#Title

Unpacking the craft of CREATIVE WRITING
ILLUSTRATION:
SARAH ANJUM BARI
The best thing I ever did for my fiction writing was 10 years of journalism—it was an editing and writing education—and for my journalism career was to take a bunch of creative writing classes. It allowed me to differentiate my writing from 50 other interns who were sent to report on the same car crash.
SARAH ANJUM BARI
November 15-22 saw aspiring novelists gather in a creative writing residency in Sri Mangal. Organised by Bangladeshi-Canadian writer Arif Anwar, author of The Storm (2018), the residency was mentored by award-winning writers: Joan Silber, American novelist and short story writer of nine works of fiction, most recently Secrets of Happiness (2022), and Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist Omar El-Akkad, most recently the author of What Strange Paradise (2021). In conversation with DS Books editor Sarah Anjum Bari, the three authors discuss the craft of creative writing and publishing.
Tell us about the residency.
Arif Anwar: The idea from the start was to build a close-knit, small group of students which would yield high mentor-student ratio. We’re all eating together, spending time together. A lot of the conversations around creative writing are emerging organically.
There have been six lectures so far from the two mentors each. Within the sandbox of a topic, they could talk about whatever they wanted. Joan offered to talk about time. Omar is focusing on revision and pace. The idea was to organise it the way the work of a novel would unfold.
Joan, what is the one advice you give to students when you’re discussing the use of time?
Joan Silber: That the length that a story needs determines its meaning. I talk about short times and long times. I talk about what I call classic time in The Great Gatsby —how it uses summary to give backstory. We both used examples very strongly and gave out a few generalities. That’s how writers always learned to write. Long before we had writing classes, writers observed what they loved in other books.
You’ve both travelled a lot. Has that impacted your writing? How does a place like Sri Mangal affect it?
Omar El Akkad: I grew up on one side of the world and then I came to North America when I was 16, so already I wasn’t anchored in one place. One of the things about travelling for writing is that you get a very unique experience of the place. You’re surrounded by other writers. It reminds me of how different the prisms are through which readers read your work.
I steal a lot from different literary lineages, from the western canon and Arab writers. The result is a weird hybrid that’s hard to pin down. It used to confound me because a lot of my favourite writers were marinated in any one spot. Over time, it’s become more comforting to know that I’m permanently unanchored.
Arif: Social scientists have written about the world in terms of a centre and a periphery. The centres are Tokyo, London, New York. Peripheries are Dhaka, Senegal, Lima. But peripheries have their own centres and peripheries. For Bangladesh, Dhaka is the centre and Sri Mangal is the periphery. The idea for me was to challenge these cosmopolitan centres that we associate with fine art.
Omar, how do you toggle between fiction and nonfiction?
Omar: I think of them as antagonistic muscles. Journalism by necessity is about finding answers. Fiction is where I go to sit with questions. I feel no obligation to provide a roadmap for any kind of answer.
The best thing I ever did for my fiction writing was 10 years of journalism—it was an editing and writing education—and for my journalism career was to take a bunch of creative writing classes. It allowed me to differentiate my writing from 50 other interns who were sent to report on the same car crash.
What goes into editing a manuscript?
Omar: The first process is interior. You’re rereading your own work, you’re reading out loud. And then it’s a concentric circle growing outwards—your trusted friends. At a certain point you hit a boundary between the personal and the commercial: you’re getting prospective editors or agents to read it—people who will have a business angle to the work. Now people are thinking about whether this will sell. What demographics can be interested in this? How can we market it?
How does one balance that line between taking constructive feedback and preserving the essence of the text?
Arif: Sometimes a writer knows what the text is about before they finish the writing; sometimes they need those other eyes to tell them what it could become. Whether you have that willingness and openness depends on how strong a sense you have of what you need from the beginning.
With your first novel, I think you’re a bit dazzled. You’re willing to cede a little more ground. I didn’t have as strong a sense of what my first novel was. With my second novel, I’m less open to directional input.
Joan: With students you can sometimes identify—oh this is the part that sounds most like them. Usually it’s the part where they don’t sound like anybody else.
These days we have labels like the diasporic novel, the refugee novel—books about sensitive, specific experiences. Who gets to tell which story?
Joan: I often get asked, has anyone objected to you writing a Thai-American or an African-American character? The whole story is never told from that point of view, it’s a certain section of the novel. I’ve never gotten flack, probably because I’m not talking directly about race and ethnicity; I’m talking about love and sorrow, which emotionally I’m equipped to do. It’s forever delicate.
Omar: I don’t think it’s so much about who can write what as it is about who gets published. By definition, any industry is going to cater towards the set of experiences that are more resembling that industry. The overwhelming publication of a particular kind of writer at the expense of others is where this debate is at its most useful. It is at its least useful when we’re telling individual writers: write about this, don’t write about that.
Read the rest of the interview on The Daily Star website and on Daily Star Books’ social media.