Building a sustainable writing practice

A masterclass with Sabyn Javeri Jillani

by Zehra Khan

The months have taken their annual turn and have begun to wear a soft, cosy chill. During this time of the year, when hibernation seems to be the only correct answer to every personal and social expectation, I sat down with eleven other writers and Sabyn Javeri Jillani (author of Nobody Killed Her and Hijabistan) to understand the process of building a sustainable writing practice. Before I proceed, I must reiterate that, though the content of my previous blog and this workshop align magnificently, the alignment was not intentional. It appears to me that my passion for this issue attracted the opportunity to write about this masterclass.

 It is not only my belief but simply a matter of logic that writing is more important than good writing. No discourse on ideas, plotting, experimentation, craft and publishing is important unless one has brought oneself to writing.

Sabyn’s masterclass began with excerpts by Saadat Hasan Manto, Joan Didion and George Orwell, all three of them striving to answer the whys of writing. While Manto wrote because he was simply addicted to it, Didion declared that it was the only way she could make sense of the strangeness of human life around herself and Orwell stated that he wrote out of the sheer vanity of creating something that would eventually outlive him. Texts regarding the task of writing itself were interspersed throughout the class, including those by Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones) and Haruki Murakami (What I Talk about when I Talk about Running), which effectively brought our attention back to the matter at hand, hearing about it in the very words of writers that may have inspired us to be writers.

Small thinking exercises made all the difference in this particular masterclass. To be propelled into thinking about why, how and what we write and what prevents us from writing gave us the unique opportunity to engage in an effective metacognitive state of thinking and writing about writing. As writers with studying to do and work commitments to fulfil, this is a liberty we all usually get in spurts in the wee hours of the night. So, to be compelled to look within and understand our writer selves turned out to be a joy of discovering ourselves.

On the other hand, the class proved to be challenging for the same reasons that it was joyful. Sabyn asked us to look at the very fabric of our lives closely and judge them with the heavy responsibility of being writers. We began by examining our schedules and building a list of realistic expectations, having understood, like Murakami said, writing is a lot like a marathon. One has to warm up through mindful intention, journaling and doing small writing exercises, building the stamina to do it consistently and eventually do it well. Sabyn beautifully discussed the frivolous yet abundant nature of ideas that surround us, that form the scaffolding of our very lives and strategies that can help us nurture an idea to reality, such as re-visiting the hero’s journey. However, for me, the most interesting part of this discussion was the idea that as writers, we have to allow ourselves the grace to stop and reflect, to ask ourselves questions our characters would ask us.

Writing weathers us. It asks of us to present our most unarmed, softest parts to the world in the garb of strings of words on pages. As Sabyn illustrated in her wonderful masterclass, in order to build a sustainable practice of writing, we have to first understand our own selves and continue to do so as time changes us. She explained to us that we have to care for ourselves because that is how we can care for our writing. We have to forgive ourselves time and time again, and allow ourselves the grace to be human along with being writers. And of course, we have to write.