A masterclass with Farah Ghuznavi
by Shaiq Ali
If it moves you, if it crawls inside your head while you sleep, if it bleeds within you, you write it – then, there and in all its flesh and skin. This is the message I came away with after attending the brilliant Farah Ghuznavi’s masterclass on finding inspiration. After years of believing that she could only write nonfiction, Ghuznavi’s first short story was “in the end, the easiest short story that [she] has ever written” because she felt compelled to write it after reading a harrowing news story.
The Bangladeshi writer and translator is a development worker by training who put out her widely praised collection of short stories, Fragments of Riversong, in 2013, and whose writings have been published in numerous newspapers and journals. In her masterclass for Write Beyond Borders, she explains her struggles to commit to writing whilst working and being as a full-time caregiver for her parents. She stresses the importance of creating and protecting the headspace we need to write in a fulfilling manner.
Frequently and consciously, she says she relies on Leonard Cohen’s idea of leaving the door ajar because that’s how “the light gets in”. What is this “light”? Memories, imagination, life experiences, dreams, political occurrences, newspaper headlines. If an overheard conversation at a restaurant is still lingering in her mind, it becomes fodder her stories.
Ghuznavi asks us to sit with our difficult pieces, to keep them around and think about why it is really hard to write about something. Does it concern someone you love, a funeral, an old friend, a relationship gone sour or witnessing physical violence, personal or communal? What is the particular characteristic that makes it difficult? Ghuznavi gives the example of her own first story, “A Small Sacrifice”, which was inspired by a newspaper article on the death of a child after being brutally beaten. Stories often lie somewhere in between such violent political events and personal anguish, familial losses and great wars, the family and the community. Engaging and figuring out the characteristics of the difficulty might help in turning the stone over. Ethically also, writing about trauma and suffering of people dearest to us requires a certain level of disguise and ingenuity to keep intact the dignity of the people involved who we wish to write as characters.
Ghuznavi quotes the prolific Ray Bradbury, who says, “We are cups constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.” This cup is our own self, filled with anger, joy, agony, envy, desire, melancholy and so on. And characters are filled with such sentiments and emotions too. To let the “beautiful stuff out” Ghuznavi asks us to examine what lies beneath the plot we have imagined – its contours, its world. She prompts us to consider ‘what if?’, changing the setting of an inspiration or thinking about it while drifting off to sleep can provide exceptionally good starting points to one’s potential story. She also mentions that while some stories come to us as a result of epiphanies and some of us might be more prone to them, for most of us, writing is a grinding process that must be done over and over.
She cautions budding writers against reaching for perfection. But she also adds to this list of tips: identify flaws, experiment with the technical difficulties and troubleshoot them, spend time with the kind of inconsistencies that have crept into the first draft, chisel the make-up of the characters and the plot, make sure to have a set of beta-readers and embrace feedback. Often, by the time we come to the final draft, points of view have been changed and altered, characters have been polished out, details have been refined, all of which were not in sight in the first draft.
Here are five questions that Ghuznavi asked during her masterclass which could serve as prompts in our own creative writing process.
- Inspiration Unpacked: Which piece of writing has been the hardest for you to complete so far? Why?
- Sourcing Ideas: What has been, thus far, the strangest source of inspiration for you?
- Capturing Inspiration: Was there a defining moment/factor that led you to begin writing your current work in progress?
- Doing the work: What have you most struggled with whilst trying to finish writing a story? Did you have an “aha” moment that helped you find a solution?
- Tips and Tricks: Is there a piece of inspiration that you are still hoping to capture? Which is the “one that got away”, if there is one such story?
One of the most important pieces of advice Ghuznavi reiterates is to protect your headspace. Financial responsibilities, caring duties and personal issues often tend to disrupt our writing. But Ghuznavi asks us not to see writing as an activity reserved for an evening armchair; instead, she wants us to see it as a routine exercise which requires constant effort, an exercise after which we can feel content that we have said what we really want to. After all, what gets put down on the page is a reflection of our creative charms as well as our persistence to carry on writing, despite odds.
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