1. We’ve been here before. Now we’re back for short stories. Is there a medium of writing that you do not feel at home in?
I don’t think so. Short stories can be as challenging as a novel, but they are also contained within a certain length so you, hopefully, do not spend years writing one. I consider myself a novelist, if we are using such labels but I enjoy the short story form too. It is just harder for me to get an idea for one. I have ideas for all sorts of novels all the time.
2. Is your process the same for long form and short form writing?
I like to follow an organic method of writing, either way. In short stories this is more manageable because you are dealing with a self-contained universe, most of the time. A novel needs all sorts of attention. Organic writing, the idea of not knowing where you will end at the start, I think, is more apparent and comfortable in the short form.
3. How do you write a broken heart?
That’s a hard one. It depends. It always begins with the character. People have different reactions to heartache. If I can see the character than I can write their heartbreak. I have to know who they are and what they did before this seminal event and what they will do with the dark days and then what they will do after. Often, you sit with them until you see them. Then the writing takes care of the rest.
4. Does it ever get odd writing a story within a story like you did for ‘The Blank Page’?
Well, if you put a gun to my head and ask me, I would call myself a metafiction writer. This is my bag. I love to go beyond subtext and intertext and wander into the life of the story and the concept of art and what lies beyond the reality of being and becoming. It is fun for me, for some reason.
5. What makes writing short stories different from long form narratives, for you?
Length I think is the main thing. You are dealing with a smaller space to inhabit, and you have to get to your point before you stray from short story into a novella. If that is not your aim to begin with.
6. We are finally getting a glimpse into the world of metafiction that you promised us. Can you tell us a little more about your work in that genre and what we can look forward to from you?
Well, I am interested in the concept of story and how we create stories and what they really mean. The idea of how we have always made fiction out of truth and tried to speak of painful things in less painful poetry or prose. That is what metafiction is to me, even in the more surrealistic aspects of it and the existential forms in which it presents. It is trying, like all other kinds of fiction, to tell truth through absolute lies.
In going forward, I believe Logia will be publishing the first metafiction novel from me later this year. That’s when all the fun really begins.
7. What kind of writer are you?
There is that gun. I am a metafiction writer. But any writer is really just a writer with certain preferences.
8. What are you reading now?
An Amartya Sen book given to me by someone I have a lot of love and respect for and a screenplay by Nick Cassavetes. I love reading screenplays, for some reason I have not yet explained to myself. I also love that whole policy and governance space, as 8 Years might show. So, I am enjoying both very slowly because, why not?
9. What is your writing process like?
Two hours a day, sometimes weekends, tea, coffee, wine, when I smoked, a cigarette, a playlist on repeat and I just wait for something to happen or not happen.
10. What can we expect from you in the future? Are you working on anything at the moment?
Look, you guys are going to be sick of me. I have a full slate in various stages of being ready to share with everyone. I am presently writing the third volume of a novel that we have not even shown the first of yet. I think I am fully booked in terms of book projects till 2042. I did not come to play. (Laughing).
