Here’s a chat with my friend Ranjit (we met online on a course facilitated by author and creator Paul Millerd a while back and bonded over our shared interest in writing) recorded on Sunday morning.
Ranjit has all sorts of interesting perspectives, including his background as a lawyer and his current occupation as a software engineer, and he’s working on his first novel alongside publishing irregular missives on his Substack The Haphazard. He’s also, to his immense credit, a fellow Arsenal fan.
We chat about finishing big projects, piecing together novels, and how sports can mirror a hero’s journey. We also compared notes on Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, share some other reading reflections and compare the everyday chaos of law firms and pro sport locker rooms.
Below you’ll find some notes on the episode (you can get the transcript as well) and I’m particularly proud of our puzzle piece analogy explaining constructing fiction vs nonfiction.
Enjoy!
Notes
We discussed how constructing nonfiction feels more straightforward as while you might write out of order, there’s usually a pretty clear linear route forwards. Fiction feels more chaotic and we came up with something unusually lucid!
Here’s our puzzle-piece analogy from the conversation (lightly edited for clarity):
When you’re writing a novel, it’s a bit like you’re cutting out the jigsaw pieces yourself and throwing them on the floor, rather than receiving a box of pre-cut pieces. You don’t fully know the picture yet—your job is to figure out what the problem or shape of the story is, which doesn’t become clear until you’ve created enough pieces and laid them out. Only then can you see where it’s headed and what the real puzzle is.
Why it matters
No ready-made map: Unlike a nonfiction project, literary fiction doesn’t come with a structured outline. You have to invent the pieces and how they connect to each other as you go.
Clarity emerges in the doing: You need to write enough rough draft to spot recurring themes, conflicts, and characters—those become your puzzle pieces. Pre-planning will never give you a complete map to where you’ll end up.
Self-generated obstacles: Writing can feel like creating challenges (the cut-out pieces) for yourself to solve. You’re the source of both the puzzle itself and the picture it creates at its eventual completion.
This helps explain why novel-writing can feel chaotic at first: you’re constructing the materials and the final image simultaneously. It takes time—and sometimes multiple drafts—before the puzzle begins to appear at all, let alone click into place.
Writing Process and Approaches
Ranjit’s Substack publishing is haphazard while mine is regular. We discussed the merits of the different approaches, the problem of accumulating too many half-written stubs and when something becomes worthy of finishing and publishing.
Ranjit told me more about his almost finished novel draft about two brothers coping with the recent loss of both parents. The older brother is a workaholic lawyer, while the younger one is a quiet student at St. Paul’s. It explores the topic of work addiction but becomes a more nuanced story about grief, familial obligation and realigning life after tragedy.
I’ve read some of Ranjit’s short fiction and he strikes a great balance of seriousness and anarchic, absurdist humour so am excited to see where he takes his novel.
Reading and Influences
We talked about some of our recent reading:
Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons
We were are surprised by how modern and accessible the 19th-century Russian novel feels, particularly given how early it is in the history of the novel form. We discuss its sympathetic portrayal of both generations: the idealistic younger characters (like Bazarov) and the bemused older ones and how its core themes of tradition vs. new ideas remain relevant—Bazarov’s scientific nihilism maps neatly onto today’s ‘tech-bro’ mindset.
David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity
Ranjit is tackling this dense book, which explores science, optimism, and infinite possibilities. It’s challenging but occasionally yields insights about the open-ended nature of scientific discovery.
Finite and Infinite Games by James P Carse
A while back I read this short but complex book that while not simple to read, gives you a fascinating lens through which to interpret reality and how it’s structured around palying games of different types.
Carlo Rovelli’s nonfiction
Rovelli’s books are mind bending and beautiful and like Deutsch’s, don’t necessarily require you to fully understand them to enjoy them. Start with 7 Brief Lessons and work up to White Holes if you’re feeling adventurous.
Other Reads
Ranjit references a biography of Churchill—he’s fascinated by Churchill’s ‘epic failures’ that eventually set him up for Second World War leadership—and The Second Act by another substackman Henry Oliver, which collects stories of people who unexpectedly found success after earlier missteps.
Sport, Work, and Finding Meaning
We compare more traditional work environments with sports and discuss the thin veneer of civility present in both, the chaos ladder you decide to climb when you opt in to these places and the mini kingdoms people create while in situ.
We brought up the usual athlete hero’s journey comparison and how random luck accounts for many successes and failures across domains, whether that’s an academy athlete making it big or an epoch-defining person like President Trump surfacing at just the right time (for them).
Even still, we wondered whether irrational optimism (in sport, writing, or career) can actually be the logical choice if the alternative is resigning oneself to failure and chaos.
What do you think to that?!
This was a super fun chat and I’ll look to do some more like it in future. If you enjoyed Ranjit then never fear, he’ll be back here with me down the line but he’s also over at The Haphazard.
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