Service the Story — Not the Reader — in Your First Draft.

Takeaways from London Writers Salon’s interview with short story author, Gurnaik Johal.

This week, Matt and Parul from the London Writers Salon interviewed author, Gurnaik Johal on his debut short story collection We Move. In these stories, Johal portrays the lives of various characters, many of them immigrants or of immigrant descent, living in a West London neighborhood.

In this interview Johal discusses his process for writing about these overlapping yet independent lives — especially writing about experiences he himself has not had. He shared his journey from being shortlisted for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize in 2018 to getting an agent and publishing his collection. He also discusses his experience working as an editor, what he’s learned from his job and how he manages his time with writing.

Here are my favorite takeaways!

“Sampling” life through writing.

If you’re a music lover, you’d be excited to know that We Move has it’s own Spotify playlist, which is perfect. As someone who writes to music and finds inspiration everywhere, Johal describes his process of “sampling” his life as similar to how music is remixed and made into something new over time.

“I quite like hip-hop music, and the way they’ll take a soul song from the 70’s, and they’ll sample it. They may pitch it higher, and they cut a tiny bit out and then they play that. Then you create out of a pre-existing thing. I see fiction as I’m sampling my life, but by the end of it, the original song isn’t really decipherable…I’m sampling my life, but not chronicling it.”

Service the story.

For Johal, it’s important to take the story where it needs to go — not worry about how the reader will react to it. Although he wrote about many difficult topics, Johal focused first and foremost on how best to service the story.

“In the process of writing, I feel you have to be free…You’re there to service the story — not the reader. Everything I do is for the story, for the characters. A lot of people ask in interviews what type of reader am I writing for. There isn’t a reader because you’re on your own. It’s on a Word document on your laptop, and you’re servicing the story. So when things get intense it’s because that to me was what the story needed — that is the character’s truth.”

Dialogue can further conflict.

Although dialogue is a vessel for communication and understanding, it’s also the means by which we make mistakes, hurt others or misunderstand. For Johal, that’s real life and that’s what he tries to capture in his stories.

“People are always talking in weird sort of tangents and misdirects. I think that’s one thing in dialogue I find especially useful for is showing misunderstanding — the way people fail to communicate…when people are having a great conversation in a book, it doesn’t work to me. There needs to be conflict.”

Find a new beginning.

Many authors uncover the story as they write, but readers don’t often need that much lead in. Johal offered the sage advice of starting where you need to then deciding where the story should actually begin.

“My general advice is where you start a story should never end up in the final product because you need to write your way into it, and then you’ll find a new beginning within the kid of mess of the story.”

Take time to reset.

Johal finds value in stepping away from the work to allow distance. Instead of berating yourself for not writing, he says the distance is really valuable in being able to see your work with fresh eyes .

“If you’ve been working on one project for so long, I think taking a little bit of time out to reset, then come back to it is really really worth the time. Don’t feel bad, like, ‘Oh, I haven’t written for two weeks or a month,” because when you get back to it, you’ll bring that fresh [perspective].”

Submit!

Although he works in the publishing industry, Johal found representation and through winning the Guardian 4th Estate Short Story Competition. He advises that competitions are a great way to get your foot in the door of the industry.

“I definitely encourage people to send stuff out [to competitions]. It is luck of the draw… but it helps with getting your name out there in different ways.”

Inspiration is everywhere.

The world is your muse. Don’t be limited to just reading books. Find inspiration anywhere and everywhere you can!

“Take inspiration from other mediums because if your writing is only bred on other writing then it’s almost this kind of weird incestuous thing, but you should be looking far afield. Look to music. Look to art. Look to movies, Tik Tok, Twtter, whatever, wherever you can find it.”

Experiment with a new title.

Chardi Kala is a Sikh phrase to express the idea that no matter what you’re going through, stay optimistic. Although not the original concept behind the stories, this idea became a basis for the whole collection and essentially influenced the current title of the book, which tied the collection together in a new and beautiful way.

“We end up with We Move which was the title of the final story that I wrote, and I realized that it does tie together what I’ve been subconsciously doing which is characters facing different circumstances, different situations, but staying hopeful...

When I was starting out I was like I’m going to write a happy story, and it’s so hard because you now the cliché. You need conflict to make the engine of a story turn, so my compromise is that these will be optimistic stories at least. That phrase Chardi Kala is like no matter what you’re facing, stay optimistic. That’s the thing my characters are going through, what I was going through when I was writing it, so it was nice when I realized it. I hadn’t sat down with that intention of writing a book about x, but I ended up writing a book about x. Titles really do throw a new light on your project. One advice I have is if you find you’re stuck on a story, try and imagine it with a different title, and see how it throws it in a new light.”

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