Commonwealth Short Story prize winner Sanjana Thakur on her winning entry

I feel like I’ve worked through it now. I’m at the point where even though my stories deal with similar themes, they can be stylistically different. I have some stories that are realistic, some speculative, and so on. In the collection I’m working on now, they stand distinct but feel cohesive. I hope each story illuminates the mother-daughter relationship differently. Even if I write more such stories, I’d just think, okay, there’s still something to explore here.

Is the short story a lost art? Do more novelists today need to train on that discipline?

The short story does feel a bit like the stepchild of the novel. That’s a shame because it’s such a fun form to write and read, especially given how short attention spans have become — mine included. They’re a great way to get into reading because they don’t ask too much in terms of time, but if done well, give you so much in return, packing the emotional punch of a novel into just 10 to 25 pages.

It’s also not easy to access short stories if you’re not someone in the literary world, because then you’re reading magazines and journals where short stories are published. In a bookstore, there isn’t usually a short story section, right?

Writing a novel feels like an entirely different art from a short story. The latter requires a lot of restraint. You have to figure out how to do a lot of work in a limited amount of space.

You’ve spoken about the pressure of conforming to writing dictums like ‘write daily’ and ‘write without interruptions’. Has this advice historically ignored people who aren’t wealthy, able-bodied and male?

I think so. I never felt such pressure within my MFA, but just hearing it so much, growing up, got in my head. I felt like that’s what I needed to do in order to be a writer. Grad school was about accepting that my writing process looks different. These processes don’t work for everyone, and that’s okay. Even if it doesn’t work for you, there is a space for you to write and be a writer.

Because I write not novels but short stories, I find it difficult to start a story and come back to it the next day. So I ideally do the first draft all in one go and then — because I’m so deadline-motivated — that often means starting a story two days before it’s due for workshop and pulling some all-nighters to get it done.

How many drafts did this story take? What’s your revision process?

I wrote six drafts for this one. Some stories need an entire rehaul, where I rewrite everything, change the POV, change the tense, etc. This didn’t. I wrote it for a workshop my second MFA year, and submitted the first draft to a workshop and got feedback from my peers and professor. Once I get feedback, I set the work aside for a bit to come back with a sense of what feedback I want to incorporate into the work.

With this story, I gave all the mothers a bit more space in the final draft. I think I introduced the protagonist’s real mother, or the idea of her, earlier in the story. I included more details of their relationship in the final draft.

My one big rule is that I never edit while writing. I rewrite the story in a fresh document. I think it wouldn’t be a good revision if I were just making tweaks on the document itself. And I try to do it all in one sitting.

When you’re reading fiction, what’s more important: Language or story? Style or substance? Form or content?

I love language, and it’s so pleasurable to read something that’s just beautiful, but that’s usually not enough for me to really fall in love with something. I can admire it or be moved by it, but to fall in love, I need the substance which comes from content and character. I don’t even need plot, but character. I’m pretty happy to read a story without it if I feel like the character is doing enough work to tell a story and move me emotionally.