I would guess that most books come from the same mix of three elements: influence, inspiration and hard work. Ten or so years ago I read a review of a novel, Max and the Cats, by a Brazilian writer called Moacyr Scliar.

The review oozed indifference, but one element struck me. At one point in the novel, a Jewish zoo keeper ends up in a lifeboat with a black panther; the year is 1933. It was perhaps too obvious an allegory of Nazi Germany for the reviewer, but the premise had the effect of electric caffeine on my imagination.

What perfect unity of time, action and place. What stark, rich simplicity. Oh, the wondrous things I could do with such a premise. I felt that same mix of envy and frustration I had felt with Mishima’s The Sailor who Fell From Grace with the Sea, that if only I had had the idea first I could have done something great with it.

But — damn! — the idea had been faxed to the wrong muse. Nonetheless, half-heartedly, I tried to find the book. It was nowhere to be found. What to do? Best move on. I wrote my first novel. Romances started and ended. I travelled. Four or five years later I was in India on a backpacking stint intended to shake and dazzle me. The start of the trip had been rough. I had arrived in Bombay on New Year’s Eve and felt terribly lonely. One night I sat on my bed and wept. Where was my life going?

I had written two paltry books that had sold fewer than a thousand copies each. I had neither family nor career to show for my 33 years on earth. I felt dry and indifferent. Emotions were a bother. My mind was turning into a wall.

If that weren’t enough, the novel I had planned to write in India had died. Every writer knows the feeling. A story is born in your mind and it thrills you. You nurture it like you would a fire. But at one point you look at it and you feel nothing. You feel no pulse. It has died.

I was in need of a story. More than that, I was in need of a Story.

I arrived in Matheran, a hill station close to Bombay that has the peculiarity of not being able to accommodate cars, auto-rickshaws or motorcycles. You get there by toy train or taxi and then you must walk or ride a horse. The closest you get to the noises of motors are the sounds of Indians spewing out betel juice. The peace is blessed and utterly un-Indian. It was there, standing on a big boulder looking down at the vast plain below to be exact, that I remembered Scliar’s premise.

Suddenly the plain was a dark, moody ocean. There was a lifeboat upon it. In it was a boy with an animal — no, with several animals. He was a religious boy. A religious boy with animals, yes, that was a good mix.

In jubilant minutes whole portions of the novel emerged fully formed, the intermingling of the religious and the zoological, the parallel stories, the “better story”, which implied the lesser story, the blind Frenchman, the algae island.

I excitedly told myself the story as I was creating it. I filled page after page of the notebook I always carry with me.

Where did that moment of inspiration come from? I could give approximate answers: that India, where there are so many animals and so many religions, lent itself to such a story; that tensions simmering just below my level of consciousness were probably feverishly pushing me to a creative catharsis.

But in truth I don’t know. Some synapses in my brain started firing off and I came up with ideas that were not there a moment before.

For six months I visited zoos in the south of India and spent time in temples, churches and mosques. I explored the urban settings for my novel and immersed myself in the Indianness of my main character.

In Canada I spent a year and a half doing research. I read the foundational texts of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. I read books on zoo biology and animal psychology. I read stories of castaways and shipwrecks.

In a smashed-up, kaleidoscopic way, Life of Pi began to take shape. At first I had an elephant in mind as my main protagonist. The Indian elephant is smaller than the African and I thought an adolescent male would fit nicely in the lifeboat.

But the image struck me as more comical than I wanted. I switched to a rhinoceros but could not see how I could keep a herbivore alive on the high seas. A constant diet of algae struck me as monotonous for both reader and writer. I finally settled upon the choice that in retrospect seems obvious: a tiger.

The other animals in the boat arose naturally, each one standing for a human trait: the hyena and the orangutan, because of traits commonly (and quite wrongly) ascribed to them by humans, cowardliness and gentleness respectively; and the zebra because of its weird, design-studio appearance.

The blind, cannibal Frenchman in the other lifeboat came to me in those first moments of inspiration in Matheran; in other words, I don’t know where he came from.

Originally, the scene with him was much longer and was one of my favourite parts of the novel. It was Beckett in the Pacific. Which was precisely the problem, my editor said. It was funny and absurd but in the wrong place, as poorly timed as a joke told at a funeral. The tone was wrong; it broke with what came before and after. So I cut it down substantially, from 48 pages to just over 10.

The line “I have a story that will make you believe in God” came later, in Canada. I liked the daring of it.

The rest was fun, hard work, a daily getting-it-down on the page that came not without hurdles, not without moments of doubt, not without mistakes and rewrites but always with deep, gratifying pleasure, with a knowledge that no matter how the novel would fare, I would be happy with it, that it helped me to understand my world a bit better.

The question remains of why I created such a mix of the purely adventurous with the religiously philosophical. That I can answer. With Life of Pi I discovered what I should never have forgotten, which is the importance of plot in a novel. If you don’t have a good story to tell, you don’t have any story at all.

As for the question of God, I took it on because I believe in taking on big issues. If we don’t deal with big issues, what are we dealing with? I try to spend my creative energies on matters that seem worth it. What has no worth in my life — material objects, social niceties, conformist behaviour, greyness — has no worth in my art.