Ask the Author: Sheheryar Sheikh
Answered Questions (8)
Sheheryar Sheikh
Every day there's something different that inspires me. This variation in sources of inspiration makes me suspicious that the muse is an internal one. I've lived enough to be inspired by memories or memories of feelings. And then there's the great outdoors as well. Everything can be a source of inspiration. I try to unlock the impetus to work by being professional about my work: write at least 2000 words a day, and keep thanking the Divine One for enabling me to enjoy wordplay.
Sheheryar Sheikh
Lots. I'm working through Omar Shahid Hamid's Pakistani thrillers, which will be followed by Sabyn Javeri's Nobody Killed Her. After that, I'll be re-reading apocalyptic narratives for my dissertation, including McCarthy's The Road, Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus (and its sequel); In non-fiction, I'm focusing on works by Joseph Campbell, as they're pertinent to my next novel, which I'm in the middle of writing.
Sheheryar Sheikh
'The Still Point of the Turning World' started off with the moment a girl sees a boy across a college campus. I wanted to write out that moment, and examine its meaning from both her perspective and his. I allowed the moment to generate further entanglements, but did not pressure the thing into becoming a novel. It took two years for that one moment to concatenate with others and become one long narrative about their complicated romance in a disintegrating, politically charged environment.
While writing out the manuscript I was processing my own college life, and that of the generation that lives in Pakistan with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) without knowing that they suffer from it. The novel is about love in difficult times.
While the novel is focused on the characters, the college campus is also an important space, and its story also needed telling. Lahore and Pakistan keep inspiring authors, and I struggle with my attachment to these spaces. All of that comes together in the novel, and I hope readers find their own exploration of space and selfhood within all that which is examined in this work.
While writing out the manuscript I was processing my own college life, and that of the generation that lives in Pakistan with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) without knowing that they suffer from it. The novel is about love in difficult times.
While the novel is focused on the characters, the college campus is also an important space, and its story also needed telling. Lahore and Pakistan keep inspiring authors, and I struggle with my attachment to these spaces. All of that comes together in the novel, and I hope readers find their own exploration of space and selfhood within all that which is examined in this work.
Sheheryar Sheikh
I’m working on a novel and jotting notes for a set of short stories on the side. The novel is based in London and Karachi, and it explores the actions and psyche of a despicable human being—it also examines the possibility of his redemption. The short stories straddle borders between literary and science fiction, and venture into the fantastic.
Sheheryar Sheikh
I love writing. Period. It causes aches in the head and the back from sitting and thinking hard in awkward poses and hunched-over positions. But that’s understood as a necessary thing. The best part about writing is how much I discover about my weaknesses, and how much I can empathize with people who only exist on the page. The only thing I do not like about writing is that it’s not (yet) my full-time job. I want to create a novel that wows people into giving me enough funding and space and time to let me be a self-sustaining writer for the rest of my life.
Sheheryar Sheikh
If you want to be a writer of literary fiction, this applies: Read about writing. Read about the publishing industry. Read books about the layers of agents and editors that stand between your writing staying on screens and pages and getting published in literary magazines and books. Imagine them as adversaries on a review board that you must impress.
Day-dream about yourself in montages, getting better with every piece you write. Then forget about your writing. Keep writing, but don’t get caught up in your ego’s demand that it be published at once. Instead, polish your reading skills—that will be the best thing you do for yourself as a writer.
Read the works of David Foster Wallace, Milan Kundera, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Jamil Ahmad, Mohammed Hanif, Alan Moore, David Simon, Flaubert, Michael Ondaatje, and everybody else who is worth reading.
Then know that you are going to do better than any of them. Know that you are going to have to do better. Your story or novel—the one you want to write—has never been told. So write your story. Or novel. Once it’s written, leave it alone. You can come back to it in a few weeks, after setting up a discipline of reading and writing the right stuff—stuff that makes you grow, and stuff that makes you write out of your (childish) comfort zone.
Now go read On Writing by Stephen King. Follow that up by picking up a book on writing exercises. I recommend What If, and 3am Epiphanies. Make a schedule and (mostly) stick to it. Write out what the prompts demand from you. Make yourself understand what it is to type or write daily for a set number of hours before everybody wakes up or after everybody goes to sleep. Embrace this solitude—yes, work when you are alone.
Never give into the Internet. It will pull you away from the writing. It will suck like a black hole on your writing spirit. Make a habit of checking the few websites you check, and then quickly move on to your writing. Only stay online if you need to be connected to look things up that concern your writing. Otherwise shut off the wifi connection on your device and work through your minutes or letters with an empowered disconnection from distractions.
Write and write and write. Every day, write something. But read more than you write until you are a “big enough” writer to write more than you read. Read Machiavelli and Dante, and Manto and E.L. Doctorow. Read the South Africans, the North Africans. The Asians. The Immigrants. The Political Activists. The Polemicists. The Nobel Prize winners. The greats, the semi-greats. Read and make notes. Enwreathe your books with your remarks. All the while, write better sentences than the writers you read. Correct their sentences. Understand why they do what they do. Journalize yourself and thrust out your dark self as well as your redemptive self in your writings and readings.
Once you are overwhelmed by all this, and you are brimming with selfhood that needs to express itself to process itself, you are ready to write a long project, or to work at length on a short project. This is when you should start writing a short story or a novel to which you will commit yourself. No matter how many novels or short stories you have or have not attempted before, every project will be something new, and it will ruin and reform you in new ways. Take it by the horns and hold on for dear life.
There will be great days, when it flows. There will be ugly days when you are bruising your bull of a story while it’s goring you with its horns. You’re both bloodied, exhausted. And you push through that, and there will be the feeling you get that the scriptures demand when they promise you gardens beneath which rives flow. Oh, how it flows.
And once you’re done with the first draft, you’ll look back and see something completely different from what you thought you wrote. This is because you’ve put on the Robe of the Editorial Process. It’s time to take out the paring knife and give shape to the text. Some writers edit as they write. But that is editing without the Robe of the Editorial Process. So do not mistake edit-on-the-go for the real editing.
To become an editor of your work, use the carving and re-shaping skills you have used on other authors. Your author self needs that kind of dispassionate attention. Get to work.
Once your work is ready for publication, you’ll know it. And, more importantly, a reader will know it. You won’t have to explain too much. It will be there. Okay, good. It’s ready. Great. Now get to work repeating the process from scratch. Read something enlightening… etc.
Meanwhile, show your ready work to a writer friend—or, better yet, send it out with a professional query letter to an editor or literary agent who is looking for the kind of work you have created. Maybe you’ll get feedback. Maybe you won’t. You’ll definitely gather rejections. They’re part of the process. If you haven’t been rejected, you haven’t lived. But acceptance also comes… and sometimes it comes from the most surprising places.
Repeat from scratch. Again and again. Then follow your dream with more work. It will be a lot of work. Be ready for that. Embrace it.
Day-dream about yourself in montages, getting better with every piece you write. Then forget about your writing. Keep writing, but don’t get caught up in your ego’s demand that it be published at once. Instead, polish your reading skills—that will be the best thing you do for yourself as a writer.
Read the works of David Foster Wallace, Milan Kundera, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Jamil Ahmad, Mohammed Hanif, Alan Moore, David Simon, Flaubert, Michael Ondaatje, and everybody else who is worth reading.
Then know that you are going to do better than any of them. Know that you are going to have to do better. Your story or novel—the one you want to write—has never been told. So write your story. Or novel. Once it’s written, leave it alone. You can come back to it in a few weeks, after setting up a discipline of reading and writing the right stuff—stuff that makes you grow, and stuff that makes you write out of your (childish) comfort zone.
Now go read On Writing by Stephen King. Follow that up by picking up a book on writing exercises. I recommend What If, and 3am Epiphanies. Make a schedule and (mostly) stick to it. Write out what the prompts demand from you. Make yourself understand what it is to type or write daily for a set number of hours before everybody wakes up or after everybody goes to sleep. Embrace this solitude—yes, work when you are alone.
Never give into the Internet. It will pull you away from the writing. It will suck like a black hole on your writing spirit. Make a habit of checking the few websites you check, and then quickly move on to your writing. Only stay online if you need to be connected to look things up that concern your writing. Otherwise shut off the wifi connection on your device and work through your minutes or letters with an empowered disconnection from distractions.
Write and write and write. Every day, write something. But read more than you write until you are a “big enough” writer to write more than you read. Read Machiavelli and Dante, and Manto and E.L. Doctorow. Read the South Africans, the North Africans. The Asians. The Immigrants. The Political Activists. The Polemicists. The Nobel Prize winners. The greats, the semi-greats. Read and make notes. Enwreathe your books with your remarks. All the while, write better sentences than the writers you read. Correct their sentences. Understand why they do what they do. Journalize yourself and thrust out your dark self as well as your redemptive self in your writings and readings.
Once you are overwhelmed by all this, and you are brimming with selfhood that needs to express itself to process itself, you are ready to write a long project, or to work at length on a short project. This is when you should start writing a short story or a novel to which you will commit yourself. No matter how many novels or short stories you have or have not attempted before, every project will be something new, and it will ruin and reform you in new ways. Take it by the horns and hold on for dear life.
There will be great days, when it flows. There will be ugly days when you are bruising your bull of a story while it’s goring you with its horns. You’re both bloodied, exhausted. And you push through that, and there will be the feeling you get that the scriptures demand when they promise you gardens beneath which rives flow. Oh, how it flows.
And once you’re done with the first draft, you’ll look back and see something completely different from what you thought you wrote. This is because you’ve put on the Robe of the Editorial Process. It’s time to take out the paring knife and give shape to the text. Some writers edit as they write. But that is editing without the Robe of the Editorial Process. So do not mistake edit-on-the-go for the real editing.
To become an editor of your work, use the carving and re-shaping skills you have used on other authors. Your author self needs that kind of dispassionate attention. Get to work.
Once your work is ready for publication, you’ll know it. And, more importantly, a reader will know it. You won’t have to explain too much. It will be there. Okay, good. It’s ready. Great. Now get to work repeating the process from scratch. Read something enlightening… etc.
Meanwhile, show your ready work to a writer friend—or, better yet, send it out with a professional query letter to an editor or literary agent who is looking for the kind of work you have created. Maybe you’ll get feedback. Maybe you won’t. You’ll definitely gather rejections. They’re part of the process. If you haven’t been rejected, you haven’t lived. But acceptance also comes… and sometimes it comes from the most surprising places.
Repeat from scratch. Again and again. Then follow your dream with more work. It will be a lot of work. Be ready for that. Embrace it.
Sheheryar Sheikh
There is no such thing as writer’s block, thank God. It’s a delusion that the writer’s ego springs ahead as a big hurdle on the barely filled page. The ego proclaims: you must write only perfect sentences. The writer balks and stops as if he or she has just received a Stay Order from the Supreme Court. But the ego must be flung aside. The writer must allow herself or himself to write badly for a while. The good grooves are just around a page-turn or a paragraph down the scrollable screen.
To remedy what you think is the writer’s block: allow yourself to write badly. Or copy short stories by veterans from book to screen or write them out by hand. Or copy recipes. Or play with words in any other way. Write silly limericks if you have to. At the end of the day, perfection must be put aside until the editing stage—which should be separated from the writing stage. Editing comes after. First, fling the words with momentum and force onto the page.
To remedy what you think is the writer’s block: allow yourself to write badly. Or copy short stories by veterans from book to screen or write them out by hand. Or copy recipes. Or play with words in any other way. Write silly limericks if you have to. At the end of the day, perfection must be put aside until the editing stage—which should be separated from the writing stage. Editing comes after. First, fling the words with momentum and force onto the page.
Sheheryar Sheikh
Hisham, Thank you for your interest in my novel, and for your query. I'm terribly sorry I didn't reply to your question before--I just saw it for the first time today.
And, unfortunately, I can't advise the best way to purchase the book if you're in Germany. The book is available on Amazon.com here: https://www.amazon.com/Still-Point-Tu...
But that may be too expensive with the shipping. I hope you're able to have a friend from India or Pakistan send it to you by post. Do let me know when you get it. I'll be waiting for feedback from you on how you like the novel.
Hisham, Thank you for your interest in my novel, and for your query. I'm terribly sorry I didn't reply to your question before--I just saw it for the first time today.
And, unfortunately, I can't advise the best way to purchase the book if you're in Germany. The book is available on Amazon.com here: https://www.amazon.com/Still-Point-Tu...
But that may be too expensive with the shipping. I hope you're able to have a friend from India or Pakistan send it to you by post. Do let me know when you get it. I'll be waiting for feedback from you on how you like the novel.
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