Women and their writerly selves!

What does it take to be a writer? An array of 23 formidable writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, share stories of their journey as they seek to answer this question and many more in a new book.
Edited by novelist Manju Kapur, "Shaping the World: Women Writers on Themselves" is an anthology of intimate, honest and brave accounts that provide an insight into the realm of writing, its adventurous terrain of highs and lows and how it continues to shape these writers as well as the world.
The writers reveal their inspirations, be it another writer, a personal tragedy, or triumph, a fascination with the English language, or a passion for putting pen to paper and finding wings.

Writing is a labour of love for Anita Nair, author of novels like "The Better Man", "Ladies' Coupe", "Mistress" and a short story collection "Satyr of the Subway."
"You write because you feel the great urge to tell a story. There is a singular feeling of achievement that nothing else will ever provide; no award, no number of bestselling books, nothing is going to match that flush of joy that I know when I write well and this is the driving spirit that relentlessly keeps me doing what I do," she says.
Pakistani author Bina Shah says that when a writer is asked to produce an essay explaining why she writes, she suffers her first major attack of writer's block in years.

"Writing is very much like walking a tightrope: the minute you stop what you're doing to look down, you start to wobble and sway in any minor breeze; you lose self-confidence and the very magic of what you do every day, easily and swimmingly, evaporates, replaced by a crippling insecurity and the odd compulsion to relate all your childhood grievances on the blank page in front of you."

Shinie Antony, who had written two collections of short fiction and as many novels, is more comfortable with short stories.
"The novel is a matter of much plotting while the short story is a mood, an emotion, a point of view, an angle, a tapping into 'somewhere out there'," she says.

According to Janice Pariat, the reason why she writes "can be traced with a magical, long-winded silver thread, to that moment - the seconds before I picked my first holiday read (usually something from Enid Blyton's 'Famous Five' series), when I stood there, all of 10 or 11, looking up at a bookshelf with wonder".
For Kavery Nambisan, who is a surgeon, the responsibility of being a writer is as exacting as that of being a doctor.
"As a surgeon and novelist, I live in two worlds: The first is that of precise anatomical knowledge, diagnosis and practical skills learnt formally, in medical school and hospitals. It is mentally demanding, physically exhausting and quite often stressful," says Nambisan.