Author Stories • Narrative Craft
Designing Fictional Systems: An Interview with Ishan Sharma
Author and narrative architect Ishan Sharma opens up about the ideologies, design frameworks, and daily rituals that keep his fiction exploratory, empathic, and relentlessly curious.
Interviewer: Ishan, your work spans genres yet feels philosophically connected. What core ideology guides the stories you choose to tell?
Ishan: I try to write stories that function like exploratory labs. Every project begins with a systems question: how does one shift in perspective ripple through a community, a family, or a technology stack? My credo is that fiction should surface the invisible architecture of power and empathy. If the story does not alter how a reader maps the world after the final page, I know I have not gone deep enough.
Interviewer: Your drafts often weave research notes, found documents, and lyrical scenes. How do you design structure without losing emotional momentum?
Ishan: I map stories the way interaction designers map product journeys—each fragment has to deliver both information and feeling. I maintain a wall of modular story cards that track friction, revelation, and recovery. Once the scaffolding is solid, I read the draft aloud start to finish. If the heartbeat stutters, that card moves until rhythm and structure finally agree.
Interviewer: Readers praise the dimensionality of your characters. What does your character-building process look like behind the scenes?
Ishan: I write dossiers before I draft scenes—childhood maps, playlists, the myth they believe about themselves. Then I interview the character in first person. Their contradictions surface fast. The goal is to understand what each person refuses to say out loud. Plot comes later; desire and shame drive the outline more effectively than any external twist.
Interviewer: Walk us through a typical writing day. What rituals keep you anchored?
Ishan: I start at dawn with a twenty-minute free write—longhand, no devices. Then I cycle through a Pomodoro block: forty minutes drafting, twenty minutes movement, repeat. Afternoons are for revision or research sprints. I close the day by annotating what worked and what collapsed so future-me has a roadmap instead of a mystery.
Interviewer: You collaborate with sensitivity readers, technologists, and historians. How do those partnerships shape the manuscript?
Ishan: Collaboration protects the story from my blind spots. Sensitivity readers pressure-test lived experience. Engineers tell me when speculative tech breaks its own physics. Historians flag anachronisms in systemic language. The manuscript is only finished when every collaborator can point to the page where their insight altered the trajectory.
Interviewer: Your newsletter often includes interactive elements. Why is reader participation so central to your practice?
Ishan: Stories are prototypes for conversation. Inviting readers into the lab—through annotated drafts, surveys, or shared playlists—keeps the work porous. I am interested in fiction that activates community imagination rather than delivering a monologue. The newsletter is a playground where readers become co-designers.
Interviewer: What guidance do you offer emerging writers who want to develop a distinctive voice?
Ishan: Build a curiosity practice outside of literature. Study architecture, jazz, climate science—anything that forces you to translate across disciplines. Voice emerges when you synthesize influences nobody else is juxtaposing. Also, finish things. An imperfect completed draft will teach you more than a perfect fragment ever will.
Interviewer: Looking ahead, what themes or experiments are you excited to explore next?
Ishan: I am exploring stories that treat memory as cooperative infrastructure—how communities decide what is archived, what is erased, and who gets custodial power. I want to experiment with braided timelines where oral histories and speculative tech documents collide. It feels like fertile ground for both tension and tenderness.
Get Ishan's Field Notes
Subscribe for annotated craft lessons, process breakdowns, and early invitations to Ishan's collaborative workshops on narrative design.
By subscribing, you agree to receive Sky Scrawl updates. Manage your subscription any time via the unsubscribe page.