In a robust conversation with the wonderful debut novelist Sanjena Sathian, Angie and Elizabeth pick her brain about craft, including defaulting to chronology as a built-in plot structure, and the benefit to stabilizing one variable in an ambitious novel with a lot of moving parts. Other topics covered include: Head hopping to find a voice with range and inflection. Connecting to/ channeling voice. Writing a dominant identity from the position of a non-dominant identity. Giving parts of ourselves to each character. Privilege and blind spots. The negotiation of self and non-self. The age of a narrator v the age of the characters. What inspired her to write. What art does v what representational politics do. The vomit draft and the cut scenes. Groping in the dark, despairing, panic, and outline: a writer’s toolkit. Editing. Noticing v building. Research and discovery. Getting outside the text. The importance of throwing things away because you know you can do something better. And the power of moving sentences around.

 

 

SANJENA SATHIAN

SANJENA SATHIAN

Sanjena Sathian was raised in Georgia by Indian immigrant parents. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an alumna of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and a former Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. She has also worked as a journalist in San Francisco and in Mumbai.

Her award winning short fiction appears or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, Boulevard, Joyland, Salt Hill, and The Master’s Review. She’s written nonfiction for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Food and Wine, The Boston Globe, The Juggernaut, The Millions, OZY, and more.

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival–everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.