Book Box: How not to tell a story

DCapitulum Reader,The c. H. Best component of reverting to bombay, apart from the monsoon rains, is being reunited with my bookshelves. Plus, there are always new arrivals waiting: bags of titles bought by the Other Reader, mostly on creativity, business and evolution, alongside review copies of new books.This week, Breaking the Rules by Vinita Gupta caught my attention. A woman who set up a business in Silicon Valley that went for an IPO and then a buyback—that must be a story. I was also drawn to a little book called The Shopify Story.I stumbled on Shopify a few years ago. I was looking for software to design a website for my bespoke book subscription service, and Shopify was incredibly easy to use. Within a few hours I had uploaded photographs and copy, integrated payments, and built a website anyone in the world could subscribe through. I’ve been an admirer ever since.Sadly, both business books proved disappointing. I won’t say much about The Shopify Story because I am still ploughing through the early parts. But I persisted till the end with Breaking the Rules. After about the halfway point, it became an interesting exercise for me in how not to tell a story.The book is a wasted opportunity because Vinita Gupta’s story has many dramatic twists and turns. Yet she skims over these moments, as though she is choosing not to share information with us. This is, of course, her prerogative, but if you are shy about telling your story, you shouldn’t write a book. If you want the gift of the reader’s attention, you have to be willing to share your story.So, if your business partner walks away saying “I can’t take you anymore”, we need to understand that conflict—the what, where, and why. We need details. When characters appear in your story, whether your parents or your sisters, we become invested in them and don’t want them to completely disappear without any explanation. If you are the subject of lawsuits and class actions, we want to know more. Instead, every episode is narrated in almost exactly the same emotional register. Triumphs, setbacks, lawsuits and betrayals receive roughly equal weight, so nothing lands with the force it should. I also didn’t get a sense of people and places, maybe because there was not much scene setting, though a few standalone chapters were devoted to family and nannies.What saved my week’s reading, though, was a re-read.I’ve been reading Peak Human where Johan Norberg analyses the rise and fall of the great empires of the world, everything from the Greeks and Romans to the Abbasid Caliphate and the Song Dynasty of China. My fictional counterpart to this study has been Asimov’s Foundation and Robots series.And I can’t get over it.A story of the rise and fall of an empire, of the chaos in between, of policies on openness and immigration and use of technology – it’s uncannily relevant to today. Asimov is giving me what both my business books lacked: a willingness to dramatise conflict, nuance characters, and let ideas breathe through scenes.In Robots and Empire, for instance, our heroine Gladia doesn’t have birth citizenship on the planet she has chosen to live in and this causes complications for her. When a strange visitor lands up at her doorstep with disturbing news, she finds herself analyzing his motives and debating her future course of action after deep consultations with her robots on geopolitics, human psychology and the larger forces that shape empires. The scene is uncannily modern—Gladia might as well be typing prompts into an LLM! This is the absolute joy of sci-fi, of how it enables us to understand our world and its policies better through telling stories.As the monsoon rains pelt my windows, and the palm trees outside are buffeted by the winds, I set aside my modern business stories, reading instead about the collapse of one galactic empire and the rise of others in its place. It feels good in this age when everyone is bemoaning the death of reading, to go back to my bookshelves and have an old classic explain the world to me so skillfully.And you, dear reader, what are you reading to make sense of the world this week?(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and Founder, Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. For all questions about life and literature email sonyasbookbox@gmail.com.)