Novoneel Chakraborty’s No Time to Blink is a direct sequel to his 2024 book The Heartbreak Club, a novel that revolves around a sinister club in a high school that creates havoc in the lives of students in dangerous, mysterious ways. When Kisha Sen’s older sister Anara goes missing, she embarks on a journey determined to uncover the ominous secrets of the club. The new novel picks up in medias res and draws the reader in instantly. t2 had a tete-a-tete with the author to find out more.
You have an impressive collection of titles under your belt and are known for the bold romantic thriller genre. How do you think your writing has evolved over this journey?
I have always believed that an artist’s art evolves as the artist evolves as a human being. The same is true for me. Since I began quite early, I now understand it was more instinct when I began, but with time, the craft involved in the writing process has taken over. And being a social animal, I am, every day, learning, embracing life lessons, and trying to be the most upgraded version of myself. The same is true for the writer in me as well.
How challenging, or not, is it to be original when it comes to writing new stories?
I personally feel stories are absolute entities. It is the perspective that we use to tell our stories that makes us feel whether they are original or not. In today’s times, when people are exposed to so much content both from India and across the world, it does become difficult to remain ‘original’ all the time, but having said that I believe the magic of the universe is that all of us have a fresh inbuilt, or acquire an exclusive, perspective. The point is whether we are probing it well enough during our storytelling. Having said that, I have personally chucked off a lot of stories because of creative coincidences that have occurred. It’s heartbreaking, but if you come to know something similar already exists or has come out before you, then you have to terminate it and put yourself on a different creative journey.
Your characters often exist in moral grey zones — none of them entirely good or bad, just painfully human. What interests you about that ambiguity, and why do you return to it so often?
That very human ambiguity is what excites the storyteller in me. I feel what draws us to stories is the human factor. And to lay bare the different layers, irrespective of their hues, especially the ones we don’t talk about in society, is what makes storytelling emotionally immersive. Moreover, the entire gamut of storytelling works because of emotions. And emotions can happen only when we have nuanced human beings as characters.
Did you always plan to write a follow-up to The Heartbreak Club? What made you want to revisit these characters?
The Heartbreak Club was always a duology to begin with. Hence, No Time To Blink was already written by the time the first one came out. Revisiting characters is a tricky thing, as I have learnt from my previous work. Sometimes it’s difficult to re-enter the mind space of the characters that one had written a while ago. Hence, this time I wrote the entire story at a stretch.
A central theme of the book is survival — physical, emotional, and psychological, via memory. What is your definition of survival, and how did that shape each character arc in the story?
We are all surviving something, big or small, all the time. Survival, I think, is one of the most basic and visceral of all human instincts. And because it’s that basic, the relativity with it is immediate. And when such a character wins in the end, the reader feels it’s a personal triumph. Just like a rags-to-riches story has an inherent appeal to it, a survival-to-rule story has an inherent engaging quotient to it. Rarely does a survival story come across as one that you don’t root for. I intentionally chose the structure of the duology as something where the protagonist has to not only find out what happened to her older sister but also has to survive an alien place while doing so. It adds the necessary emotional drama to the thriller that is at its core. Even Kisha’s parents are trying to survive their marriage in the story. It allowed me to tackle a mature relationship in the otherwise innocent universe of relationships triggered by school life.
When you’re not writing, what kind of books do you gravitate towards as a reader? Are they similar to the stories you write?
I read anything and everything. These days, I’m inclined more towards non-fiction and biographies, but there’s no particular category of books. It depends on what I want to read at a given point in time. From thrillers to romance to fantasy.