‘Writers on Writing’: Reeti Roy on the ultimate goal–communication!

Reeti Roy is one of my favorite people I’ve met through writing & the web, and I am fascinated by her background and experiences living in India. She has been an incredibly engaged and active part of this “component” of my life; I once tweeted that I was struggling to edit a piece, and she immediately responded, asking if she could help or weigh in. It’s this kind of selflessness that makes her such a great writer, as someone who truly cares about her subjects and the world around her–not to mention the people who inhabit it. Here, Reeti reveals a haunting story that fueled her desire to write and the impossibility of total objectiveness.

Why did you begin writing and in what form?

I started writing when I was seven. I was reading “Anne Frank : The Diary of A Young Girl” at the time and I decided to write a journal like hers. I was always interested in biographical information and the fact that a girl only five years older than I was had died–and for no fault of hers–began to haunt me. My elder brother, who has always been interested in history and biographies, was the first person to tell me about the holocaust and its implications. I remember asking him why Jews were singled out and discriminated against (not the exact words of course, but using a seven year old’s vocabulary!) because it was unfathomable, even then, to realise why human beings would want to kill each other.

The other very significant incident that took place was the death of a boy called Ranjan. I didn’t know him very well, but I’d met him twice over the summer vacations. My grandparents and I had gone to Hetampur, where my grandmother grew up, so she could meet all her friends and relatives. I’d gotten bored playing ludo and carom all by myself indoors. To top it off, I was an anglicized city kid with little or no similarity to my village counterparts. Ranjan laughed at me when I said that I couldn’t climb trees. I remember not relating to him at all when we first met, but that summer we gradually grew to be friends. Later, when I was down with flu, he brought twenty four of his friends and played cricket in the garden so that I could watch from my window.Cricket was, and has always been, one of my foremost passions, and that’s when I realised that supercial boundaries created by socialisation need to be challenged.

A few years later when Hetampur was a distant memory, my grandmother told me how Ranjan had passed away. He  had had leukaemia that had gone undetected. His sudden death came as a shock to me and I remember writing extensively about it in my journal. So journal-writing has always been my way of communicating with myself, and writing, by extension, has been one of the ways in which I communicate with the world.

Being an avid reader helped as well. I was reading writers like Roald Dahl, who was funny and caustic, and Noel Streatfield who said the simplest things in a very beautiful way. My current favourite authors have to be Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro. Both writers are stylistically very different and yet both convey a sense of place, and of time. I’m still a novice when it comes to narrative technique, but I think both Rushdie and Ishiguro are fantastic writers to learn from because both are strikingly original and yet both writers are very conscious of what they write. Sylvia Plath and W.H. Auden are my favourite poets and while I don’t write very much poetry myself, I have often found myself being able to engage in confessional writing and I attribute it to my reading of and response to Plath. Auden is the shrine I pray to everyday.

How do you support yourself financially?

I’ve mostly supported myself through writing (which I’ve been doing professionally from the age of 18) and I’ve done a couple of youth leadership projects that have paid me well. I’ve done all kinds of writing–copywriting, internet writing, writing for small publications and big brand names in India (I’ve written for The Statesman, The Telegraph, The Times of India and a women’s glossy magazine called Femina as well as alternative weeklies. I also apply for as many grants as I can (and keep my fingers crossed so that I can win them).It also helps when I write for international publications because the currency rate is to my advantage ( I live in India).

What’s the strangest or most surprising thing you’ve ever written?

The weirdest thing I’ve ever written is a short story about an evil frog that controls the universe. I had a bizarre dream about it one night and jotted it all down on paper.

What’s the one resource or inspiration piece you couldn’t write without?

It would have to be a specific type of notebook with single spaced lines and margins. I cannot write in blank books! I cannot get a word out.

What’s one thing about writing you absolutely hate?

The one thing about writing that I absolutely hate is probably the cause of one of my biggest shortcomings when it comes to writing. I like to leave things open-ended when I am writing and I often find my friends and family asking me to clarify. In my attempt to leave things open-ended, I often fail to substantiate my claims thereby leaving room for misinterpretation and not consolidating my arguments or the point that I am trying to make.

What life lessons has writing taught you?

I wish I could say that writing has taught me to be patient, but it hasn’t. In fact, I am possibly the most impatient person I know. Writing has taught me to think critically, argue coherently, and present my version of the truth in the most transparent way possible.

As a journalist and someone who writes avidly about social justice, how do you provide balanced perspectives? What ethics do you use to ensure this occurs?

I don’t believe that there is such a thing as objectivity. You can try your best to be objective, but your race, your gender, your background, and your community will always play a part in your writing. I think subjectivity is inevitable, but I still think that “limited objectivity” ( if there can be limited objectivity) might be helpful as a journalist. When I say limited objectivity, I mean trying to weigh the pros and cons of both sides of the argument.

Reeti's precious pup!

What most propels your writing and why? (ex: travel, experience, thought, human interaction, politics, news, the environment)

There is no single propeller of my writing as such. I write almost everyday, and sometimes the writing stays shut in my diary. At other times, I send out pitches with abandon, feel elated for a couple of days, start panicking afterwards, and then force myself to produce articles on deadline. I like both kinds of writing–spontaneous writing as well as writing with a deadline. I disagree with people who say that you can’t be creative if you have a deadline.

Why do you think it’s important to share your writing with individuals from other countries? How are you able to fulfill this goal, and why are you committed to it?

I’ve always thought of writing to be an extension of myself. You will often hear professors and editors saying that it is your writing they are criticizing and not you. I’ve never dissociated myself from my writing and yet, I’m very detached from the decision making process as far as the editor or professor is concerned. If writing is an extension of me as a person, and I can deal with some people loving and admiring me and others loathing me, why can I not deal with a couple of rejections? That helps me to be completely detached from the decision making process.

I have very strong opinions when it comes to my writing but I will always listen to the editor when s/he decides to change bits of the story . I’m not saying that it’s 100 percent foolproof, but in my experience, eight times out of ten, the editor knows his/her publication better than I do.

Working with people from different countries helps me tap a new demographic and not the usual demographic I am used to writing for. It pushes me out of my comfort zone and forces me to come up with new and creative ways of communicating. And my goal has always been to communicate. It’s a long-term goal–and one I will strive towards and hopefully achieve it before my time is up!

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Check out Reeti’s interview with me, posted here.

Tagged as: writers on writing