind a paywall. But the more I thought about it, the less sense it made.

Then I realised, I was writing for two kinds of people: casual readers, who just want to read a good story and move on; and hardcore nerdy folks like me, who are interested in the why, the how and the when and whatnot. And like you said: “those who want more”—if they do, maybe they’d also be interested in supporting me? That did seem to make a lot more sense.

And, having just the first few chapters of a potential 2000-pager free wouldn’t do justice to the entire story, too. It simply wouldn’t be enough to judge whether you are willing to invest more into it or not.

You've published at a steady pace since beginning your substack. How much of Project Fable is currently finished?

I’m about ten chapters ahead of the publishing schedule, and bit more on the lore side of things.

As the story progresses, I’m getting deeper and deeper into the thick of things, and this needs more research, more plot visualisations, more verifications, cross-checking and proofreading and so on. There will be a time when the backlog runs out, and I think that’s where I’ll close out Book 1. Or, if I reach a potential milestone in the story first.

What kind of research goes into your writing?

Most of my research is diving into religious texts and history of India. 

The religious texts are mostly Hindu philosophy and the immense number of literary works such as the vedas, the upanishads, the puranas and folktales from different regions. This is just to feed my mental model of classical Hinduism, so that I can write with deep understanding, rather than just a generic grasp of the ideas. The central tenet of karma is what my novel is built on, so I can’t afford to misinterpret the themes of Hinduism.

History is more for authenticity and practical usage. Details are important to me, and I want to make Fable as rich and vibrant as possible, and don’t want to make silly mistakes that shatter that immersion for the reader.

Final words?

I’m ever grateful for Substack for the platform it is today—in a sea of toxic social media sites and vain, shallow influencers, Substack feels like the last bastion of intellectual discussions and positive community. I love that artists and writers can at least shore up their income with their creative output here. Kudos to the team.

And of course, I’d love it if you folks headed over to my newsletter, and see if it’s something you’d read, and share your thoughts on. Cheers!