The literary life, or how to go mad with words

In an interview published this week, Indian novelist Vivek Shanbhag offered a formulation that will land differently depending on where you sit in the literary ecosystem. "You must, in some sense, go mad with literature," he told Scroll.in. It reads like a provocation. In practice, it describes something much quieter and more disciplined than the phrase suggests — a willingness to subordinate almost everything else to the work.

That willingness is rarer than it used to be. Not because writers have become less serious, but because the infrastructure around writing has shifted beneath them. The platforms that mediate between author and reader increasingly optimise for engagement over depth, for volume over the kind of sustained attention that serious fiction demands. A novelist who wants to build an audience in 2026 faces pressure to perform as a content producer — to be visible, responsive, and perpetually producing. The math runs counter to the conditions that produce the books those same platforms eventually celebrate.

Shanbhag, whose novel Ghachar Ghochar won international acclaim when it appeared in English translation in 2016, has watched this unfold from the inside. His own trajectory — from writing for Indian literary magazines to a slow-burning international reputation — predates the acceleration, but the dynamics are not foreign to him. What the interview captures is less a complaint about the literary economy and more an insistence on what it costs to take the work seriously. Going mad, in this formulation, means refusing the bargain.

The time problem

Serious literary fiction requires time that the current content economy does not generally compensate for. A novel built over five or seven years will not generate the metrics that justify platform promotion in the way that a well-timed essay or a viral newsletter can. Publishers, mindful of this, have in many cases shortened the runway for debut authors — expecting visible platforms before the book arrives, as if the novel itself were insufficient advertisement.

This is not unique to any single market. Writers in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States describe similar pressures. The difference is that the pressure has intensified across the board as publishing conglomerates have consolidated and as social media has rewired the relationship between authors and their readers. What once looked like marketing is now a prerequisite for being considered at all. The writer who refuses to play this game — who treats the novel as the primary communication and everything else as noise — either finds a readership despite the signals or does not. There is not much middle ground.

Shanbhag's position, as it emerges in the interview, is that this is simply the wrong trade. Not naively — he is not suggesting that writers should ignore readers. But the hierarchy he describes runs in a particular direction. The work comes first. The relationship to readers, if it forms, follows from the work's quality and honesty, not from the writer's visibility.

The craft of refusal

There is something in this that connects to older debates about literary integrity — the question of whether a writer's obligation is to the work or to the audience, whether seriousness and accessibility are in tension or whether the tension is itself a false problem. Shanbhag's answer, insofar as the interview discloses one, leans toward the second. The "madness" he describes is not a rejection of readers but a willingness to risk them — to write the book that needs to exist rather than the book that the market has already shown it wants.

This is easy to say and hard to execute. The economics of writing — even successful writing — rarely provide the security that allows for long fallow periods between books. Agents and editors speak openly about the pressure authors face to demonstrate productivity, to be present in the conversation, to have something to say before they have finished saying it. The result, in some cases, is a kind of professional conservatism: books that feel calibrated to meet an expected audience rather than books that feel surprised by their own existence.

Shanbhag's career does not look calibrated. Ghachar Ghochar arrived without obvious fanfare, built slowly through word of mouth and critical attention, and then became something of a landmark — cited by readers and other writers as a novel that reoriented what the form could do. That trajectory is not reproducible, which is part of what makes it instructive. There is no system for manufacturing the kind of seriousness Shanbhag is describing. There is only the decision to pursue it.

What the writer owes

The interview does not pretend that this decision is without cost. The literary life, understood this way, is not a straightforwardly good life. It requires periods of invisibility that the contemporary writer is trained to experience as failure. It demands a tolerance for uncertainty about whether the work will find its readers — and a willingness to accept that outcome as separate from the work's value. None of this is glamorous, and none of it is easily reconciled with the professional norms that govern most working lives.

What Shanbhag's framing captures, though, is the particular quality of commitment that serious fiction still requires — not as nostalgia but as description. The novels that endure tend to be written by people who understood, at some point, that they were not writing for a market. They were writing for a problem they could not leave alone. That problem — the specific, stubborn, seemingly irrational problem that makes the writing necessary — is what the literary life, at its best, is built around. Everything else is logistics.

Whether this remains viable as the infrastructure around writing continues to shift is a genuine open question. The platforms are not going to make it easier. The economics are not going to liberalise on their own. What remains is the choice: to go mad with literature, or not to. Shanbhag, for his part, seems clear on which side of that question he stands.