Ep. 244: Sanjena Sathian on How to Make Every Word Count

A Paul and Daisy Soros fellow, Sanjena Sathian is a 2019 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has worked as a reporter in Mumbai and San Francisco, with nonfiction bylines for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Food & Wine, The Boston Globe, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Gold Diggers is her debut novel. 

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you’ll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

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Transcript:

Rachael Herron: [00:00:00] Welcome to “How do you Write?” I’m your host, Rachael Herron. On this podcast, I talk to authors about how they write, what their process is and how their lives fit together. I’ll keep each episode short so you can get back to writing.

[00:00:16] Well, Hello writers! Welcome to episode #244 of “How do you Write?” I’m Rachael Herron. And today, I am talking to Sanjena Sathian about how to make every word count when you’re writing in your book, in your work, in your world. It was a delight to talk to her and you are going to love the interview, so stick around for that. What is going on around here? Well, my friends, I just realized right before I pushed record that this is the last time you’ll see me in this spot. If you watch on the YouTube, but most people don’t. Most people listen on the podcast. So just know that right now, I am in Oakland, on a little street in east Oakland, that is a fantastic little, cul-de-sac, very, very family oriented. We know all of our neighbors. We have loved living here. Behind the house is a creek, there’s huge trees back there, eucalyptus and some terrible Acacia. On the other side of the trees is the high school and just a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting on the porch and could hear the way I always love to hear. I could hear the kids graduating and having their names called out and thank God they got to do a little bit of something in person this year. So that was nice. And I don’t know where I’m going to be recording this next week. Actually I do. I’ll still be in Oakland. I’ll be in an Airbnb. Don’t know what it looks like. It’ll be fine. 

[00:01:41] But it’s Thursday, June 24^th, as I record this and this weekend, we’re out. We are out, we are loading the pallets we’re loading our boxes onto a pallet, which will be picked up by the shipping company and put onto a big boat. The staged furniture will be getting picked up on Monday. Everything we own needs to fit in our two suitcases. And on Monday, we will trundle our stuff out the front door and leave it locked behind us for the last time. And I’m really honestly right now feeling pretty okay with that. I feel ready. It feels like we have been gearing up for this for a long time, even though it’s only been about four months that we, since we have actually made the decision to move and sold the house and did all this stuff. But I am ready and ready for the motion. Ready, I’m ready to live out of a suitcase. I’m pretty stoked to live out of a suitcase, honestly. Packing is one of my favorite things. I don’t get to pack all the time. So that is wonderful. That’s happening. 

[00:02:42] What else is going on? Oh, I wanted to share with you, let me bring it up here, an amazing email that I got from my friend, Mariah. You have heard me talk about Mariah before. She is an amazing, beautiful writer and she’s also a friend. We go back a long time, from the knitting world. And she was a good friend of a friend of mine and that’s how I think we got him introduced Mariah. Is that right, through Carrie? Anyway, I have worked with Mariah and I have worked with Mariah because Mariah came to me when I went full-time as a writer, maybe a little bit before I went full-time and she said, you should coach writing. And I said, I don’t, I don’t know about that. And she said, you should coach me. And I said, well, okay. So I kind of practiced on Mariah. And I will always be grateful to her for allowing me to do that because what Mariah did it was, she showed me that I freaking love it.

[00:03:37] I love being a book coach. It is fantastic and listen to this letter that she sent me. This is, this made my day, this literally brought tears to my eyes. So, I’m just going to summarize a little bit. She sent her book off to her editor for the second round of structural comments. So that’s awesome. Huge progress for celebrating that. But this is something a little bit different here. So, this is what she says: “There’s something else I need to tell you about yesterday before I made the final, final touches for now, I sent a snippet from my epilogue to my critique partner. She had some good stern notes about what wasn’t working in the snippet and it wasn’t on a language level. This was deep stuff about the relationship between my guys.” “As I said to her,” and this is now Mariah talking to her critique partner: “A few years back, they might’ve sent me into a spiral of ‘I’ll check the whole book. Can’t write for toffee.’ And now I thought, right, good points. Let me try and see whether this works or this maybe? No, that’s better. And I went ahead and found some relevant moments in the story where I could add new details and poof! Made it work, at least temporarily. Won’t upset me at all, if it turns out if it wasn’t the correct solution, I’ve got the tools now to try different approaches.” And then she says she owes it all to me, dearest Rachael, which is not true, Mariah, you owe it all to yourself. She goes on to say: “You’ve given me those tools and the confidence to apply them. Practicing it over and over has helped too, of course. But, where before, I got so very, very nervous reading about the endless editing rounds that you went through with your agent, I now think that yes, I could do that. A muscle has been built. Not saying that muscle will work forever and endlessly, but at the moment, I feel that, dare I say it, I actually like editing.” My life is complete, honestly. 

[00:05:36] This feeling that people get when they understand their best process for revision, which is not the same as my best process, everybody has their own best processes, but when they learn their best processes for revision and they have the tools, it really is like a muscle that we can continue to use. I always say that first drafts, you never know what you’re going to get. You cannot prepare for a first draft. A first draft might come to you super, super easily, or it might be the worst thing you’ve ever experienced in your writing life. But revision is reliable. It’s just a set of tools. You pick them up, you put them down, you use what tools work for you the best and the, and your muscles get stronger to use these tools better. And Mariah, you just made my whole life by sending me this. So, thank you, thank you, thank you for saying that. Yes. Revision is where it’s at. 

[00:06:31] Okay. Another little business thing I would like to do that I haven’t done for a while is thank new Patrons. You can always become a patron of the show over at patreon.com/Rachael. And I send out really kick ass essays every month. And I got to start thinking about writing this month’s essay. Right now, I’m using the Patreon essays to write about this move of moving around the world. And I’m writing the memoir that the book will become, so you’re getting the first draft. You’re kind of getting 1.5 draft, like it’s a first draft, but I have cleaned it up for grammar, but I don’t know if it’ll actually make it into the book because I’m writing a first draft. First drafts teach you what a book wants to be. So that’s what’s happening over Patreon and these are the new patrons. Thank you, thank you so much to April Smith and Lisa Belkin and Bill who edited his pledge. Thanks Bill. You know, I love you. No, Bill is amazing. Thanks Bill. Sandy Miranda, Robinet is new, Julia Borghini, hello, Julia. Deborah Hart and, Amanda Schiller and Caressa Swanson. Thank you, Carissa and Lisa Page. 

[00:07:40] Thank you, thank you all of you, whether you are a patron now, whether you have been one in the past, whether you want to be one in the future, seriously. Those small amounts really add up into something that allows me to spend my time at the desk and do this work for you, for myself. You’re truly a patron of the arts and that is really freaking cool. So thank you very much. I think I have caught you up on all the most exciting things. Oh, I will say that I finished recording the audio book of Life in Stitches this week. And I got the copy edit out to my copy editor, who you will be hearing from on a future episode, you’re going to, with Katrina, you’re going to love that episode. But I realized that I have this kind of little break built in right now, because as I was doing, I did this a little bit in the wrong order, so I will tell you about it really quickly. I revised a Life in Stitches. I added a few essays to it. And then I already had the copy-edited manuscript because it’s a rerelease of a book I got the rights back to 10 years later. So, I have a very clean draft. And I added to that, I revised it a little bit. I added the essays to it, and then I sent that off to my copy editor because I will have introduced new errors and the new essays absolutely need probably a lot of cleanup copy-edit wise. 

[00:09:00] And then, I used my document to create the book, to record the audio book. And then I realized that all these changes that I’m making as I’m recording, because this sounds a little bit better, or I just used that word, I don’t want to use that word again. I’ll change it. I realized that that’s not the version that my copy editor is working on. So, I can’t do the edits on the audio book until I am looking at the copy-edited version from Katrina in front of me. And I can change those few little words here and there that I, that I moved. So, I can’t even edit the audio book. I just got to kind of sit around and work on some other projects, which is really nice, really, really nice. I’m trying to get faster after memoir of the workbook off of my desk. I’ve been working on that for a while. I’ve had the interior formatted workbook back for a while, and I just have had no time to sit and figure out the changes. Cause it looks great, but I do want some things different so I can give it back to the designer. So work is going on even while we’re moving. I feel like I have talked enough. Let’s jump into the interview. Shall we? I hope that you are getting some of your work done and please, wherever I am on the internet, come and tell me about how it’s going for you. I always love to hear. All right, my friends, happy writing.

[00:10:19] Hey, you’re a writer. Did you know that I send out a free weekly email of writing encouragement? Go sign up for it at www.rachaelherron.com/write and you’ll also get my Stop Stalling and Write PDF with helpful tips you can use today to get some of your own writing done. Okay, now onto the interview.

Rachael Herron: [00:10:37] I could not be more pleased to welcome to the show Sanjena Sathian. Hello, Sanjena!

Sanjena Sathian: [00:10:41] Hi, thank you for having me. 

Rachael Herron: [00:10:43] Welcome. Welcome. Let me give you a little bit of an introduction. A Paul and Daisy Soros fellow, Sanjena Sathian is a 2019 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has worked as a reporter in Mumbai and San Francisco, with nonfiction bylines for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Food & Wine, The Boston Globe, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Gold Diggers is her debut novel, and Sanjena, I loved it. 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:11:06] Thank you.

Rachael Herron: [00:11:07] It was everything that I wanted to read. It was, I’ve just had such good luck lately of diving into books that just lift up my heart and fill my writer’s spirit. So, I have been so excited to talk to you. Welcome, welcome. 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:11:23] Great to hear. 

Rachael Herron: [00:11:24] This is a show for writers and we talk about, on the show, we talk about process and how we get the work done because, I think all writers are all curious about other writers’ processes. I would love to hear about yours. You get a lot done in different areas. How do you do it?

Sanjena Sathian: [00:11:39] Yeah. Yeah. I’m very excited to talk process and craft. I mean, a lot of it is regularity. I, you know, I had a full-time job for, sort of the first half of my twenties and it was, it was hard to write on top of that. So, I have like deep sympathy for everyone who’s trying and like, mad props if you’re trying to, it’s so hard. I was not the kind of person who could wake up at 5:00 AM before going to an office and get stuff done. Like I couldn’t function that way. So, I tried to write in the evenings when I had that job. And it was okay. A lot of what I did actually was kind of takeoff on weekends. And just like, I had a job where I basically was working like 80-90 hours a week. I had to be on six days a week. But, my one day off on the weekend, I just turned my phone off and I would drive, I lived in San Francisco at the time, I would drive across the golden gate bridge and get myself a hostel and like, point Reyes or just drive for the day. You know, I would walk in the morning, take a little solo hike and then come and literally sit in my car and work. I think that was less good for actually producing great work, but it was really good for cultivating like an inner space where I could write. Because I think that’s one of the things that’s so hard is keeping up your relationship with your own, like private writing self, when you have to exist in public as someone else. I did a lot of this work when I did eventually go to grad school. And I’m sure you talk about grad school, whether or not that’s the right choice and things like that. For me, it was the right choice because I had already taken some time in the real world. And that meant that I could appreciate what it was like for someone to say you’re only job is to write. I can make use of that.

Rachael Herron: [00:13:30] That is gorgeous. 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:13:32] Yeah, I can make use of that. And so, when I was writing this, I woke up, and kind of got to my writing desk as soon as possible. Sometimes I would work out before I wrote, other times I would do that afterward. And I would write, say from like 9:00, 10:00 AM until about somewhere between 1:00 and 3:00 PM. And I tried to write a thousand words a day when I was just getting out new stuff. I am a vomit drafter. 

Rachael Herron: [00:13:57] Talk to us about that. I love that.

Sanjena Sathian: [00:13:59] Yes, so, yeah. It’s really easy for me to just spew work and really hard for it to actually be usable.

Rachael Herron: [00:14:06] That’s exactly me. Exactly. Yeah. 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:14:10] It’s, so producing can sometimes be hard. But the big thing I knew I would have to do is like write the world, explore the world, write the characters, be in them and with them. And then eventually I was going to have to add some shape. So, I would, you know, I would write for, you know, X amount of time, X number words per day. When I’m editing, which is where like the real work happens, then I can be at my desk from somewhere between like two and like 8 to 10 hours a day. So, it kind of depends. 

Rachael Herron: [00:14:42] Isn’t it interesting, how revision for some, for me, and for a lot of people that I talk to, revision seems we can sit down and just do it more like a job. And it, and for me, it’s the most creative part, but it also feels more like a job whereas the first drafting is just body and soul exhausting for me. So, I think that something that is very underrated is people thinking about hostels. I live in Oakland, so, I routinely go to a point Reyes or to the pigeon point hostel, I don’t know if you ever went to that one. That is where, they’re cheap, people. And if you’re a sweet talker, a lot of hostels will close during the day. But if you’re a sweet talker and you say, well, I’m a writer and I would just love to stay on the couch and I’ll be out of the way, then they won’t kick you out. They’ll kick everybody else out. And then you have this house to yourself all day. So, in your life now, do you, is your life set up to support the writing all the time or do you kind of have to still go into that, the beautiful way that you said, having the place to center your writing? 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:15:42] Honestly, the pandemic really messed it up. As we were talking about before we started recording, you know, I was in New Zealand when the pandemic hit. I had a three-month teaching job there and I was supposed to go back to India, which is where I sort of lived on and off and I got locked out. So, yeah. 

Rachael Herron: [00:16:03] I heard about people that happened to, but I did read a bunch of people saying, well, if you’re going to be locked out, it might as well be in New Zealand. Did you feel that way or did you, were you just desperate to get home? 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:16:12] The problem was, I would have loved to stay, but I was just frankly concerned that something would happen to my family and I wouldn’t be able to get back. So, instead of staying the perfect utopia, I flew home to Georgia and, not exactly a utopia, especially not in the pandemic. But you know, my life was just a scramble like everyone else’s. Like a suitcase of mine was still in India. It’s still there. Like my, literally my life was just like in, it was in boxes for a while. But I found, in case anyone is considering this, it is very hard to write when you are living in your parents’ home.

Rachael Herron: [00:16:49] What is it, what did that look like living in your parents’ home? and trying to write. 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:16:53] I was in the bedroom that I, you know, had to like spend my teenage years in, which automatically meant I regressed.

Rachael Herron: [00:17:02] That makes me want to cry, just thinking about it.

Sanjena Sathian: [00:17:04] Yup. In some ways, it was cool. Cause my, so everyone kind of came back, my brother and his fiancée came and sheltered in Atlanta because they wanted to get out of New York. And so, like we had like a whole group of people there and like my brother’s an amazing cook, so I was cooked for. But there was something and this kind of gets back to that question of like your inner, private life. They were all working jobs, you know, like consultants and bankers and doctors and people who are like, like highly professional white collar. Like, they’re doing the jobs that like account in society and trying,

Rachael Herron: [00:17:39] And probably talking loudly on zoom about it all day long. 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:17:42] Loudly on zoom, which is very bad. That was very bad for me. But I think what really, what injured me was that I was trying to like, live my writing life, the way someone else would live a job life. And that meant like keeping to traditional work hours. It meant like we ate dinner together a lot. And like the sort of like way that you would have to eat dinner together as a family when you were a kid. And like, in a lot of ways, it was wonderful how all that time together, blah, blah, blah. But, also not conducive to like, you know, carving out your own space. So eventually I moved out, I now have my own life again. But I really do think like, like we have to battle for space because writing does not look like traditional labor. And it sucks that sometimes people don’t respect it until you’re getting paid for it or that’s the primary way you’re making money. So, really like over the summer, I had to, you know, hurt my parents’ feelings and move out and say, I have to write new work. I need to, you know, like sell new work and that was hard for them to grasp, but you just have to battle for that private life.

Rachael Herron: [00:18:55] I love that you say that, and I love that you have named that because it reminds people that this is not a, this profession is creative. It’s not anything like a 9-5 job. And I have tried often to approach my writing as a 9-5 job. And it just doesn’t work unless I’m like in a third or fourth revision and then it does work. What is your biggest challenge when it comes to writing? And let’s say right now where you are now in your life. 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:19:20] Well right now, you know, I’m on book tour. My first book came out last week and one thing that’s actually kind of scary is like, I have been so happy to see people connect with the book. But my crazy anxious writer brain, here’s a compliment, and it’s like, oh my God, I’m not doing that in my current work. What if they hate me? And that is scary. Because I like teen pops, I think about like Disney, like stars who like decide to have like a sexual revolution when they hit their twenties to be like, you don’t know me.

Rachael Herron: [00:19:52] Right. 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:19:53] And I kind of get that. Cause by the time you’re promoting one book, I think almost everyone is already on to their next iteration. So, it’s been cool to talk about this book finally, but I’m also like, my brain’s already kind of in another place, so that is tough. But there’s also something really cool about reentering it and trying to be like, okay, what state was I in when I wrote that? Cause it’s like all a blur. So

Rachael Herron: [00:20:19] Oh, that’s lovely. How has it felt to be, to have your book release? How has it felt? 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:20:25] Yeah, I mean, you’ll know this. I mean, it’s crazy that this thing that was once a word doc, a PDF, all of a sudden, it’s in people’s hands. 

Rachael Herron: [00:20:34] Also, the cover is incredible. 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:20:36] I love the cover. I love it. 

Rachael Herron: [00:20:37] The cover is insane.

Sanjena Sathian: [00:20:38] They did an amazing job, just a completely amazing job. I think what’s interesting is like learning to talk about it from the outside and developing kind of a vocabulary for how the book can fit into other people’s understandings. You know, there’s been a lot of talk about the sort of thematic elements of the book. You know, it deals with immigrant identity. It deals with coming of age, it deals with it sort of challenges, this like model minority thing. None of those things are phrases that I used while I was writing, you know, like that’s stuff that happens later. I think I started,

Rachael Herron: [00:21:13] I love that. You were just, you were telling a story when you began and now you have to be able to talk about that story.

Sanjena Sathian: [00:21:18] Exactly. And I do think it’s useful. Like it’s nice to be able to say, you know, what, because I do think about politics. I think about justice. I think about, I think about social issues. Like I’m not, I think there is this like picture of like, Raymond Carvery, white male writer who sits apart from the social forces that shape their work. But of course, that’s a completely artificial vision. So it’s not as though I don’t think about those things. It’s just that, like, if they were absolutely the front of mind when I was writing, I wouldn’t be able to write a story. So sometimes I just have to push those aside, which I think is very common. But it’s been exciting to hear people relate to the thematic elements of the work as though they were like, I mean, I guess they seem like complete ideas now. They didn’t feel like complete ideas when I was writing.

Rachael Herron: [00:22:05] But that’s what our vision is for, and that’s what editors are for. And this may be related to that, but what is your biggest joy when it comes to writing?

Sanjena Sathian: [00:22:16] I think, I mean sometimes I don’t know if I’m feeling any joy while I’m actually doing the writing.

Rachael Herron: [00:22:20] Amen.

Sanjena Sathian: [00:22:21] Right. 

Rachael Herron: [00:22:22] Oh my God.

Sanjena Sathian: [00:22:23] It’s that like, Bukovsky poem, that’s so obnoxious, but it’s like, you should only be a writer. Doing something else would drive you to suicide or murder. Yeah. I mean, I feel like I do it because I have to. There’s just literally nothing else I could do with my life. But, I mean, I think joy comes from new understanding, maybe. Like, I think, yeah, I think I need, I write about things that I need to understand. Whenever there’s something that frightens me, like a black spot in my understanding of the world, that’s like a thing I have to write to word. Maybe it lightens the load. 

Rachael Herron: [00:23:02] That’s gorgeous. There’s a Susan Sontag quote that says, my writing is smarter than I am because I can revise it. And I go super deep into that quote and take even more from it in that, like, I am a smarter person because I write some BS and then I learned from it and I learn what I need to learn from it as I keep going back to it and learning from it. And I think that’s, that’s gorgeous. Speaking of getting those words on the page, or any form of this question, can you share a craft tip with our listeners? 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:23:32] Yeah. I mean, this is sort of post craft. It’s not like when you’re writing, but kind of in this like revision zone. I studied with Anne Fadiman, who’s a wonderful non-fiction writer in college and she used to do this thing in office hours where she would call you in, after you turned in a piece and you would sit there with her for an hour and it’s usually like a thousand-word piece. She’ll pull it up on her computer, and you would think you were going to get to talk about, you know, the inspiration behind the piece and your intentions. And you’re such a raw genius that we’re gonna talk about that.

Rachael Herron: [00:24:04] I’m so scared now.

Sanjena Sathian: [00:24:05] But, instead, she would go word by word and make you defend every single word 

Rachael Herron: [00:24:12] Oh, that just gave me goosebumps. I want somebody to do that to me, like in the next half hour or so. 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:24:17] Yup. Over,

Rachael Herron: [00:24:18] What did that make you feel like?

Sanjena Sathian: [00:24:19] I mean, over the course of an hour, you maybe got two sentences then. It’s, and like, she would have a, I sit right now with like a physical roche thesaurus on my desk because that’s something she taught us to do is like, you don’t use a thesaurus for like, you know, synonym, dark.

Rachael Herron: [00:24:38] Right.

Sanjena Sathian: [00:24:39] You use it to find the most particular word that is not the fanciest, but the most particular. And the thing that I, you know, people kind of do this a little bit in journalism, but never with that kind of painstaking effort. And when I teach writing, I do this to students. And what’s interesting is, it’s the students who don’t think they’re going to be writers, they don’t love writing, who take to it the best because they don’t have an ego. And they’re like, wow, you taught me something about how sentence works. Thank you. I’m going to be better now. Writers, students who think they’re writers, they are brats about this. They feel like,

Rachael Herron: [00:25:16] It came out perfectly the first time. I know what I’m doing. 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:25:20] Exactly. And it’s just so important. Like, you know, there’s this, there’s this Phillip Roth quote in the ghost writer that novel he wrote where, kind of this older Phillip Roth character told the younger Phillip Roth character, all writing is moving sentences around. And I think that’s a thing you have to come to terms with, if you’re going to try to do this as you and I know. Like, that’s what the work is and it cannot just be you in love with your own genius. 

Rachael Herron: [00:25:46] Oh my gosh. Yeah, exactly. I have an embarrassing way to do this. Because I was, I am still a Twitter person, although I’m taking, we’re on a break because I just can’t. But, so, I came up in Twitter when it was still 140 characters. And what I loved to do was put my entire thought as an, as many words as I wanted to have into a Twitter box and then streamline it down to those 140 characters. And I have this past now in my revision work, where I call it Twitterify, where I look at and I do that. I look at every sentence and make each word earn its keep. But I’ve never thought of doing it that, that beautifully and it shows in your work. It shows in the language and the lyricism and the rhythm of your work and the specificity. So amazing. You’re, that is, that’s really, what was her name? Anne Fetterman? 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:26:37] Anne Fadiman. F-A-D-I-M-A-N.

Rachael Herron: [00:26:40] I am not familiar with her, but I’ll have to look her up.

Sanjena Sathian: [00:26:42] Yeah. She wrote a book called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. That is, 

Rachael Herron: [00:26:45] What a great title. 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:26:46] Yeah, it’s incredible. It’s about, kind of cultural differences in medicine. I think won the national book award. And her essays are just these perfect little gems. I really recommend Ex Libris.

Rachael Herron: [00:26:59] Oh okay.

Sanjena Sathian: [00:27:00] Just, very small essay collection and just every single one is perfect.

Rachael Herron: [00:27:05] I’m obsessed with essays, so, thank you, thank you. My next, my next purchase. What thing in your life affects your writing in a surprising way? 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:27:14] That’s interesting. I mean, maybe this isn’t surprising, but I get in a really bad mood if I don’t have a book that I’m excited about picking up. And I think that’s something, you know, I keep coming back to this, in these craft conversations that I’m lucky enough to have now. People sometimes want to be writers who like don’t love reading and, you know, be gone with you, you know. Like it’s,

Rachael Herron: [00:27:38] Be gone.

Sanjena Sathian: [00:27:40] You, I like to have, I need to have a book that I am being pulled back to when I’m writing, because it reminds me of the kind of feeling I would like to give my readers that I just want them to want the book. 

Rachael Herron: [00:27:57] How do you make sure that you’re reading a book like that? I do, I do it, I think the only way I know how to do it is that I just keep throwing books out of my Kindle until I have the one where like, I can’t wait to go to bed because then I get to read for an hour. Is that how you do it? 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:28:11] Yep. That’s it.

Rachael Herron: [00:28:12] It feels a little wasteful, but it is what it is.

Sanjena Sathian: [00:28:1415 No, you have to, you have to want to be there. I think like, you know, in college I studied English lit and it was a very like Brit lit heavy program. And so, I don’t know, I just had to read the Fairy Queen twice and I don’t think it made my life better. I do think reading Chaucer, and Dunn, and Shakespeare did, and like, that’s not, Shakespeare is not always easy, but Shakespeare made my life better. I don’t need to read the Fairy Queen again. And I think also trying to read when I had a job was a big part of it too. Like, just realizing that there were books that I wanted to come home and pick up and books that I didn’t want to come home and pick up and just identifying the differences between those was really helpful.

Rachael Herron: [00:29:01] I, speaking of things like the Fairy Queen, I read that, and I believe this, that Milton was the very last person on earth who was able to read everything that was in print. 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:29:12] Wow. 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:13] And he had read every, or he had read through his daughter’s poor eyes as he lost his own sight, eyesight, but it makes sense. And since then, we’ve had an explosion we’ll never read everything that’s out there. So we have to be, we don’t, we don’t have long enough lives. We have to pick things that make us super excited. Thank you for saying that. Speaking of books that you love, what is the best book that you’ve read recently? And why did you love it? 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:29:38] I am right now reading The Four Books by Yan Lianke, which is a political satire set during China’s great leap forward. It is a very dark period. It is set in like a sort of political internment camp, but it is incredibly funny. 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:54] It is?

Sanjena Sathian: [00:29:56] Very Kafka-esque. 

Rachael Herron: [00:29:57] Nice.

Sanjena Sathian: [00:29:58] I mean, it just, it takes pleasure and a moment that is joyless. And I just think that is completely masterful. I’ve also really loved, I’ve had the chance to read two friends books that are both coming out in 2022. One is by Sarah Thangka Matthews. His book is coming out with Viking. It’s called All This Could Be Different and it is an incredible coming of age story of a whole community of friends in their twenties, in Milwaukee. It’s a queer love story of the kind that just crackles and makes you be like, Ooh, this is so sexy and also so daring and new. And it’s also, it does stuff with race that I’d never seen before. Like I read it and I was like, I didn’t know I needed this book, but I needed this book. And then another friend’s book is called Groundskeeping. It’s coming out. And they, Lee Cole is his name. He’s a Kentucky writer. And he, I know, you know, I knew the books that he grew up reading. You know, these Appalachian stories, Southern stories. But, it has like the sort of old, you know, Southern short story feel, you know, minus the racism. Plus, this field of like Elif bought humans, the idiot and this sort of like very contemporary coming of age discovery. It’s about a groundskeeper on a Southern college campus who has an affair with the writer in residence. And it’s about the sort of two of them coming into their own writing voices. And it is just like, both of these novels. I was like, they’re just word docs on my computer. But like, I am the coolest because I got to read them in advance. So, 

Rachael Herron: [00:31:35] Oh, and I just had like an image of me in bed with one of these or both of these books when they come out and I had just, I can’t wait to get my hands on them. And I’m sorry that it’s 2022, but I will still be, I’ll be, I’ll grab them. Speaking of amazing books, can you tell our listeners a little bit about Gold Diggers?

Sanjena Sathian: [00:31:52] Sure. Yeah. So, it takes place, the first half opens in a fictional suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. That’s a little bit of a fictionalized version of where I grew up. And it follows a 15-year-old boy, who’s 15 at the start, named Neil, who is kind of trapped in this like extremely claustrophobic high-achieving competitive Indian American bubble. And he is like really underachieving compared to them. It feels like he’s going to burn out struggling. He’s smart, but he just, he has an inner life, you know, this thing that we’ve been talking about. And he discovers that his best friend and childhood crush and neighbor, Anita, is really succeeding by all the sort of standards of their community. And he discovered that the reason she is so successful is that she and her mother have been stealing gold from other Indians in their community. And they don’t turn it into cash. Instead, they transmute it into this magical elixir and that allows them to steal the ambitions and energies of the Gold’s original owners.  And so, in the sense they are literally stealing ambition from other people in their extremely competitive environment. And the second half kind of picks up in Silicon Valley, another pressure cooker, full of competitive Asian immigrants, 10 years later. And the book ends up kind of, and it also has these cutaways to 1849 gold rush, California and 1980s Bombay. And it’s really an exploration of ambition and what it is required to make it in America. How you have to be better as an immigrant. And the burden that like, your parents arrived here and they made all these sacrifices, so you better make good on them. And the fact that there’s often just a very narrow definition of success in the particular corner of the Indian American community that I come from. The novel is sort of about a collective experience. It’s not the collective experience. It doesn’t stand for all Indian Americans, but it is, it does try to speak to, and with a we, to be in conversation with the community. 

Rachael Herron: [00:33:56] And it is gripping and beautiful and page turnery and the kind of book that I couldn’t wait to get back into bed to read my arc of it. So, thank you, Sanjena! It has been such a pleasure to talk to you. I wish you very happy writing and happy release weeking month thing and good luck with the book you’re working on right now. 

Sanjena Sathian: [00:34:16] Thank you. Happy writing to you, too.

Rachael Herron: [00:34:17] I know you’re going to knock it out. Thank you very much. Okay. Take care. Bye. 

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of “How do you Write?” You can reach me on Twitter, twitter.com/RachaelHerron, or at my website, www.rachaelherron.com, you can also support me on Patreon and get essays on living your creative life for as little as a buck an essay at www.patreon.com/rachael spelled R, A, C, H, A, E, L and do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers rachaelherron.com/write/

Now, go to your desk and create your own process and get to writing my friends.