6 debut authors offer tips on writing

You don’t need to write every day

“Burning yourself out trying to reach that goal is pointless, as is shaming yourself for not sitting down to put down a few obligatory words on any one day. If your heart’s not in it, those words are mere literary chaff. Better to read a book, meet people, watch a movie, go outside. My best place to write is surrounded by strangers in a warm, lively cafe, music in my ears, hot cup of coffee at the ready. But the trick, of course, is to make anywhere and everywhere the best place to write, or you’ll keep making excuses. You can’t always find that ideal coffee shop.”

– Indra Das

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It's okay to borrow from your life

“Writers are inveterate borrowers and your own life is low-hanging fruit. It’s hardly surprising that bits of your life and those around you creep into your book almost without you realizing it. It unnerved me when it happened to me but ultimately I realized that was OK. None of the characters in my novel are real but some of the incidents in their lives, some of their idiosyncrasies, even a turn of phrase, spring from memory. It is actually lovely to relive that memory and hear the voice of a long-dead real great grandmother in your head again as you try to bring to life your fictional great-grandmother. Writing, as has been said, is an act of remembering as much as it is an act of imagining. And if all else fails, as a writer friend advised when asked how he mollified aunts who might recognize themselves in his book,” I always introduce them as looking wonderfully elegant in a beautiful sari. After that nothing else matters.”

- Sandip Roy

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