In a recent podcast, the CEO of an Indian publishing conglomerate revealed that 70% of its trade list is now non-fiction. A decade ago, fiction and non-fiction were evenly split. Three decades ago, a reputed publisher's backlist was dominated by fiction, with literary fiction conferring prestige on a trade house.

For novelists, this is grim news. But then, being a novelist has always been precarious. Writing fiction is not a skill so much as a benediction. You cannot do it on command, like an ophthalmologist performing multiple cataract surgeries a day, or a journeyman translator producing three books a year. Nor can you train for it, or earn a degree and emerge as a novelist.

I despair each time I hear that a friend's son or daughter has enrolled in a creative writing course, paying astronomical fees. I try, gently, to dissuade them: you do not need a degree to write fiction. Even a Salman Rushdie, as a professor of practice, cannot teach you how to write. At best, he could tell you whether you are a writer. But he wouldn't. Not in a private university classroom. That would be unprofessional. He would merely advise you to keep writing and to read fiction copiously, and that you might improve, eventually. Surely one need not attend graduate school in creative writing to do what can be done at a dining table for a fraction of the cost.

Many young writers, mostly from affluent families, tell me they enrol for being among their own kind. I tell them to get used to loneliness if they want to survive as writers. Being alone in a room, with your laptop and your thoughts, will be the default setting for most of your waking life.

Even in a crowd, you must train yourself to be alone with your thoughts. I solved many structural problems in my stories while correcting author contracts in my day job as an academic editor. Soon enough, solitude stops feeling like loneliness. As for being among one's own, a writer is better served by acquaintances who are robbers, lawyers, stockbrokers, and petty politicians of every hue.

If you are a writer of fiction, you must also be ambitious. And believe me, while coming up in the literary world, you won't have the time to strike friendships with fellow writers. It is only after you have written your first few novels that you will once again acknowledge people who are like you. You will tentatively seek the company of other writers. But rarely will it blossom into a true friendship.

But why is non-fiction a safer bet? Is it because better quality non-fiction is being written now than it was before? Or has the quality of literary fiction gone down by a fair bit in the last decade? I think it is the latter more than the former.

Non-fiction has always been a safer bet because it's easier to produce. Even a mediocre non-fiction title will give you some sort of information about the times one lives in. But in fiction, only a superlative work would do the same. It is harder to produce. Also, fiction is harder to read. You need to have years of training in reading to enjoy literary fiction.

So, could it be that most novels published in India over the past decade are not literary at all, some perhaps not even novels? I sense a bland sameness in much of this fiction, a smothering of voice in the service of political correctness. The Indian novel in English has ceased to be provocative. The 'personal' has flourished while the 'political' has been banished. Is this because the personal novel is easier to teach in creative writing schools? I don't know.

But I hope the new year brings political fiction in Indian English, by young writers, that disturbs and excoriates me to the core.