Jenny Bhatt

How did you become a writer?

I grew up in India with strong oral storytelling traditions. Stories have always been a natural way to make sense of the vast, confusing, chaotic world and of my way of being in the world. My earliest childhood memories involve trying to “write” stories on bits of scrap paper at our living room “teapoy” (a kind of coffee table.) When my English teacher got me to enter a children’s short story competition and I won it nationally at age 10, my mind was set that I would be a writer when I grew up. But it wasn’t seen as a respectable profession in middle-class India. So, off I went to become an engineer. But I kept writing through a longstanding journaling practice and for the odd writing workshop in my spare time. In my mid-40s, I finally started sending out and getting work published in literary magazines.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

So many writers at different times of my life have been profoundly influential. Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf have been the most enduring. A book that changed my life at a formative age (17) was Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Almost all of Woolf’s and Morrison’s novels continue to inspire. When I look at my South Asian literary forebears, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children left a permanent mark because it showed me what was possible as an Anglophone writer. Rohinton Mistry’s story collection, Tales From Firozsha Baag, is one I still revisit from time to time.

When and where do you write?

I’ve written in all kinds of places and spaces given that writing was not a full-time vocation for me until recent years. When I left my corporate job to focus on writing full-time, I wrote from my bedroom, sitting on the bed. Early mornings and late nights have always worked best for me because the world isn’t demanding our attention quite so much then.

What are you working on now?

It’s been quite the year with the pandemic and the US elections. Also, I moved back to the US and got married. And I have two books out in two different countries. So I’m not doing as much writing—beyond the essays and interviews for book promotion—as I’d like to. But I generally like to have multiple projects on the go so I can switch to something daily, even if it’s only for 30-45 minutes. There’s an ongoing novel, an ongoing literary translation, and an ongoing book review. Besides that, I have my bi-weekly podcast, Desi Books.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

I don’t think I’ve had writer’s block as I understand the term. I’m never short of things to write about. If nothing else, I’ll fill pages of my personal journal. But there are definitely times when I’m not progressing as much as I’d like with my writing projects. This is more an issue of time management and discipline than anything else.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

I’ll summarize my top five here:

1/ Write the things we cannot or do not speak about. I can't recall where I came across this some years ago but it's from Diane Williams. To me, there's not much point to writing if the work doesn't do this.

2/ People say: begin with action; in medias res. That's fine. For me, it’s about starting at the point of no return when my protagonist has done or said something they can’t take back. We’re right in the thick of it then. And it gets me writing because I want to know how they’re going to get out of their mess.

3/ With fiction, I’ll ask myself: what would push this scene into some unexpected territory? Not implausible, but unexpected. Then I’ll try to lean into that as far as I can in the early drafts and edit as needed later.

4/ Don’t talk about your writing too much with others. Save all that emotional and cognitive energy for the work. There’ll be plenty of time to talk about the work after you’re done and you’re submitting it, getting it edited or workshopped, published, etc.

5/ I once had a writing instructor who said that a story is as much about what's left unsaid as it is about what's said. In turn, I sometimes tell writers in my workshops: text matters; subtext matters more; and what's not on the page is often more telling than the latter combined. So always be aware of that.

What’s your advice to new writers?

All of the above and this: don’t be in a hurry to get published; get some good, meaty life experiences first. These will give you not just grist for the writerly mill but the emotional energy for your work. Zadie Smith, who was a wunderkind writer, sold her first novel at age 21. But, on a Desert Island Discs episode, as a 40-something writer, she said, “there’s no replacement for experience. You can’t fake it, you can’t fictionalize it. It won’t develop your heart, it won’t develop you as a person. It’s a kind of game that you can play on the page but it’s not the same as being alive. Being alive is a very radical thing; it’s much more difficult.” A thousand amens to that.

Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, book reviewer, and the host of the Desi Books podcast. Her debut story collection, Each of Us Killers, was out in September 2020. And her debut translation, Ratno Dholi: The Best Stories of Dhumketu, was out in October 2020. Her nonfiction has appeared in or is forthcoming in venues like NPR, The Washington Post, BBC Culture, The Atlantic, Literary Hub, and others.