Dostoevsky wrote such big books. Was it the weather?

MUMBAI: If they weren't "dam aged individuals", as Jeet Thayil puts it they wouldn't be sit ting in a room writing even when the weather is beautiful and they could be, as he suggests swimming. Four popular con temporary writers—Thayil Daniyal Mueenuddin, Rana Dasgupta and Anjali Josephgathered at the TOI Literary Carnival on Sunday to tell why and how they write what they write with some prompting from Nilanjana Roy.

The writers took a risk Apparently, discussing the "process" is a "dangerous" thing to do. If you talk about what worked (again Thayil you may never get it back Either way, you have to work hard. Waiting for inspiration is no good; Thayil, whose de but novel Narcopolis, made it to the Man Booker short list declares it "highly overrat ed". Perspiration, he says, is of greater value. Mueenud din, whose volume of short stories, In Other Rooms, Oth er Wonders was a Pulitzer fi nalist, says something much the same—" You think I'll have this done in six months and it's seven years and all you've done is hang around and smoke cigarettes." Prac tice helps too—Dasgupta (his Solo won the Commonwealth Prize) used to write stories for friends as presents and Joseph (author of Saraswati Park, which won the Betty Trask Prize, and Another Country) has always written and always felt "quite pleased" with what she wrote And sometimes, difficult weather conditions will do the trick. "The Russians wrote so much and such big books—it was the weather," jokes Thayil.

To launch into a new book Dasgupta starts with "im pulses of total ignorance and emptiness." And also, stories that have been neglected Hence his interest in Bulgar ia, which is, in his words "almost legendarily uninter esting". It's also about finding the "nuggets" of stories, as Mueenuddin puts it, and giv ing them life. "We go around the world with hoovers and find these stories."