Interviews

On the Art of Storytelling: In Conversation with Anukrti Upadhyay and Anu Singh Choudhary

Two phenomenal writers whose respective oeuvres contain multitudes and push the limits of storytelling engage in an invigorating dialogue.

Read our conversation with Anukriti Upadhyay and Anu Singh Choudhary, authors of two stellar short story collections: The Blue Women and The Blue Scarf. They talk about their writing processes, the form and formidability of the short story as a genre, feminism, love, and so much more!

Q. Both of you have talked about your fondness for short stories as your preferred medium of writing. But could you tell us what are your respective processes of ideating and writing short stories? How do these vignettes of lives take origins in your imaginations? 

Anukrti Upadhyay: The idea or suggestion for a story could come from anywhere – part-heard conversations that then carry on in your imagination; glimpses of people, mountains, sea from a moving vehicle; bereavements, big toes, bats. But stories themselves are formed in mysterious places. When I begin writing, I am not sure what the story is, all I know is—it is there and if I am determined enough to give it room, time and opportunity, it will emerge, like a shy, nocturnal, reclusive creature who can’t be coaxed out, only waited for patiently.

Anu Singh Choudhary: You are sitting with a group of elderly women in your village home and a rather ravishing anecdote of a ‘lost and found’ comes up. A subway in New York City passes by with a thousand other passengers but one particular set of curious eyes stay on your face. A fruit seller hardsells a bunch of mulberries that have apparently made their way into Mumbai all the way from Assam. You wonder what her life is like, where her motivations and disappointments come from. All these vignettes stay on in one’s memory and become the breeding ground for short stories. For me, short story writing is a perennial process of memory keeping of mundane moments and eventually giving them a flight of imagination.

Q. There is a marked difference between the tenor of the stories in both the books. In my opinion, rather simplistically, one is about the ‘unnatural abject’ and the other is about the ‘natural absurd’. Would you agree with these categorizations? Why or why not? Would you categorize them in any other way? 

AU: I don’t know whether I would categorise the stories Anu and I write in either group. In fact, I’d rather not categorise them at all. The stories belong in the category of stories, any further categorisation would be venturing into a territory that I feel does not belong to the writer, it is for the readers to determine for themselves. Anu has been, as usual, very generous, too generous about my work. To me, the quality that stands out in Anu’s stories is their authenticity, a deep honesty in their telling, the symbols and metaphors flowing smoothly with the narrative, unlaboured and therefore widely relatable. This quality of her Hindi stories which immediately speaks to a sensitive reader has been frictionlessly rendered in English by Kamayani Sharma.

ASC: (Laughs out loud) I am so grateful for this categorisation! That gives me a name for my own writing style, which even I wasn’t aware of. However, in my opinion, both Anukrti and I as writers are on a quest of looking for the natural absurdity in the unnatural abject and vice versa. One can’t be separate from the other. I think it comes from always keeping in touch with what we are feeling and thinking. The only strong difference, however, is that I am more reckless in my writingnot caring much for the craft but focusing mainly on getting the story out there, while Anukrti is far more profound in her writing. Every aspect of her writingcharacterisation, language, subtext, theme, plot, structureis a well-thought out process. She writes like an expert conductor of an orchestra, who knows exactly which pulse to stress on, so that each aspect of her writing comes together to follow a certain metrical rhythm very unique to her. I, on the other hand, am more intuitive and raw, and also slightly impatient.

Q. Another strong connection between the two books is their feminist and also feminine outlook. Even stories with male protagonists direct their action through this outlook. How did you find these interconnections and bridges between gendered narratives to represent a diversity of voices, even in the [allegedly] ‘limited’ medium of short stories? 

AU: Any connection you see between Anu’s and my stories can only be flattering to my work. However, I am careful about labels. Am I a feminist and do I have a feminist outlook? Most emphatically yes. Are my stories feminist and do I tell them from a feminine perspective?  I try not to tell them from my ideological perspective or interfere with the stories in any way. I let them tell themselves, for whenever I have tried to intermediate, they have baulked and bolted. The Blue Women includes stories about teenagers, middle-aged men and bats, and to that extent I hope they speak to, and of, varied outlooks.

ASC: First of all, I don’t agree with short stories being a ‘limited’ medium. On the contrary, it’s a limitless medium with infinite possibilities, a strong medium and opportunity to express the variety of your own voice as a writer. As for the feminist, and feminine outlook, it is only natural to have the ability to depict the invisible for a woman writer. She has a natural flair for bringing in the gendered narrative, the innate power of granting access directly to the unconscious of characters as they navigate their way through their own cosmos, their gender notwithstanding. I think it comes from our acute attention. If you really look closely, women writers often work with a camera-eye in order to consciously bypass straightforward representation. I see this a lot in the women writers, and especially in Anukrti’s writings. As if she writes with an instinctive knowledge that gender representation in itself is out of order, and one must be the witness and documentor of this imbalance. The best part is, she writes that with empathy, and that to my mind, becomes the bridge between gendered narratives to represent the diverse voices.

Q. What are your thoughts on representing the body as a sight of horror or violence in literature—especially the female body? How do you achieve this in your work, and what are some challenges to writing stories that contain traumatic events and responses?  

AU: If literature is to represent and be representative of the society and individual experiences, it is difficult to avoid depiction of violence on female bodies. I have written about both physical and mental violence, about overt and subtle ways of subjugation and oppression, and also about the internalisation and acceptance of that violence by women. As a writer of fiction, the challenges in writing remain the same across themes – to write authentically, to remove the writer from the written such that the reader confronts the story on her own terms.

ASC: Again, empathy is the keyword. Also, the challenge is to always remember that writing is not to titillate. It is to evoke an emotion that hopefully will lead to some sort of a change within the reader, if not beyond. To my mind, empathy comes from being aware of the purpose of why you’re writing what you’re writing. Let’s not shy away from the fact that stories will sometimes trigger a memory of trauma and will also contain traumatic responses. They aren’t necessarily only to entertain. But as long as the story and its characters become a tool to empower the writer (and the reader) to first recognize the trauma caused by that particular sight of horror and/or violence, and then lends them the wherewithal to deal with it with more awareness, I think it has done its bit. 

Q. The stories in both the collections tackle with challenging emotional landscapes and themes. From love—in its many shades, from obsessive, to first, to receding—to grief and fear. What are some challenges that you encounter as a writer, while writing about emotional backgrounds and orientations of your characters? 

AU: To me, the real challenge is for the writer to say little and be invisible. It is for the characters and the story to be centerstage While writing about complex characters, obsessive, destructive, even repulsive, for me the key is to let them reveal themselves without suggestions or intervention by an authorial voice, let them play out, show themselves in all their hues. I find melodrama and studied philosophising a tad annoying and try to keep the characters as real as their individual circumstances permit and at all cost, to avoid overstating, embellishing. 

ASC: The biggest challenge is one’s own deep social conditioning and its insistent bedfellow, judgment. As the American prose writer and screenwriter Jim Thompson has famously said, “There is only one plotthings are not what they seem.” It is a lot of hard work to question and then maybe disintegrate and reanimate one’s own beliefs on these emotional landscapes and themes such as love, heartbreak, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, livelihood, social injustice and life at large. As a writer, you are more of a work-in-progress than your own characters. If we remember that every single day as we sit down with our characters, the imperative process of discovering and tackling the challenges of the unknown of these emotional landscapes and themes will be far more joyous and fun.

Q. It is often said how poetry is the art of suggestion—perhaps that also holds true for short stories, since the scope of exploration is [allegedly] relatively ‘limited’. A longer piece arguably offers more opportunities for authorial interventions and segues. Would you agree? If not ‘suggestion’ per se, what would you suggest is the foundational element of a good short story?  

AU: I echo Anu when she says that the short story format is not ‘limited’. In fact, the very shortness of [a] short story gives it the ability to hone in instead of being diffused. The format, by limiting the length, provides infinite opportunity to explore, delve, even indulge. It is like wielding a microscope and focusing on a cell of an organism. 

ASC: Brevity is the magic word here. As a format, I find short stories less indulgent, and hence far more challenging. In fact, I personally feel that the art of suggestion through poetry is probably the most difficult one to achieve. It is always easier to have authorial interventions and segues if you have a bigger canvas, and more number of pages to explore. But how do you blend tiny, perfect revelations into fewer pages, fewer words? Hence, brevity, to my mind, is the foundational element of a good short story.

Q. Various stories in the collections are open-ended. How do you aim or manage to ‘suggest’ layered meanings in your respective oeuvres without being didactic or moralistic or definitive? 

AU: Like I said, I can’t do anything with the stories, they go forth, or not at all, as they like. As a writer, I facilitate their emergence, think of me as a midwife helping with a birth. There is no room for my moralistic judgement. Like Kabir Das’ path of love, the path of writing too is very narrow and only the writer or the story can exist at any given time. Also, isn’t the lack of neatly-wrapped-and-tied-with-a-bow conclusions in the stories like our lives where things shift and change all the time? So to that extent, I am just following the classic art-imitates-life approach. 

ASC: I just let the apparent facts from the life and times of the characters be, while writing. It is not my job to ‘suggest’ any layered meaning. I can arrange my thoughts and prepare my phrases to unstate the apparent and state the obscure. That’s all that I can do as a writer. Everything else beyond that is the reader’s contribution, really. 

Q. Short-fiction isn’t a genre known for breaking through and launching a writing career. There are examples of many writers whose short story collections rose to prominence once their novel(s) sold really well. Often writers aim to establish themselves as novelists or screenwriters before releasing their short-fiction. What are your thoughts on this? Does it make sense for aspiring writers to debut with a novel, and then publish short-fiction? 

AU: You are asking the wrong person about launching a writing career. I know nothing about launching writing careers. All I am trying to do, and not doing it very well, is writing consistently, writing the best I can, writing the essential stories in a way that only the essential gets written. The rest I know nothing about. However, as a reader, I am endlessly fascinated by short stories, some of the most rewarding books I have read are short story collections and some of the most brilliant writers have chosen short story format as their forte, Sara Rai and Alice Munro being just two examples. So why not begin with short stories? I did, though the first books to be published were short novels, Daura and Bhaunri. 

ASC: I am probably an anomaly to this rule because my writing career, both in publishing and in screenwriting, started with short stories. So clearly, there is no set rule. One should just go with whatever format one feels the most comfortable with instead of choosing to do what generally many writers do.

Q. What would be your advice to aspiring short storytellers?

AU: There you have got me again. Who am I to advise anyone? I’ll share what I say to myself all the time thoughread voraciously, variedly, adventurously, classics, contemporary, across the aisle; read what you like but also that which you don’t, to figure the why and the what; writing is a practice, it is a muscle, if not used, it atrophies, use it consistently,  write as often as you can; edit, edit, edit; don’t love your words, love the process through which they emerge. It is always the process. The joy is in the process. Go forth and write. 

ASC: Start somewhere. Start with a character, a sentence, a thought, an aphorism. But you must start somewhere. More often than not, your characters grab your attention and lead you to a small part of their lives to let you delve deep. Characters give you back what you give to theme—time, depth, emotions, feelings. This constant interchange between the writer and her characters is known as a ‘short story’.  So, give your characters time. Please sit down with them everyday. That’s the only advice I have for aspiring short format storytellers. And to quote Carl Sandburg in the end, “Beware of any advice. Even this.” 

In conversation with Kartik Chauhan for HarperBroadcast

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