Some stories, some legends and a bit of advice

Bestselling author Jeffrey Archer met management students from India’s top two tech-savvy cities, but his message was the same: writing is real hard work.

“So you think you have talent? You think you can write? Let me tell you ambitious young people, writing is hard work,” said Archer, a former British MP, who is in India to promote his latest book Mightier Than The Sword. “ It is relentless and rigorous and no draft is ready until it has been rewritten 14 times,” Archer told students at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore.

In Hyderabad, at the Indian School of Business (ISB), the advice was almost the same: “It's damn work. Hard work. You need to put in the kind of work like a ballerina, a musician,” said the author whose books have sold over 270 million copies.

Archer describes himself as a ‘Shanachie’— a skilled teller of tales. And as if to prove the point, he took the audience at IIM-B on a rollicking ride, narrating one story after another — with enough twists and drama to keep them spellbound.

They ranged from the time a popular TV channel in the US flew him in a Concorde and drove him to their studio in a stretch limo for all of 2 priceless minutes of air time, where he had to compete with Mickey Mouse and Billy Carter to plug his book, to how a wise word from Johnny Carson (former host of The Tonight Show) catapulted his novel Kane and Abel’ to No 1 on TheNew York Times Bestsellers list.

The stories wound their way from his study in Cambridge to the Lord’s with many a wisecrack in between. Sample this: “What do I aspire to? Well, captaincy of the English cricket team, to start with. I can’t bowl, I can’t bat, and I can’t field. So, I do have a chance for a look-in, don’t I?” he said, adding with a straight face that England would go on to win the World Cup.

“All they need to do is win the next five matches on the trot.” The man who finds inspiration from every day instances, from art, from sport, from politics, told the packed auditorium that he was a “writer by mistake”.

A point he made at ISB too. “I became a Parliament member at the age of 29 and after I suffered heavily financially I became a writer (at the age of 36),” said Archer, who pointed out that it was important to start afresh and take up a completely new career, when you failed in something else.

Politics, he declared, has always been his first love. “But then, most of us do end up doing what we are second best at, don’t we?” he added.

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