With love, labour and writing

If there is no one way to live life, there is no one way to be a writer. And if writing advice could be summed up into a book written specifically for the South Asian writer and reader, How I Write would be just the one.

Edited by Sonia Faleiro, founder of the literary mentorship program South Asia Speaks, the book is a collection of conversations that began as masterclasses at the program. Once exclusive to the fellows in the program, the book makes the invaluable knowledge and experience of 30 writers open to all. 

Featured writers have deep connections with South Asia and write about the region’s life through fiction and non-fiction, prose and poetry. A conversation between two writers, the interviews are candid, thoughtful, and poignant, even funny. 

In one light-hearted moment, Mira Kamdar asks Suketu Mehta how writing and life relate to each other, and before diving into the details of the answer, Mehta mentions, “I’ve been cooking a lot.” 

Mansi Choksi shares a vulnerable side of the publishing world, when she felt like a failure because The New York Times did not review her book. Moments like these remind us that an aspiring writer must eventually graduate from the label of ‘genius’ or ‘artist’, to a life with real responsibilities and expectations, and write within the joys and pains of that very life.

Read Kamila Shamsie with Sanam Maher when it is difficult to let go of the words. Shamsie is stoic about chopping off 30,000 words if her writing calls for it. Read V V Ganeshananthan with Sonia Faleiro when the writing process takes forever. It took Ganeshananthan 18 years to write Brotherless Nights. 

Read: Writing about writing, Lisa Choegyal

Each conversation is a stand-alone piece and does not require to be read in chronological order. But the conversations themselves are inevitably in conversation with each other.

The book also introduces writers with South Asian roots to readers. Many of their works, while accomplished in their own right, are not readily available in bookstores in Kathmandu. What How I Write does is give the reader reasons to come across the writers when and where possible. 

The conversations in the book do not shy away from critiques, like the West-dominated publishing industry and its repercussions on the reader and the writer, a theme explored throughout many interviews. Vauhini Vara shares, ‘….it must be really frustrating to be a writer in South Asia interested in writing for a global audience, say the US, because there’s this very restricting idea in the US about what’s interesting and what’s going to sell.’ 

Many agree on the need to stay true to one’s story and to fight through what the industry might at times force on the writer. Adding on to what the industry refers to as a marketable writer, Manjushree Thapa says, ‘It’s been important for me to step back and say, “Look, I need to keep evolving as a writer, and I need to be honest to my writing desires. I don’t want to be just a writer from Nepal who did this in the past. I’m going to write in the future.”’

Read also: Finding a permanent home in poetry, Pinki Sris Rana

The lived experiences of the writers are stories in themselves. Some have gone and done their MFAs, some stumbled into writing, some are journalists who are writers, some are writers who have never studied journalism but teach journalism, and some host podcasts. 

There is no one way to be a writer, there is no one designated path. But if there is one common overlapping idea, is it this: there is no easy way to write, no quick fix. With every book, the writers are lost. They experiment, they learn. They toil through doubt and continue to write for the love and labour of it all.