Charlie Garner 

Opinion Editor 

avg6206@psu.edu 

Recently, I had the privilege of sitting down with Samhi C. to discuss her romance novel, “When You Saved Me,” along with her writing process, her inspirations, advice for other writers, and so much more. 

Samhi’s full name is Samhita Chitturi, but the pen name she goes by is Samhi C. Her inspiration for writing a romance novel came up pretty naturally. She explained that most media she was used to seeing in movies and TV was always romance. 

Her intention was to write a rom-com and crime mystery fiction series, where the romance part was the starting point of the series, and she claimed that “romance is natural and easy to picture.” 

The tagline of this novel describes it as a “romance-ish” story, which Samhi elaborated on the meaning of. She wanted to focus more on the healing power of friendship and how the characters healed each other of their traumas from their respective broken families. As a reader, you believe that the characters of Damon and Rosaline are going to end up together in the end, but that does not happen. They are not enemies to lovers, but rather, they are enemies to friends, which is a very overlooked trope in fiction. 

Speaking of the characters of Damon and Rosaline, I asked Samhi how she modeled these two characters. The character of Damon was thought of first and was initially inspired by a daydream of Damon Salvatore from “The Vampire Diaries.” Over time, the daydream character evolved and turned out to be a completely different character than the one he was originally based on. 

She believes that having evolution in characters is very important and that she kind of takes the experiences and characteristics of other characters and meshes them together until they create something new. She made Damon a pretty immature character, which sometimes clashes with the mature characteristics of Rosaline. Even though Damon is a good bit older than Rosaline, Samhi describes Rosaline as “more of an adult than Damon.” 

She designed Rosaline to be more mature, manipulative, and a realistic portrayal of a young and troubled girl. It is a very adamant fact that Samhi C. very much cares about her characters and their development and that they are very close to her heart. 

In terms of ideas, Samhi C. absorbs many different ideas from a myriad of source materials. In terms of writing techniques, she claims it happens by accident. She finds that discussions of writing works aid her in learning more about writing than reading assignment work and finds that the reading assignments in her English classes are useless in influencing her writing. 

She learns about narrative styles and narrative structures mainly from discussions and believes that engagement is important for cycling through narratives and different ideas. She also takes ideas from other media and makes them into her own, along with some ideas and themes from fairytales, since they are what she grew up with and is most familiar with. Samhi C. is mainly concerned with filling in gaps and writing about day-to-day life events that are not usually covered in fiction to make her works feel more authentic and realistic. 

Samhi C. decided that she wanted to be a writer in the eighth grade, and she joined writing workshops in school to improve her skills. She used to struggle with creating her characters, as she says that they used to be very “fake and artificial.” Making her characters seem real with depth was exponentially important to her, and she quickly realized that it was something she needed to work on. 

Samhi C. self-published “When You Saved Me” back in 2021. Self-publishing did not make major changes to her writing process in the storytelling aspect. However, she now knows how to properly edit and format her books to be ready to print and publish. Her writing process is simple: she jots down ideas as she thinks of them, she writes scattered notes, and she writes and thinks over her ideas over and over again before they come to fruition. 

Writer’s block is something that every writer has gone through at one time or another, and this is no different for Samhi C. She believes that knowing the root cause of a problem helps with the solution. Specifically, with “When You Saved Me,” she struggled with having too many ideas, indecisiveness, occasionally losing interest, and not knowing how to write the ending. 

She knew that her audience would be confused or even a bit angry because of how her characters ended up, but she stated, “you can’t force a narrative, not even in literature” and that she had to try to stop trying too hard to make the characters do what she wanted, or her audience wanted and that she needed to focus on what was actually more natural for the story. 

To end the interview, I asked Samhi C. what advice she could give to struggling writers. The blunt advice she gave was basically: if you want to write… write! 

She believes that everyone has to start somewhere and that the start of a writing process is different for everyone. No one is going to know your work exists if you do not put it out there, and new authors struggle to get published by companies when there are no works in their name. 

Samhi suggests participating in writing workshops, getting to know your audience, and taking constructive criticism. I believe that any college student who is trying to write in any capacity can take some inspiration from Samhi C. for her talents and her determination. 

Check out the Features Section to read an excerpt from the book!