echoes & originals

I announced a short-story writing workshop, and it filled up in no time. Here's what led to it...

A good amount of my fiction writing happens through a kind of complex imitation. I read something—a novel, a short story, or anything else—and try to see the chassis of it, a structure, so to speak. And I am sometimes able to extract from a given piece a framework, or at least a diagram, along with some sentences that I regard as crucial pillars of the said framework. Then I try the use the framework to formulate something from my own subjects and themes, or one of the many story ideas that have been brewing in my mind. I go some distance, and then I start to improvise. Then, in a second pass, where the main work happens, I actively forget any preconceived structures and notions I brought into that piece of work, and try to satisfy its own inner logic, its organic demands. After finishing, I let the thing rest. Then I return to it for edits. This return happens post a period in which I have almost forgotten about the work and have started feeling the pull of other stories, other works: distance is crucial to a certain ruthlessness in the editing. By the end, what I have bears no resemblance to the original that inspired me. It is original in itself.

The above process is admittedly hazy, not at all perfect—sometimes the outcome is good, sometimes bad—and is most definitely averse to documentation. But it can be illustrated in all its haziness, and is, to that limited extent, vaguely informative for newer writers—and even, I would say, vaguely replicable at their end. I believe all writers use their own version of it, consciously or otherwise. Insofar as reading informs writing, and insofar as what we read informs our subject matter, our style, our methods of pacing and slowing down, our caesurae, our alertness in descriptions, our length of sentence, or even our doubt and confidence, writers are constantly in the midst of some or other complex imitation. We read others’ work, retain echoes of it, and use some of these echoes to create our originals.

Over this year, teaching gigs in Ahmedabad University and Alliance University have allowed me to attempt to illustrate this hazy process to students of creative writing. The feedback of these attempts has been generally positive, though I must add that the courses I have taught until now have done many other things too. Out of necessity. The process above being a private process, first and foremost, does not talk readily the language of the components of fiction—language that has words like plot, story, character, point of view, voice et al. It prioritises workable composition instead, and is perhaps laced with a practitioner’s innate familiarity and ease with said components. Since that familiarity and ease cannot—must not—be assumed to be available to newer writers, my classes have to be a mix of these two approaches: one that offers an echoes-and-originals process, and the other that defines and builds on constructs that a learner is going to hear all their life. Establishing a balance between the two approaches—perhaps the adjective pedagogical is apt—has been a work in progress.

Sometime in July, it occurred to me that I could privately offer classes with slightly different imperatives. For one, they could focus on just the short story, where the illustration of the echoes-and-originals process becomes somewhat clearer. They could be more intense, too, I imagined, asking the learner to do a large chunk of reading each week and giving a big homework each time. They could also prioritise depth over width, asking the learner to complexly imitate certain specific kinds of short stories and let myriad others go—after having acknowledged, of course, the limits that this choice imposes.

So, in essence: a clutch of stories are picked up and are progressively shown to be belonging to a large family in terms of models and maneuvers, and the learner spots in them similarity and difference, allegiance and contradiction, conventionality and radicalism, finally arriving at the combinatorics that they want to complexly imitate for their final assignment. While analysing the stories, details are found and theorised, rather than concepts theorised and located. Moving from backstory to current action? This is how Paul Yoon did it in Bosun. And lo, how similar it is to how Janice Pariat did it in Boats on Land. Thinking of inserting backstory? This is how William Trevor does it at length in The Piano Tuner’s Wives. This is how Yiyun Li does it at length in The Particles of Order. See the similarity? See the difference?

From July to October, the idea of these classes swirled in my head, now nearing the status of an imperative, now being relegated to a mere possibility. On good days, I felt I had something very valuable to share. On not so good days, I felt that mine was a fancy typical to the jobless: concocting weird projects in which they sell their wares and, fantastically, the world laps them up.

With not a small amount of trepidation, then, I finally announced a paid short-story writing workshop—titled echoes & originals—on October 6, hoping to fill just one batch. The announcement went on my Instagram and Twitter. I had thought of an announcement on Substack two days later: I was under no illusions, you see; I knew that filling up one batch would take work.

But there were more takers than I had imagined, and there was never any time for a Substack post. I filled two batches by October 11, and now all my Sundays in November are booked. Perhaps this speaks to how much demand there is for creative writing instruction in India; perhaps it is a testament to the pull of the short story, a form that traditional publishing has almost given up on but which remains the first station for nearly all fiction writers; perhaps it has something to do with the appeal of the poster below (I’m not too bad at Canva). At any rate, it is clear I have no reason to complain. I am now at work on designing the best possible twelve-hour engagement for the learners (four classes of three hours each).

To those subscribers of mine who are not connected with me on Instagram or Twitter, and who find the idea of the workshop interesting: I plan to offer iterations, and I plan to offer fresh editions (I’m calling the latter seasons; being cool and all). That echoes & originals prioritises depth over width means that there is always more ground to cover, new families of stories to pore over. Filling the wee form here will let me know about you.

The square-shaped poster I used as header for announcing the workshop. The painting used here is Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk By The Sea