The Monthly interviews Indian writer and poet, based in Northern Ireland, Pallavi Padma-Uday – Part 2 – The question of craft

How do you develop your craft?

My attitude to craft is much the same as how I live my life. It flows when the heart feels something and seeks the truth of our being. I don’t like to be constrained. I write in free verse. I write on the go, when the moment strikes. Then, there is the ritual of idea stacking which again, I do on the go. I carry my phone with me and whenever an idea comes to me, whether I am at work, or I am out walking, I stop and make sure I record my thoughts. I use an app called Google Notes and I make sure I record all my thoughts on the app. Later, when I get some free time, I look through those notes and work on expanding those ideas.

You record your thoughts and work on the poetry later?

No, for me to finally put those ideas and thoughts on paper, my heart has to be in a certain emotional state and with spiritual clarity about a subject. That is when a lot of writing happens in just an hour; ten minutes barely for a poem. If I don’t feel, I can’t write.

This also explains why I am able to practise literary writing alongside a rigorous research programme. I am a compulsive writer, especially when writing poetry, and for me, great writing exists in moments of emotional expansion. I don’t plan my literary writing; definitely not my poems. The only thing I have a daily plan, and schedule, for is my research in Economic History, and my work on non-fiction. Yet, both seem to feed each other. I get bored with monotonous work; dwelling in diverse fields feeds my imagination and drive to write.

Having said that, I have two methods with regards developing my craft. I have a particular approach which I think comes from my experience as a journalist. I am always employing the lens of a journalist even as an artist. I think that lens is really important. It helps me understand the relevance of themes that move me and offer me reasons as to why I must write about them. The key question I ask myself is,

“What is it that you want to say and what is the big picture perspective that you wish to express about the world.”

I think developing a perspective is vitally important in life as in writing and research. In some ways that perspective emerges from your artistic eye. What is it that you want to talk about from what you see and experience around you?

The second method comes from reading a lot of good literature. I grew up reading great literary classics from a range of writers, both English and Indian writers writing in English; Poetry was at home with my mum’s beautiful poetry and her entire shelf of literary classics, and then the overall family environment was one of current news and public policy. These elements collectively shaped my world view.

I am strongly bilingual like my parents, so I grew up reading a lot of work in the Hindi language as well. I read a lot of Hindi writers, such as Amrita Pritam, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Mahadevi Verma, Premchand and several others.

What about influences?

Hindi writers Premchand and Phanishwar Nath Renu, who wrote about the common people, have been the greatest influence in both my journalistic work as well as literary writing. I put ordinary people in stories, and like to find them in the midst of extraordinary situations, which help me look at an evolving story from a prism many may have missed before. Kamala Das and Vikram Seth would definitely be the Indian writers and poets whose work I find very compelling. Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Bishop, Maggie Smith, Silvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Riche and Gwendolyn Brooks are poets whose work has inspired me in moments of doubt and self-reflection.

In recent years, I have had the privilege of listening to poets such as Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon, whose work I have been reading. In fiction, I am a diehard fan of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Khaled Hosseini, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens. Chimamanda’s feminist work is enormously inspiring. Among Irish writers, recent discoveries for me have been Audrey Magee whose prose is delicious, and so is the work of Claire Keegan.

I read a lot of narrative nonfiction, which I think has seen some fantastic work by both journalists and scholars alike, but this is a very long list. I identify a lot of myself in Eli Saslow’s work, who remains an endless inspiration for journalistic excellence. The list is exhaustive but these are some of the names that come to mind immediately.

What about other influences like art?

I have started to look at art in a different way. I am painting a little myself, and I have found inspiration through seeing paintings. Recently at a workshop I attended, I saw a painting by Tracey Emin, “Sad Shower”; it is displayed in the Tate Modern, I believe, and that had such an impact on me; I was impacted so strongly that I wrote four poems after seeing that painting. Then, I explored more of her work and studied books about her art.

Since I have begun drawing, I am enchanted by the work of American artist Milton Avery, whose ordinary life portraits are just fascinating. Avery also reminds me of Henry Matisse, another visual influence. I must not forget about music – a quick fix to pull me out of a depressive day and get to dancing in my head. Top on my playlist – Sufi music and anything by A.R. Rahman.

What about editing your work?

To go back to the idea of craft; I denied myself as a writer for so long that now I believe the best way to develop is just to keep on writing. This largely borrows from my years of experience as a journalist of long form. My stories were seldom edited, and most published stories were first drafts. When I write, I tend to have completed a lot of the work mentally first in terms of framing and the message and then I get down to writing and allow my thoughts and impressions to flow on the page.

In longreads, I self-edit as I write. In poetry, most of my work is first draft. If I edit a poem, it has to happen within the time space that poem is written in. I want the work to maintain a directness so I don’t really edit too much. I also want to maintain as much emotion in a poem as possible, and as a writer, this is what I think writing is for. Too much thinking and form-obsessed editing interferes with the flow of emotion, in my case. As a writer, my only wish is that I succeed at making the readers relate to the emotion and the message in the poem. I sometimes do add some line breaks after letting the poem sit for a little while, but by and large I like to think that most of the work has been done by the time the words are put on the page.