Jenny Bhatt

 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.