Porochista Khakpour's Process of Writing

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Porochista Khakpour talks about how she deals with the process of writing.

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[Music Playing] I write very fast and I write in great volume. Big and fast is really the way I write but mostly because I want to get to through the art as fast as possible. I do not like in security and I do not like surprises and I do not like not knowing. So, I really for the same writing a short story, I try to get the end as fast as possible and then I will spent the next few months or the few years editing. Editing is a big part of my process, for 75% of it. But you know the novelist written about seven months, first draft that he was very fast and I did not write everyday though seven months either. I would have these relentless weekends that I would just write from 6:00AM on a Saturday morning until 2:00AM on a Monday morning. And then it took another two and a half years to edit the novel, but fast and big definitely is something that I believe in and it is necessary for me. I do love to be one of those writers who labors’ over every sentence and discuss one sentence at a time, but that is not really my nature. I believe life is short unless try to get it out there and just keep going and not take the whole process too seriously. There is so much talk among writers about that holy experience of writing and sacredness of the art but that does pretty intimidating and that is very-- because as a teacher, I do not like to tell my students to think that way. It is not really going to save the world at the end of the day. If you want to help people go out soup kitchens, go out work one on one with the homeless and the truly do some franchise in the world but go there and physically do it. Writing a book is not going to feed anyone at the end of the day. So, I try not to—put all that posturing into it. And I also do not believe in write everyday. I think that is what creates a writers block. The feeling that you must write everyday, there is been I would think eight out of 10 days, you are going to feel like you are very bad writer and I do not have time for that. I want to write when I actually feel good about what I have to write. And so that might just be a couple of times a week, it might be for like a month, nonstop. But I never put that pressure on myself. I never been want to read the advice of other writers or to play by those sort of rules as where John Gardner’s School of how to be a writer and I think of the whole process. I am sort of -- I am a naturally nervous person so I would like to cut down this much anxiety as possible. [Music-Playing] I generally work in the material that I have. The very raw materials that is awfully raw. I mean it is sometimes my senses do not have periods, those are just fragments, sometimes every word is misspelled and I jumbled mass and there might be four adjectives when I only need one. So I have to really go sentence by sentence and take the rock and chisel out it and get what for some would be left there for sometimes, normal sentence out of it. So it is pretty brutal that knowing that I have the whole the arc, I have a beginning, middle, and end really becomes encouraging because then I can look at in my new shift. But if I do not have the micro cost on my cam, look at the micro, there is no way. So I really have to actually go back and write sentences, literally. [Music Playing]

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