Aakash V Shivach Interview

"A novel gives you room to breathe, you can take three hundred pages to build a world, brick by brick."

Aakash V Shivach is a novelist, lyricist, composer, singer, actor, and Solution Architect whose creativity spans literature, music, and theatre. In this interview, he shares how storytelling, emotion, and imagination shape his work, and why compassion remains the foundation of every story he creates.

Q. Introduce yourself how did your journey into writing and the arts begin?

I'm Aakash and honestly, creativity found me before I found it. I was drawn to acting since childhood, plays, dance, it almost felt like it was in my genes. From there I drifted into music, picked up singing, and taught myself a few instruments, guitar being the one that stuck the most. Dance was probably where I found the most rhythm and repetition, the most performances. But acting was always the fire in my blood the one thing that never asked my permission to exist, it just did. I wrote my first story, a horror piece back in class 7th, and I didn't just write it, I directed it with a group of fellow students and staged it live for our society. That was the moment everything clicked, I realized I didn't just want to tell stories, I wanted to build them from scratch and watch them breathe in front of real people.

Q. Which creative role feels most natural to you, and why?

If I had to pick one, it's writing, specifically novel writing. Acting, singing, composing, they all taught me how to feel a story from the inside out, how to wear someone else's skin for a while. But writing is where I get to play God a little, I build the entire world myself: the characters, their flaws, the twist nobody sees coming. Everything else I do, the stage work, the music, all of it eventually feeds back into how I write. It's the one space where I'm not performing someone else's imagination; I'm creating my own, brick by brick, word by word.

Q. Where do your story ideas come from, and how do you shape them into narratives?

My ideas come from the strangest, most unrelated corners, aliens, the Bermuda Triangle, angels, time machines, heartbreak. I don't chase realism; I chase wonder. I ask "what if" until it becomes impossible to ignore, until it starts keeping me up at night. My first book, Miracle: An Exotic Wonder, came from exactly that curiosity, blending alien mystery with the idea of a superhero born from an angel's power. Once I have that spark, I build the narrative around emotion first, love, loss, courage, because plot is just skeleton, emotion is what makes it walk. That's why even a story about time machines, like Yesterday 9, is really about two people trying to claw their way back to each other across time itself.

Q. How does write lyrics differ from writing a novel?

A novel gives you room to breathe, you can take three hundred pages to build a world, brick by brick. A lyric gives you three minutes, sometimes less, to make someone feel something they'll carry for years, it's a knockout punch instead of a marathon. The challenge in lyrics is compression, every single word has to earn its place or it gets cut without mercy. The challenge in a novel is the opposite, sustaining that same emotional intensity for hundreds of pages without ever letting the reader's pulse drop. Both demand brutal honesty, just at completely different speeds.

Q. Do music and storytelling influence each other in your process? An example?

Constantly, they're two instruments playing the same song. When I wrote Steps Taking Backward, a story about a rockstar who gives up everything for love, I was essentially writing from inside a musician's heart even though it's prose. I could hear the songs he'd have written before I ever wrote a single lyric, the melody arrived before the meaning did. Music gives my stories their emotional tempo, I often know if a chapter is "slow" or "urgent" the same way I'd know if a song needs a ballad or a rock riff. One always tells the other where to go.

Q. How do you stay motivated through self-doubt?

I've had years where everything creative got pushed aside, studies took over, then engineering, then a full-time job at TCS as a technical developer. For a long stretch, acting, theatre, music, all of it went silent, like a stage with the lights turned off, except for writing, which I kept close no matter what. What kept me going was letting go of the pressure around when dreams should be fulfilled, dreams don't run on deadlines, they run on faith. I stopped being anxious about my own timeline and instead focused on making the people around me, the ones who came into my life, feel a little more looked after, a little more happy. That, to me, is the real work. And somewhere in that quiet giving, my own creativity kept growing in the dark, until it was ready to burst out as a full book.

Q. Which work is closest to your heart?

Shelly & Smith, my latest book, holds a special place, it continues the idea I first explored in my very first book, of a superhero rising from an angel's power, but this time it's about how that power changes not just one life but many, like a single flame lighting an entire room. There's something spiritual in that idea for me, the belief that there's an immense power stored inside each of us, capable of saving someone else's life if we simply choose to use it. That's not just a plot device for me, it's a conviction. It's something I try to live by, one page and one person at a time.

Q. Advice for aspiring multi-passionate artists?

Don't force yourself to choose one identity too early, the world will try to box you in, don't let it. I was an actor, a singer, a dancer, a street theatre performer doing Nukkad Natak on social issues around Delhi, long before I ever called myself a novelist. Every one of those experiences is still alive inside my writing today, nothing you learn creatively is ever wasted, it just waits for its turn. The key is to stay a contributor, to people, to causes, to community, because that's what keeps your art meaningful instead of just impressive. Skills fade if unused, but the habit of creating and giving never does. That habit is the real talent.

Q. What’s next for you?

I keep writing that's constant, that's the heartbeat that never skips. Alongside my books, I still run acting workshops when I get the time, training new, aspiring actors to find their real feeling and bring it into their performance instead of just technique because technique without truth is just noise. Long-term, I'd love to see one of my stories, probably from the Shelly & Smith universe leap off the page and find its way onto a stage or screen, where it can breathe in front of an audience the way that horror play did back in class 7.

Q. If your life were a movie title and actor?

I'd call it "Steps Taking Forward" a quiet nod to one of my own books, but flipped, because that's really been my journey, pulling myself back from everything I stepped away from and walking straight into it again. As for who'd play me... someone who can hold both intensity and softness in the same scene, who can make silence as loud as a monologue, Rajkummar Rao comes to mind. He's someone who disappears into ordinary, grounded characters but always finds the extraordinary hiding inside them, which is very much how I see my own story.

Bio:

Aakash is a storyteller in every sense of the word a novelist, lyricist, composer, singer, and actor whose creative roots run as deep as his professional ones. By profession, he works as a Solution Architect with one of the world's leading CRM platforms, bringing the same precision and vision to enterprise technology that he brings to his fiction.

His journey into the arts began in childhood, through theatre, dance, and music, before evolving into a lifelong passion for writing. He is the author of four novels, Miracle: An Exotic Wonder, Steps Taking Backward, Yesterday 9, and his latest work, Shelly & Smith, each exploring themes of love, wonder, and the extraordinary power hidden within ordinary people. Alongside his books, he has performed extensively in theatre and street plays across Delhi, using Nukkad Natak to spotlight pressing social issues, and continues to mentor aspiring actors through workshops.

Beyond his creative and professional pursuits, Aakash is guided by a deep sense of humanitarian ethics and spiritual grounding. He is a person of commitment, one who consistently places the wellbeing of his loved ones above his own comfort, and who believes in extending a helping hand before chasing material gain. An animal lover and devoted pet parent, he holds a special fondness for children and champions the belief that every person deserves what they truly deserve in life. A sports and athletics enthusiast at heart, he finds his balance and healing through music and meditation, using them as anchors against the noise of the outer world.

At his core, Aakash is someone who believes creativity, compassion, and quiet discipline can coexist, and that the truest art is the life one builds around others.

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Interviewed By: Vanshika Gupta