I can’t have composite characters. I can’t attribute dialogue to someone based simply on my memory and not based on notes taken at the time that the words were spoken.
AKHIL SHARMAI realized that he was writing about good people doing good things. This did not match my experience of life and so I found my sentences stretching and becoming less plain.
More Akhil Sharma Quotes
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It’s easy when you grow up in fear to act out of fear. I don’t want to embrace that fear; I prefer to be kind.
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My parents are deeply pious Hindus.
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My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.
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Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind.
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It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.
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While a dramatized scene is a way of proving and guaranteeing an emotional experience for the reader, exposition assumes that the reader is sophisticated and can see the universal.
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Even within my stories, people hold opposing views.
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It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.
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Ernest Hemingway has been the most important influence on me as a writer. But at a certain point as a writer,
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I can guide them to books that will serve as role models. Largely, though, one learns to write almost like developing muscle memory, and this requires years of effort.
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I need to tell the things that are important but which don’t make sense in terms of the narrative, things that would destroy symmetry or narrative pace. This is my personal belief about what it means to write nonfiction.
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If anybody reads an Indian newspaper, all these things are obvious, and so I am not breaking news. All I am doing is representing my community as it actually is.
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Money is part of how we move through the world, what stores and restaurants we go into, whether we take a train to the airport or a taxi. Describing characters living in the real world requires describing them engaging with money.
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To me exposition always contains tenderness.
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Intern will resonate not only with doctors, but with anyone who has struggled with the grand question ‘What should I do with my life?’ In a voice of profound honesty and intelligence,
AKHIL SHARMA






