In which their worst fears were realised

In a discussion titled ‘The myth about short stories’, Nilanjana Roy, who hosted the panel, had a moment as she took questions:

“Okay, we’re running out of time but we have time for just one more question… Renuka there has a question, and there’s, uh, Jyoti.

[Pause]

Is this what they mean when they say our literary circles are incestuous? We even know the questioners [by name].”

And they don’t get written in ten days. On the panel were Mridula Koshy and Nighat Gandhi (who showed her collection of stories around for a decade before they were published), who discussed the merits and pain of writing short stories.

Nighat Gandhi. The thing about writing short stories, at least the way I write them, is that I write a lot. When you rewrite/edit your own words, you chop off more than 50 per cent… Sometimes it takes me a year to write a short story. I write it, keep it away, revisit it. Anybody who thinks you can write a page a day and have a short story in ten days is wrong. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a difficult and trying thing to do, to go to your desk day after day and look at those 15 pages and say ‘what do I need to cut out? What needs to be left unsaid?’

and

Mridula Koshy. Like Raymond Carver, in this one respect, I often know the end of my story before I begin. Almost always, because it’s almost always an image of something I’ve seen, and I don’t know, when I’m writing it, what the point of it is, except that I need to arrive at this destination. After arriving at the destination, I can revisit it by speaking to other writers and editors. But at the time, it is not so clear. One thing that is clear, though, is that the form, having picked me …umm, the story will not fit any other form. Does that make sense? I could not choose to write a novel given what I was interested in writing about. It wasn’t because I only had a certain amount of time as a mother or a housewife or between work, to squeeze out a short story.

In a discussion titled ‘The myth about short stories’, Nilanjana Roy, who hosted the panel, had a moment as she took questions:

“Okay, we’re running out of time but we have time for just one more question… Renuka there has a question, and there’s, uh, Jyoti.

[Pause]

Is this what they mean when they say our literary circles are incestuous? We even know the questioners [by name].”

And they don’t get written in ten days. On the panel were Mridula Koshy and Nighat Gandhi (who showed her collection of stories around for a decade before they were published), who discussed the merits and pain of writing short stories.

Nighat Gandhi. The thing about writing short stories, at least the way I write them, is that I write a lot. When you rewrite/edit your own words, you chop off more than 50 per cent… Sometimes it takes me a year to write a short story. I write it, keep it away, revisit it. Anybody who thinks you can write a page a day and have a short story in ten days is wrong. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a difficult and trying thing to do, to go to your desk day after day and look at those 15 pages and say ‘what do I need to cut out? What needs to be left unsaid?’

and

Mridula Koshy. Like Raymond Carver, in this one respect, I often know the end of my story before I begin. Almost always, because it’s almost always an image of something I’ve seen, and I don’t know, when I’m writing it, what the point of it is, except that I need to arrive at this destination. After arriving at the destination, I can revisit it by speaking to other writers and editors. But at the time, it is not so clear. One thing that is clear, though, is that the form, having picked me …umm, the story will not fit any other form. Does that make sense? I could not choose to write a novel given what I was interested in writing about. It wasn’t because I only had a certain amount of time as a mother or a housewife or between work, to squeeze out a short story.

About The Author

Rahul Bhatia