I practice as a Homoeopathic Physician and a Mental Health Counsellor and also work as a freelance content writer. I’m also planning to launch my own small entity of literary services called ‘The Writeous Way’ focusing on editing, proofreading, mentoring and beta-reading with constructive feedback, so that upcoming writers are guided rightly from the beginning itself. My writing journey began when I was just thirteen and I began by writing poetry. I was also into fiction writing a year later.
My first book to be published was a collection of poems from my younger years, titled The Torrent from My Soul: Poems of A Born Dreamer, which came out in 2011 when I was a 22-year-old medical student. The book is not in print anymore, but I do have its revised Kindle edition available on Amazon. I began writing my first serious work of fiction at the end of my first year at college and completed it two years later.
Tell us more about your background and journey.
I’m an author from Kerala, India. I was born and brought up in the Malabar region, Areekode in the Malappuram district to be exact. I live in Kadalundi, a seaside town in Calicut now. I hail from a more or less conservative family, but quite a well-educated one with many teachers including my mother. I’m a BHMS graduate with a Masters in Applied Psychology.
I practice as a Homoeopathic Physician and a Mental Health Counsellor and also work as a freelance content writer. I’m also planning to launch my own small entity of literary services called ‘The Writeous Way’ focusing on editing, proofreading, mentoring and beta-reading with constructive feedback, so that upcoming writers are guided rightly from the beginning itself. My writing journey began when I was just thirteen and I began by writing poetry. I was also into fiction writing a year later. My first book to be published was a collection of poems from my younger years, titled The Torrent from My Soul: Poems of A Born Dreamer, which came out in 2011 when I was a 22 year old medical student. The book is not in print anymore, but I do have its revised Kindle edition available on Amazon. I began writing my first serious work of fiction at the end of my first year at college and completed it two years later.
Getting it traditionally published was a long journey with all the usual struggles of a debut writer. Finally, in December 2018, my debut novel Sandcastles was published. To my utter amazement and pleasure, it was shortlisted for ARL Literary Award for Best Author 2018 shortly after its publication. Less than two years later, in August 2020, amidst the pandemic, my second novel, The Storyteller, came out as well.
I have also compiled and published a short series of ten poems on narcissistic abuse and power politics titled The Puppet on Kindle. Besides writing novels and poetry, I also write articles on diverse topics like writing, creativity, productivity, books, mental health, self-improvement, relationships and parenting. My latest venture is a weekly podcast The Writeous Way with Sana Rose talking about the same topics.
When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
I decided to be a writer long before I decided to be anything else that I am doing now. I journaled passionately since I was 13, and stepped into the world of writing poems shortly after that. I was fairly a quiet and lonely teenager with her own bundle of emotional troubles and trauma. I had a few close friends but I had a shell that I kept closed. And I was a bookworm.
This was a perfect blend to make a writer. I discovered writing was cathartic to me, helped me process all that I had internalized as I grew up and release the repressed emotions within me. Right from the beginning, instead of thinking, “I want to write poems and stories,” I used to think, “I want to be an author, see my name in print.” And that has happened. I was passionate and ambitious even at thirteen. And I knew, whatever I pursued later in life, whatever I became, whatever job I did, I would always be a writer first. So, I decided to be a writer when I began writing. It is the one thing that has driven me to survive a lot and the only thing that I have stuck to in the past 20 years.
Is it a financially stable career?
To be honest, no. Not until you are lucky enough to get that smashing book deal that funds you for the rest of your life. To think that poetry and fiction writing will pay my bills and fund your expenses is not really sensible unless authorship and book writing is a business for you. That takes investments and more than just writing when inspiration strikes.
Ideally, I would like to be a full-time writer because life in general, with all its responsibilities and tasks, is pretty distracting, but I believe to identify oneself as a writer, one doesn’t have to be a full-time writer. It is enough to write. And that can be done alongside other jobs as well. Being a physician, counsellor, content writer or a parent has not stopped me from writing two novels and working on more but rather enriches me as writer. So yes, write if you can’t stop yourself and if you have to work other jobs to be financially stable, do that as well. It doesn’t make you any less of a writer.
Who is your favourite writer and why?
This might be the hardest or most unfair question you can ask a writer at any given point of time. There would be many. For that reason, instead of choosing a favourite author, I prefer to name books that I loved reading. I cannot say that I would like all works of an author. But when I name a book, I can also mean, you may checkout other works by that author as well. But some of my earliest favourites are still in my heart, whether I have read them recently or not.
I love Kristin Hannah for her deeply emotional women’s fiction novels, Jane Austen for her futuristic Victorian novels of manners which hold lessons for women even in this contemporary world, Arundhati Roy for her poetic and uncompromising prose that smacks of reality, Khaled Hosseini for his starkly realistic depiction of pathos in fiction, Elif Shafak for her rich stories, Rowling for magically sweeping me away during my younger years, Julian Barnes for his Booker –winning short but mind-blowing novel ‘The Sense of An Ending’ and many more. This list is a work in progress and will remain so, for there is so much to be read.
Where does your inspiration lie?
I am someone who internalizes a lot and it is not always my own experience. A generous serving of what happens around me adds to it. My inspiration lies in everything that I can empathize with. I am mostly an introspective writer and I am very much comfortable with switching my point of view frequently which helps me build my characters that are diverse.
My inspiration comes from different kinds of trauma and my understanding of it and I process and purge it in the form of fiction and poetry. Sometimes, my inspiration is a random word that snags at my mind and fingertips, and it could grow into a page or a poem.
What does your typical day look like?
My day is divided between many things. On a regular week day, I have to be up early to begin breakfast chores. I live with my husband and his family and I have a daughter - she is almost seven. After the morning hustle, if I can stay awake, I sit down to do things related to my writing.
It may be some incomplete draft of a social media post, some catching up online or recording my next podcast episode in the silence of the morning. Once my daughter wakes up, it is time for me to prep her for the day’s live classroom and I get ready to go to work. I am at the clinic till 1PM but depending on the number and time taken for the cases, I get back home as late as 3PM.
By then, I am pretty much drained. Late lunches and a short afternoon nap has become a routine. On days there are less number of patients, I catch up on some writing or networking from the clinic. I also have to fit in the content writing projects that I take up, so the evenings are mostly spent on that. As for my creative writing – I have to admit that I have no specific routine. I yield to passion most of the time and it could happen at anytime - sometimes past midnight, sometimes in the morning or in the afternoon. I get it done taking my own time, not racing against anything or anybody because storytelling for me is an organic process. So there are long stretches of weeks or months of not working on my novel but the whole time, my mind is reeling around it.
There are also bouts of unstoppable writing when I churn out thousands of words a day. The prerequisite for this is that I be consumed by my story. It has to happen by itself often. Do I write daily? I consider writing anything a day to be writing – some days, it’s a poem, and some days, it would be a blog article. Some nights, it’s a chapter or two of the book in progress and sometimes, it is just a few sentences of prose, a random muse or thought that finds a place in a book years later. So, yes, I write something daily.
What piece of advice would you like to give to future aspiring writers?
There’s just one advice to aspiring writers – stop calling yourself ‘aspiring’. And start writing. There is no such thing as an aspiring writer. You are a writer when you begin writing. You don’t have to aspire to write, you just need to have the courage to take that step and start writing.
Every other advice related to writing that I would give applies for those who have crossed this hurdle called aspiration. It’s a waste of your time, dream and passion. Do it already!
Which is your favourite book and why?
Among the many fiction books I have read and loved over the years, one book pops up in my mind the moment this question is asked. It is hard for a writer to choose a favourite book. But I think this is a decent answer for that question. The Sense of An Ending by Julian Barnes. It won the Booker Prize in 2011. It is just 150 pages long, a short simple read. But it blew my mind. Subtly, slowly, unknowingly, the mystery crept up on me when I reached the second last page and it went off.
After I finished reading that book, it stayed with me like a gentle companion, whispering to me, “This is how you should write. Blow minds with as little as possible.” A novel so short left me guessing till the end and the journey was not a shallow one. With an air of casual and humorous observations and recollections, the narrative takes us down a memory lane that leaves us thoughtful about the smallest things we come across. This book made me set the standards for my own writing a little higher than it was before.
Read her books on Website
Interviewed by - Saba Parveen
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