 "'How I Write' explores publishing challenges, writers' creative struggles")
How I Write: Writers on their Craft
Author: Sonia Faleiro
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 284
Price: Rs 699
To help nurture literary talent from South Asia and to address a variety of gaps in publishing across geographies, London-based writer and journalist Sonia Faleiro established South Asia Speaks in 2020. For over four years now, the programme, available for free to unpublished authors of all ages, has produced an enviable group of fellows. In 2022, the programme “expanded its offerings with a series of masterclasses featuring some of the world’s most respected writers”. Ms Faleiro has collated and edited 18 sessions in How I Write: Writers on their Craft. In the introduction to this book, she also notes that “every sale of this book will directly benefit South Asia Speaks, allowing us to continue supporting the next generation of South Asian literary talent.” Each interview in this collection is insightful, unpacking for the uninitiated how the publishing industry works and the types of desirable and undesirable challenges—writerly, bodily, or systemic—they face. Sample what Mayukh Sen, the James Beard Award-winning author of Taste Makers: Immigrant Women Who Revolutionised Food in America (WW Norton, 2021), tells Pakistani journalist Sanam Maher: “I had come into [Food52] thinking that food writing was a genre with limited possibilities, in the sense that it was mostly about restaurant criticism, which was the domain of white, middle-class dudes.” When he was hired by Food52 in 2016, he was the only “person of colour on staff, which was composed entirely of white women.” Then, what the Women’s Prize for Fiction-winning author Kamila Shamsie notes in an interview again with Ms Maher regarding the publicity of her book Salt and Saffron: “When I was in New York, the publicity person said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to help me out here because I don’t know how to reach your community.’ It was only after I left the room that I thought I should have answered, ‘Readers.’ But, of course, you don’t say that.”
The resilience these authors display in the face of such developments either when they were trying to establish themselves in the industry or when they became well-known figures signals that no matter what, an artiste must navigate and negotiate an array of biases and that they’re inevitable part of the process if you’re from a marginalised section of society.
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The book also offers distinct viewpoints on writing. For example, writing from a distance doesn’t help Manjushree Thapa at all; it remains “very confusing” for her. Regarding the margins, she notes that there has been “a splintering of our understanding of what is the centre and what is the periphery” in a conversation with Roman Gautam. But what she also underlines is the sort of relationship one must build with their editor to avoid any mismatch in expectations—advice that’ll come in handy for several unpublished authors. Then, the multi-award-winning author of Brotherless Night (Penguin, 2024) V V Ganeshananthan in an interview with Ms Faleiro notes that while “writing about violence,” the enormous time she spends “studying and thinking about [problems and issues within one’s home or community] is either from the position of an outsider, or the position of someone in the diaspora, kind of at the hinge between homeland and stranger”. Her thinking process is to write “horrible violence” sensibly “in a way that’s not voyeuristic”.
That’s a particularly noteworthy thought because there’s an inherent perverseness in representing violence on the page—often seeming unnecessary. Of late, mostly women writers are writing about injustices and crime in a way that offers dignity to those who’ve been underwritten or bereft of agency. A case in point is Nilanjana S Roy’s Black River (Context, 2023). In a terrific interview with the founder of The Writing Room, Mariam Tareen, Ms Roy notes that her book is “a record of a time when those friendships [between Chand, Rabia, and Khalid] were possible, as we’re moving towards an age when those border-crossing friendships seem more and more rare, almost forbidden, along with many other things.” How often do we find a writer talking about a sense of grief percolating and informing their crime-centric novels in this way?
For investigative journalists and those interested in long-form reportage, a conversation between the former editor of The Caravan Vinod K Jose, and the Paris-based author of the award-winning title Motiba’s Tattoos: A Granddaughter’s Journey into Her Indian Family’s Past (PublicAffairs, 2000) Mira Kamdar is particularly rewarding. Among other things, Mr Jose emphasises how in “the new phase of authoritarianism, backsliding of democracy, or fascism—whatever it is—everyone was quick to overlook the evidence” when his team published the Judge Loya story. His emphasis remains on “facts and information which is verifiable”, as that has a “better chance of public support”.
Be it novelist Vauhini Vara’s distinct approaches to writing fiction and non-fiction, Rahul Bhattacharya’s comments on voice upon reading Toni Morrison’s Jazz, among others, or Jamil Jan Kochai confronting his positionality as an Afghan in America and writing about the relationship between the two, or Meena Kandasamy reflecting on domestic violence, each interview in this book opens a distinct door of perception for readers.
The reviewer is a Delhi-based writer and cultural critic. On Instagram/X: @writerly_life