After writing seven thousand pages over twelve and a half years, I now have a novel, published this week, that is two hundred and twenty-four pages long. When I began working on the book, I knew it was going to be hard—hard for emotional reasons, certainly, but even more for technical ones.

The novel is called “Family Life,” and it is based on my own experience. The novel tells the story of an Indian family that comes to America in 1979 and, two years later, suffers a terrible tragedy. The family has two children—two boys, ten and fourteen. The older boy dives into a pool and strikes his head on the cement bottom. He lies stunned underwater for three minutes. When the boy is pulled out, he has suffered catastrophic brain damage: he can no longer walk or talk; he can’t roll over in his sleep; he has to be fed through a tube. After the brain-damaged boy spends a year in a hospital and a year in a nursing home, the family decides to take him home and take care of him themselves. This causes the family to collapse.

All of this, more or less, happened to my family, and to go back and relive the events was awful. I would often meditate on the horrible possibility that my brother might have been aware and not unconscious during the minutes underwater—poor boy, lying on the bottom of the pool and looking up at the people swimming back and forth above him like they were stroking their way across the sky. Along with the simple misery of examining things that I would rather not have considered, my artistic instincts were thrown off. I didn’t feel as confident as I usually do about how to describe a room or a street, because the room and the street were based on real life and I kept comparing fictional reality with factual reality and finding the former wan.

I struggled especially with three technical challenges. The novel is told from the point of view of the younger child. The danger of taking on a child’s P.O.V. is that children mostly don’t understand things. They understand bits and pieces of what’s happening, but they can’t process what it all means. This gives the narration a flattened quality. Reading novels told from the P.O.V. of a child, you often feel like you are on the surface of events.

There is also a danger to representing the physical horror of the situation that is at the heart of the novel. For example, what does it mean for a lung to collapse? Lungs are not attached to the inside of your chest cavity but merely stick to it; when a pair of lungs fill with water, the heaviness causes them to peel away from the chest wall and wad up like socks. A few details like this are necessary to establish that the narrator knows what he is talking about, but any more and the reader begins to resent the unwanted education. This means that a central aspect of illness, the physical horror, must be kept at a distance.

While these first two challenges could be finessed, there was a third technical challenge to writing the book, and this last one was what I found hardest to solve. The story I was planning to tell had very little plot. A truly traumatic thing occurs to the family and then the family begins to unravel. The misery of this family’s daily life takes a slow toll. Real life is plotless, but the experience of reading books that replicate this can be irritating.

When I run into technical challenges, I look to writers who are not only better than I am but better than I ever probably will be. All I needed to do, therefore, was find novels that shared some of the same DNA as my book. I was most concerned about the plotlessness problem, and so this was what I focussed on.

The first books that I looked at were books that give away the ending at the beginning. Doing this makes the narrative feel more pointed than it actually is. One example is “A House for Mr. Biswas,” and another is “Radetzky March.” I love both of these books and have read them many times, but when I tried writing a draft that started with me declaring the ending, I didn’t like the experience that I was generating for the reader. In the drafts that I created—and these drafts took years to write and then abandon—I had the sense that my reader, since he already knew the end, was wondering why I was not moving faster or why events were occurring in dramatized scenes instead of summaries. I wanted the narrative to move like a rocket.

A second way to handle plotlessness is to turn the narrative into something that is close to a pure act of remembrance, and so the novel becomes about remembering. Two models I looked at very closely were “Remembrance of Things Past” and “Housekeeping.” Again I spent years trying to write a book that could work the way that these two do. I kept failing miserably. When I read my attempts to mimic these extraordinary works, I found that I was again impatient with my own writing. I felt that my writing contained elements of decadence and self-pity. My inner critical voice said, Does the narrator have so little going on in his life that he can spend his days noodling over the past?

The third group of books that I examined were nonfiction works. I looked especially closely at “This Boy’s Life” and “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down.” There are certain lessons one can learn from nonfiction when writing a novel—a certain freedom in terms of jumping in time, or an acceptance of tangents—but fiction is so different from nonfiction that it was hard to truly mimic these writers.

My great breakthrough came about three years ago. I was reading Chekhov to see how he controls present tense and to see if I could copy some of his solutions. Chekhov relies especially heavily on certain aspects of our senses. For example, he uses sound, smell, and feel much more than he uses visual details. Nabokov said that there is an even, gray tone to Chekhov, and this arises from his restricted reliance on the eye. Events appear to be occurring in darkness. I find that somehow, in fiction, sound and texture and smell are stickier, lingering more than visual details. My theory is that they’re more visceral and so suggest a stronger sense of present tense.

The problem I was having with my narrative was that there was very little plot, very little causation, and so, when I created dramatized, visceral reality, the weak plot left the reader stuck in a particular scene. Because causation was weak, the reader did not have the sense that the scene mattered enough for the amount of space it was being given, and so there was a sense of shapelessness. Reading Chekhov, I began to wonder what it would be like to remove sound, feel, and smell, and to leave just visuals and dialogue and introspection.