One of our very own Lancers, Sahasra Nistala (’25), is publishing her debut novel, DreamRealm Unleashed, on March 24. The middle grade fantasy novel, which features action and humor similar to popular series like Percy Jackson or The Last Kids on Earth, is about, as Nistala says, “Tara, a seventh-grader who is obsessed with a popular kids-only video game called DreamRealm. When DreamRealm is released from magical containment, Tara and her friends must get to the top of a global leaderboard to access a portal to the dimension where the adults are trapped—and they need to beat a teen-run organization bent on preventing the adults from returning.”
Along with juggling the difficulties of high school, Nistala has been working on DreamRealm Unleashed for roughly the past two and a half years. The idea for the novel came to her in 2021 around the end of middle school, but she “didn’t get serious about writing it until the year after.”
During COVID shelter-in-place, she “drew a comic about getting trapped in a video game,” and although her final novel would not be the same story she started with, this comic provided a stepping stone for her future plotline. When developing the storyline, Nistala wanted to “write a character who is comfortable in her own skin and who is allowed to step out of everyday reality and go on a world-saving quest” rather than following the same stories she had seen about “South Asian diaspora protagonists… facing academic pressure and ambivalence about one’s cultural identity.” The novel had undergone a couple drafts, each of which took around a year to complete, with rounds of editing.
However, Nistala’s journey to becoming an author extends back before middle school. “I’ve always been interested in writing and storytelling in general. Short stories scared me, though, because they seemed to require so much finesse, so I gravitated towards poetry. It wasn’t until middle school that I considered writing a novel.”
Nistala published her book through Amazon KindleDirectPublishing, an efficient platform for authors without the resources to go to a large publishing house. KDP is easy to navigate, has a quick turnaround between submitting a manuscript and actually publishing a novel, and gives authors access to an on-demand printing service, taking away the barrier of buying thousands of copies before knowing if the novel will be successful. Writers can also publish on Kindle, paperback, or hardback, but Kindle typically brings in better writer profits because it requires no physical resources.
However, because it was a solo process, Nistala had to consider several factors, like “formatting, cover design, [and] copyediting.” She says that if she could go back, she “would have used a spreadsheet to track [her] to-dos and set deadlines for each one.”
Another struggle she faced was, like most authors, writer’s block. “Before DreamRealm Unleashed, I tried to write at least three other novels.” She later realized that what she considered writer’s block, though, was actually more of a lack of framework for her writing. For DreamRealm Unleashed, she “made an outline of plot points that [she] wanted to hit… Because [she] knew where [her] main plot was headed, [she] had the freedom to come up with the ‘fun stuff’ on the fly—dialogue, action scenes, and emotional arcs.”
Finally, Nistala wanted to give a piece of advice to aspiring writers: “Find the balance between reading widely and finding your own voice. If you don’t absorb the classics, current bestsellers, and lesser-known works of your genre, you won’t be able to figure out how your work fits into that landscape.”
Writing a novel requires a deep understanding of what makes for a good piece of literature, specifically when it comes to fitting in a genre, developing plotlines and characters, and having a good writing flow. By “absorb[ing]” a wide range of literature, future writers can develop a sense of style and voice, ultimately making them more appealing to readers.Be sure to read DreamRealm Unleashed when it is released on Amazon later this month!
