“Writing is the only thing I’m good at. When you’re good at something – even if it takes a lot of effort every day, as it does for me – it makes you feel powerful.”
Do you enjoy writing?
I enjoy some aspects of it. Writing is the only thing I’m good at. When you’re good at something – even if it takes a lot of effort every day, as it does for me – it makes you feel powerful. It’s important for everyone to experience moments of power, to be able to reach out and make contact with the world through something they do. And making things up, making things believable: that’s fun. I love feeling immersed in a world, whether of my creation or someone else’s. And I enjoy always learning, though sometimes I get discouraged by how very much I have left to learn.
I love being outdoors in nature. But I haven’t worked out how to write outdoors without interruption from changing light, flies, etc. I did recently begin acquiring houseplants, to make my room feel more like the outdoors. Maybe that’ll help. My least favourite aspect of writing is spending all that time at my desk within four walls.
What are the most important steps an amateur writer can take?
Start small. Start with flash stories, then work your way up through short stories and novellas. Build your skills progressively. Build a portfolio of published works. Then you can try a novel.
Meet other writers. Find critique partners early, people at roughly your level of skill and life experience. Meet other writers in person when possible.
Set deadlines. When you allow yourself too much time, your productivity suffers, as does your mood. It’s wonderful how you’ll find a shortcut when you’re up against the wall. Maybe you’ll realise you didn’t need all those stages of outlining and notetaking after all.
Take breaks. Go out. For most of us, myself included, writing will never pay the bills. So it should never be an excuse not to enjoy yourself away from your desk.
Read a lot, of course. Read great literature. I agree with Hemingway – read the great dead writers. It’s important for us to support our fellow living writers. But a lot of the hype around the living is the emperor’s new clothes. So learn to judge for yourself.
If you were to begin writing today for the first time, would you do anything differently? Which would be your first steps?
The advice I gave above is based on all the things I didn’t do myself. I’ve always wanted to write novels. Some years ago I finally shelved my set of unfinished novels and turned to the short form. Now I love it so much, I’ve no real longing to return to novels.
I also wish I’d gone about acquiring my craft more deliberately – listing the skills I wanted to work on in each new story – and also just getting more life experience, spending more time outside these four walls.
Who would you say are your literary forebears? Who have you learned the most from?
George Eliot is my favourite writer. She combines the two greatest qualities: compassion and insight. She gives us a wide range of characters, sees right through each of them, and gives each of them the compassion that comes from understanding. I’ve never been religious, but George Eliot’s gaze is like the gaze of Jesus, full of loving-kindness, but never hoodwinked.
She’s also great with plot. Plot in an Eliot novel is what it should be in literary fiction: a vehicle for the showing and the developing of character. She wrote tomes, like her contemporaries, but she’s very efficient. There’s seldom a sentence you could remove without harming the integrity of the work.
I admire Herman Hesse’s explorations of the solitary human psyche, and his gift for making his prose reflect his characters’ mental state; Alice Munro’s genius for structure – you think you’re reading one story, but actually the story she’s telling is bigger and more satisfying; Orwell’s, Steinbeck’s, and Upton Sinclair’s gift for telling engaging stories about key social issues; and Carver’s gift for efficient paragraphs and strong but subtle structure. Often you read a Carver piece and it’s not immediately clear what the narrative arc was, or why these events constitute a story. But you feel they do. You feel satisfied. Not one of his stories has a predictable structure. Every story is like a bizarrely shaped house of cards, that oughtn’t to be able to stand. But it does.
I love reading plays, especially Ibsen and the Athenian tragedians.
I’m not a fan of experimental work – I just love good stories, clearly told – but I enjoy Henry Miller.
I envy the great comic writers, from Aristophanes to Wodehouse, Martin Amis to Douglas Adams. If I can write a good comic novel someday, I’ll die happy.
What do you believe is the function of your art?
I want us to stop destroying the earth. Climate fiction may be the best thing to happen to contemporary literature.
I’m working on a high fantasy novel where the central conflict is a metaphor for climate change. I’m examining why and how various groups of people do or don’t acknowledge the problem and act.
Climate change is such a big, wicked, hopeless-looking problem. Action often seems ineffectual, and meaningful progress slow or absent. Meanwhile global capitalism is incentivising each of us to grab what we can. And weakening social safety nets are making selfishness look like the rational choice. It’s a challenging but wonderful time to be a writer.
Most of my writing is not explicitly climate-based. But the environment has always been my cause. I see everything as linked to that. For instance, dysfunction at the social, familial, and psychological levels often produces overconsumption – binge-eating, compulsive shopping, gambling, and substance abuse problems – which then affect not just our health but the planet’s. So my fiction often examines irrational behaviour: where it comes from and how it damages us.
Happy endings are often not artistic. But we need some glimmer of hope, as much as is true to the story. In 2025 it’s impossible for us to go on without some hope.
What is the role of the writer in society?
To challenge the status quo. If we’re not doing that, we’re insidiously reaffirming it. Sometimes, this challenge comes from shocking the reader. Sometimes, it comes from humour. If you can make me laugh at the rich and powerful, you’re telling me I don’t have to be paralysed by fear of them. You’re empowering me.
I’m a Marxist born and bred. Look around and you’ll see how much of literature, and entertainment, and culture, is shallow and harmless. It’s just meant to get us through the evening so we can go back to work tomorrow. Business as usual. Meanwhile, we’re destroying our only home. Income gaps are widening worldwide. We’re doing terrible things to each other.
If literature cannot force us to confront all this and change course – then, to paraphrase Kundera, it’s not literature. It’s kitsch.
What do you find most inspiring?
Art in any medium that’s done well. I recently rewatched the Lord of the Rings films. When I’m feeling drained I’ll turn off the lights and listen to one of Beethoven’s symphonies. I’m now rewatching some films from Hollywood’s golden era.
It takes so much work to craft a good film, song, or book. A good work of art inspires me to aim high, too.
Amita Basu is a Pushcart-nominated writer whose fiction appears in over 80 venues including The Penn Review, Bamboo Ridge, Faultline, Jelly Bucket, Phoebe, and Funicular. She’s contributing editor at Fairfield Scribes Micro, and sustainability columnist and interviews editor at Mean Pepper Vine. Her short story collection, At Play and Other Stories, is due out with Bridge House Press in 2025. She lives in Bangalore, works at a climate action thinktank, and blogs at http://amitabasu.com/