Getting To Know: Savi Sharma

Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone is a writer. Some are written in the books, and some are confined to hearts. - Savi Sharma, Everyone Has A Story

Born on 18 July 1993, this twenty-five year old author is already an inspiration to millions of people, and you can guess who one of them is!

Savi hails from Surat, Gujarat. She began to pen her thoughts to get to know herself better as early as ten years of age. Throughout school, she contributed to her school magazine once a year (most of us have to do that anyway, don’t we?) but what excited her most during her childhood were films. Watching critically acclaimed, award-winning movies, she slowly realized what power stories have to inspire people. Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist proved another big inspiration for her.

Better known as “the girl who left her CA studies to become an author”, Savi Sharma, interestingly, never even read books until she was in college!

Post school, she began studying for a Bachelor’s degree in commerce from a university in Surat, and alongside started preparations for the gargantuan Chartered Accountancy course.

In the first year, she also began to maintain a diary of her own. And it was at college that she was recommended by friends to reads the books that they were reading—so Chetan Bhagat, Ravinder Singh, Durjoy Dutta and Nikita Singh paved the way for more serious literature later.

Reading their stories, she began to think more about love and the inspirational power it has on us. Learning from other authors’ pros and cons, she gradually developed her own style, and wrote a novel titled Silent Love, a college love story that she never actually published but used to test the impact of her writing on her close friends and family.

When the results came out to her satisfaction, Savi decided to pursue her dream of inspiring others full-time. Of course, it wasn’t half as easy as it sounds. Like her character Shaurya from her second book This Is Not Your Story, who struggles with himself to leave his CA studies in Jaipur for the city of dreams, Mumbai, to become a filmmaker, Savi too struggled to convince her parents of the confidence she felt in herself as a writer.

And eventually, she did succeed, self-publishing her book that soon after made its way to the Nielsen top ten book list (a leading consumer research company) and stayed there for twenty-four weeks, retaining the first position for seven weeks and the second and third for another sixteen!

It is, in fact, weird to think that a writer like her, who wrote her debut book at the age of 23, hadn’t even stepped into the world of books until after 12^th standard. But when she did, well—lo and behold!

Her first book Everyone Has A Story sold an average of a 1000 copies a day for the initial hundred days, and it only got better from there! Soon enough, publishers were thronging her inbox with requests and multi-book deals.

The fact that makes her work different from that of others’ is that even with her love stories, she is seeking to touch people’s lives in a deeper way than any other commercial, popular contemporary romance writer. Her vision is depicted in her books through the words of her characters, which are again, a part of herself and her own dreams and aspirations.

It is definitely worth the wait to see how the talented author’s experiences with the world as well as her minute observation of people influence her next novels to make them a motivation for each one of her readers!

Image credit: thehansindia.com, twitter.com