Can it be, indeed? Writing fiction, poetry, essays, plays, scripts and screenplays? Can it be learned in a classroom?

What is special about the kind of writing that we find in a poem, a novel, a personal essay, or a play? What makes it different from a policy document, a newspaper report, or an academic article?

Two things:

A) Literature is always a unique event. The social sciences are primarily interested in collective behaviour. Literature is interested in the unique and the personal. Such is the difference between history and fiction. It is not that one is about things that really happened and the other is about things that did not. The real difference is that the history, for the most part, focuses on the public story while fiction likes to tell a private one.

B) Critical language appeals to reason, but imaginative language appeals to the whole person. T.S. Eliot said: a poet unites the sound of a typewriter, reading Spinoza, falling in love, and the aroma of cooking. In good imaginative writing, there is no difference between thinking and feeling, the heart and the brain, or the digestive tract.

What, then, is writing? What is its goal?

It is a process of seduction.

A call to intimate companionship. The Sanskrit word for literature is Sahitya, which has its root in Sahit, companionship. Companionship between the reader and the writer.

So what do you need to be a good writer? Again, two things:

A) An interesting relationship with life. Not an interesting life.

All life is interesting. Never go anywhere looking for a “subject”. Art is where you are. Always. It’s not the life you have. It’s how you look at it.

B) The other thing one needs is an interesting relationship with language, a relationship that offers a paradoxical mix of the alien and the familiar. Because that’s what art is – the warmth of the familiar cut across by the cold hand of the alien.

So what can one achieve in a creative writing studio? This was the question very much in our mind as we went about setting up a Department of Creative Writing at Ashoka. Creative writing, which draws its exponents from everywhere – from the entire spectrum, in many ways, is the throbbing heart of a liberal arts education.

A creative writing studio creates a space for writers to come together. It pushes writing to go from the therapeutic to the affective. Therapeutic: that journal entry where you vent your anger, romance, frustration, love, disgust. Affective: the piece of writing that successfully evokes all these emotions in the reader. Where writing goes from being about you to being directed to the reader.

And how does it do that? By turning writers into readers and back to writers again. That’s the workshop experience at the heart of the writing studio. Writing is a lonely affair – far more so than any of the performing arts, be it the ballet or the garage band. For a writer, a communal space can be life saving.

The Creative Writing Minor at Ashoka foregrounds the studio approach, with the writing workshop at its core. Along with the workshops, a thesis of substantial length, polished in the Publishing Seminar in the last semester, forms the capstone of the programme. To our great delight, we’ve already seen some theses that, with some honing, could be ready for professional publication.

It is not surprising that this is now one of the most popular minors in our liberal arts university. Imaginative writing is the most academic of the arts and the most artistic of all academic subjects. It belongs to a special place in the university, and to campus life.

Saikat Majumdar, Professor of English & Creative Writing, is the author of several books, most recently, the novel, The Scent of God (2019)