THE CHOICE TO LIVE AND WORK AS A WRITER

The choice to live and work as a writer is a tricky one. When we’re on a successful jag, we crank it out with guts and gusto. When we’re not successful, what do we do? Keep writing anyway. Shutting down the writer’s mind is among the most undoable tasks. We try to turn it off, but it keeps us up at night, loses us in thought, strains our attention span for other activities.

Usually, we are called to the profession from deep within. Sometimes we fall into gigs – read Amy Farnum’s Breakthrough story about identifying as a writer – and sometimes we are drawn to the field because we have a story that needs telling. Novelist Samhita Arni, interviewed here by Kavitha Rao, is fascinated by myths, which she retells in various literary formats because the novel alone couldn’t contain Arni’s ambition to explore her topic. (She was working on a TV show in Afghanistan during the interview.)