Venita Coelho is no J K Rowling, and the only common ground they hold is that both are writers. But Coelho, who shares her surname with the internationally best-selling writer Paulo Coelho, belongs to that group of writers whose focus is children — whether or not they have access to a marketing machinery like Rowling of Harry Potter fame has. Based in Goa, Coelho’s book Dungeon Tales, brought out by Scholastic, is about the denizens of a dungeon who tell wondrous tales to the Badmash Badshah. The multifaceted Coelho, who has been associated with Hindi cinema and television as a screenplay writer, was the brain behind India’s first writers’ cooperative Kalamkari. Also a painter, Coelho tells Utpal Borpujari of Deccan Herald the story behind her first book:

As an author who has just written an adventure for children, how do you feel to be up against monster successes like the Harry Potter series?

Gosh! I wouldn’t be as presumptuous as to think that I was going up against Harry Potter. It’s just a little book in India. But I think the monster success of Harry Potter has expanded the market for children’s literature and proved that authors of the same can be rock stars!

But, by contrast, children’s literature by Indian authors do not get even comparable success. Why?

Harry Potter tapped into the universal myth. Any book that does that gets a universal audience. Add to that aggressive marketing and brand building — none of which an Indian author has access to. The hype machine of the West is a well-oiled one.  So Indian writing tends to stay in a small pond.

How did the germ of Dungeon Tales get implanted in you? Has the response to the book been along the lines you expected, or has it been somewhat beyond that?

I wanted to write something that followed the Eastern tradition of story telling — a tale within a tale within a tale. The Arabian Nights is a classic example. So the Dungeon Tales and the Badshah are actually an excuse to hold together all kinds of different stories. This is my first book, so I really had no idea what to expect. But we’ve had two fabulous launches in Goa and Mumbai. Way past what I expected. And the book has already gone into reprint.

Do you believe in the notion that youngsters these days are getting weaned away from reading because of the internet, TV, gaming, etc?

I think Harry Potter proved that reading can beat everything else for entertainment. It just has to be entertaining enough!

Do you have any plans to convert any of the stories to a screenplay — or a TV series — given that we are seeing films like Blue Umbrella coming out in recent times?

Dungeon Tales is actually being converted into a play right now. With song and dance and lots of fun.

What gives you a better kick — writing screenplays for Bollywood flicks, books or poetry, or painting?

Each has its own high. I love the sheer insanity of working for Bollywood. Painting is quiet and meditative. Writing for kids is like going back to being a kid yourself.

What has been the status of the writers’ cooperative that you had formed?

I shut that some time ago. When the saas-bahu wave took over Indian television, I was quite sure that this was a genre I just didn’t want to work in. Which is when I packed up and headed out to Goa. I intensely dislike the genre and I think it has done untold damage to women in India.

You had plans to launch an online initiative to provide a platform for aspiring script writers. What is happening to that?

It is still around. Quite a lot of effort went into it, but writers are difficult to hold together as a community. Any idea takes a long time to gather momentum and fructify.

Your 11 script ideas are online, 10 of them waiting implementation. Tell us about these ideas and their stages of implementation.

The last few years have been extremely frustrating. A script will suddenly turn “hot”. People will be cast, schedules will be drawn up — and then the project will fall through as suddenly as it began. In TV my take is that the success ratio is 9:1. If you have nine shows on air, then maybe one will come through. In film it’s obviously higher.

You have made TV films for channels abroad. What has been your experience with them vis-à-vis the Indian industry?

I worked in Malaysia at a time when they were just opening up. It was a very fledgling industry with everyone untrained. A lot of my effort went into training writers from scratch. In the West, they are terribly limited and bound by the systems that they have set up. Of course the systems help — but when no one will even read a script if it’s in the wrong font, I think that’s taking things a bit too far. They are also absolute slaves to the formula spelt out in the “Hero’s journey”. A script is returned to you with a polite note saying that Act II starts five pages later than it actually should.