Ranbir Sidhu, author, Dark Star – ‘Most writers just talk to other writers’

How did Dark Star come about?The book is loosely based on my mother; I had been thinking about it for a few years. I thought I would write a non-fiction book, but it wasn’t working. So I tried different approaches to write it fictionally. Once I found my voice, it was an outpouring. By that point, my mother was quite ill. She was living in India and due to the pandemic travel restrictions, it was impossible to see her. Writing the book felt like a way of being close to her when I couldn’t physically be with her.It’s always mysterious where a particular story comes from. Sometimes you get lucky — something clicks. I was thinking about my mother, Punjab, death during the pandemic… And it all came together with the novel’s first line. Once I had that line, the book just appeared.

Your novella is entirely a first-person recollection without a conventional plot or dialogues. How did this structure take shape? The first draft was a single piece of text — there were no paragraphs. I introduced those in subsequent drafts. I had lots of conversations with Karthika VK, my editor at Westland, about the structure, including where to put commas and question marks. I feel the early part of the book is an attempt to train the reader how to read the book because it later becomes… not more difficult, but many conventions of basic paragraphing break down as the protagonist’s mental state breaks down.

Did you have any apprehensions about the novella’s unique form?Not really. I was only apprehensive about whether my editor at Westland would want to publish it. She read the initial draft, which was half the length of the final manuscript, but she was incredibly supportive from the very beginning. In many ways, I guess if there were any apprehensions, she got rid of them. She had no problem with the style and how it was written. But also, I don’t think the book’s style is a big deal. I wish more writers in India and the diaspora embraced more experimental techniques. Some have — like Meena Kandasamy and Annie Zaidie — but too often, we copy a version of the Victorian novel. I hope we can cast away colonial notions and embrace a more modern approach to fiction.

What works have influenced your experiments with style?As an artist, everything you do and experience feeds into your work — most of it unknowingly. More directly, when I was a student at the University of Arizona, I studied with the French novelist Monique Wittig and we became friends. Her experimental, avant-garde writing was enormously influential on me, but more than that, she introduced me to many French and American writers whose work became, I won’t say influential, but important to me. I wouldn’t have read them at that age had it not been for her.

Were any aspects or sections of the novella challenging to write?It wasn’t challenging, but it was emotionally difficult. My mother was dying — and died — as I was writing Dark Star. While doing the rewrites, I often found myself breaking down into tears. Even today, I find it hard to read some sections of the book.

Your protagonist is a woman from the South Asian diaspora reflecting on the Partition of India, which rarely features in stories about Indian emigrants. Growing up in the UK as the son of a Partition refugee, what were the narratives around the event?People didn’t really talk about it. My mother had no memories — she only had stories that were told to her. The only version I have of those stories is what I remember of the things she told me. It’s interesting that there are few diaspora stories on the Partition. It might be that Punjabis in the diaspora haven’t written as many books as other communities. But that’s beginning to change. I suspect we will see more stories about the event because it’s still a huge overhang on the lives of many. The Partition remains, weirdly, one of the central facts of my life even though I was born 20 years after it happened.

You were born in the UK, lived in the US, among other countries, and now reside in Greece. How does your geographical location affect your writing?

Having lived in Greece for a few years now — both on islands and in the city of Athens — the experiences I’ve had and the people I’ve met have given my work a sense of space. I don’t mean physical space, but a sense of being able to breathe. So many New York writers live in a world where they meet only other New York writers. When I was living on the island of Crete, I didn’t know any writers. There were a couple of visual artists, but nobody was lost in that small insular world (of writers). It’s funny because I was living on an island and I suppose our world was insular in a different way. Today, more than ever, it seems like most writers just talk to other writers. It’s important to get your head outside of that space for a bit and live outside the bubbles we build for ourselves.

In 2017, you wrote an essay about how “the literary oligarchy is killing writing”. Do you view the literary world differently today?It’s not different — it’s probably the same, if not worse, especially the US publishing industry. I think there’s more room in Indian publishing — it’s telling that Dark Star has been published in India first. We’re still trying to get UK and US publishers interested. In India, perhaps, more space is opening up for people who don’t come from super-elite backgrounds to break into the arts and the world of writing. It still feels like a game of where you come from, who you know, and the schools you went to, though it’s changing. The US publishing industry is quite difficult — I don’t know how one navigates it. The one good thing about it and the UK publishing world is that many small independent presses have come up in the past 15 years. The big four or five publishers are resting on their laurels or trying to put out best sellers, but genuinely great writing is happening because of small publishers. That’s something to celebrate.

You’ve won awards, fellowships, and residencies in the US and still find it hard to navigate the mainstream US publishing industry. So how does a person break into the industry if they do not have the right background and connections?I don’t know, sadly. One of my publishers at a small independent press told me that now if they have two equally excellent novels, they’ll publish the one whose author has a larger social media following. Also, several people have told me that if you’re young or a new writer today, one of the hardest categories to belong to is white male. I don’t know if that’s true. We’ve had a lot of white men — and men in general — publishing for decades and decades. I’m happy that more women are getting published, even if it means that my works get published less easily. That kind of correction is necessary.As for breaking into the US publishing industry, I’ve no idea. Perhaps, it’s just luck — getting the right editor to read the right book at the right moment and having them fall in love with it enough so that they can persuade the publisher and the marketing department to spend money and time on it.

Syed Saad Ahmed is a writer and communications professional.

The diversity of topics you’ve touched on in your work is intriguing. You’ve written a novel about a satellite television magnate who gets eaten by a huge fish and an investigation into Trump’s presidency, among others. How do you decide what to write a book about?I don’t think about this question. It’s important to follow your interest or what excites you. With the Trump book, there was a sense of derangement with what was happening in the US even though I was living abroad and my life was not connected to America. My publisher wanted me to write that book. It’s funny you found information about the novel on the big fish — that was my first novel. It never got published; perhaps, one day, it will.

How did Dark Star come about?The book is loosely based on my mother; I had been thinking about it for a few years. I thought I would write a non-fiction book, but it wasn’t working. So I tried different approaches to write it fictionally. Once I found my voice, it was an outpouring. By that point, my mother was quite ill. She was living in India and due to the pandemic travel restrictions, it was impossible to see her. Writing the book felt like a way of being close to her when I couldn’t physically be with her.It’s always mysterious where a particular story comes from. Sometimes you get lucky — something clicks. I was thinking about my mother, Punjab, death during the pandemic… And it all came together with the novel’s first line. Once I had that line, the book just appeared.

Your novella is entirely a first-person recollection without a conventional plot or dialogues. How did this structure take shape? The first draft was a single piece of text — there were no paragraphs. I introduced those in subsequent drafts. I had lots of conversations with Karthika VK, my editor at Westland, about the structure, including where to put commas and question marks. I feel the early part of the book is an attempt to train the reader how to read the book because it later becomes… not more difficult, but many conventions of basic paragraphing break down as the protagonist’s mental state breaks down.

Did you have any apprehensions about the novella’s unique form?Not really. I was only apprehensive about whether my editor at Westland would want to publish it. She read the initial draft, which was half the length of the final manuscript, but she was incredibly supportive from the very beginning. In many ways, I guess if there were any apprehensions, she got rid of them. She had no problem with the style and how it was written. But also, I don’t think the book’s style is a big deal. I wish more writers in India and the diaspora embraced more experimental techniques. Some have — like Meena Kandasamy and Annie Zaidie — but too often, we copy a version of the Victorian novel. I hope we can cast away colonial notions and embrace a more modern approach to fiction.

What works have influenced your experiments with style?As an artist, everything you do and experience feeds into your work — most of it unknowingly. More directly, when I was a student at the University of Arizona, I studied with the French novelist Monique Wittig and we became friends. Her experimental, avant-garde writing was enormously influential on me, but more than that, she introduced me to many French and American writers whose work became, I won’t say influential, but important to me. I wouldn’t have read them at that age had it not been for her.

Were any aspects or sections of the novella challenging to write?It wasn’t challenging, but it was emotionally difficult. My mother was dying — and died — as I was writing Dark Star. While doing the rewrites, I often found myself breaking down into tears. Even today, I find it hard to read some sections of the book.

Your protagonist is a woman from the South Asian diaspora reflecting on the Partition of India, which rarely features in stories about Indian emigrants. Growing up in the UK as the son of a Partition refugee, what were the narratives around the event?People didn’t really talk about it. My mother had no memories — she only had stories that were told to her. The only version I have of those stories is what I remember of the things she told me. It’s interesting that there are few diaspora stories on the Partition. It might be that Punjabis in the diaspora haven’t written as many books as other communities. But that’s beginning to change. I suspect we will see more stories about the event because it’s still a huge overhang on the lives of many. The Partition remains, weirdly, one of the central facts of my life even though I was born 20 years after it happened.

You were born in the UK, lived in the US, among other countries, and now reside in Greece. How does your geographical location affect your writing?

Having lived in Greece for a few years now — both on islands and in the city of Athens — the experiences I’ve had and the people I’ve met have given my work a sense of space. I don’t mean physical space, but a sense of being able to breathe. So many New York writers live in a world where they meet only other New York writers. When I was living on the island of Crete, I didn’t know any writers. There were a couple of visual artists, but nobody was lost in that small insular world (of writers). It’s funny because I was living on an island and I suppose our world was insular in a different way. Today, more than ever, it seems like most writers just talk to other writers. It’s important to get your head outside of that space for a bit and live outside the bubbles we build for ourselves.

In 2017, you wrote an essay about how “the literary oligarchy is killing writing”. Do you view the literary world differently today?It’s not different — it’s probably the same, if not worse, especially the US publishing industry. I think there’s more room in Indian publishing — it’s telling that Dark Star has been published in India first. We’re still trying to get UK and US publishers interested. In India, perhaps, more space is opening up for people who don’t come from super-elite backgrounds to break into the arts and the world of writing. It still feels like a game of where you come from, who you know, and the schools you went to, though it’s changing. The US publishing industry is quite difficult — I don’t know how one navigates it. The one good thing about it and the UK publishing world is that many small independent presses have come up in the past 15 years. The big four or five publishers are resting on their laurels or trying to put out best sellers, but genuinely great writing is happening because of small publishers. That’s something to celebrate.

You’ve won awards, fellowships, and residencies in the US and still find it hard to navigate the mainstream US publishing industry. So how does a person break into the industry if they do not have the right background and connections?I don’t know, sadly. One of my publishers at a small independent press told me that now if they have two equally excellent novels, they’ll publish the one whose author has a larger social media following. Also, several people have told me that if you’re young or a new writer today, one of the hardest categories to belong to is white male. I don’t know if that’s true. We’ve had a lot of white men — and men in general — publishing for decades and decades. I’m happy that more women are getting published, even if it means that my works get published less easily. That kind of correction is necessary.As for breaking into the US publishing industry, I’ve no idea. Perhaps, it’s just luck — getting the right editor to read the right book at the right moment and having them fall in love with it enough so that they can persuade the publisher and the marketing department to spend money and time on it.

Syed Saad Ahmed is a writer and communications professional.