I am re-reading Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. I love re-reading classics and learn a lot from them as a writer.
I always wanted to be a airplane pilot. Maybe I would do that! I much prefer writing, though—and teaching writers, which is what I do at U of H.
Don’t get too busy with the rest of your life. Keep it simple. The biggest problem for writers is that we don’t give ourselves enough time to work on our writing. And then we fall out of the “fictive dream,” as John Gardner says.
Buying books. I have a lot of good books I read and re-read and they give me inspiration.
Don’t be too impatient to publish. Wait until you’ve made your story/poem/book the best it can be. Show it to a trusted reader and take their evaluation into account to improve yourself.
Chitra Divakaruni is the author of 21 books: novels, short story collections, and poetry. Her work has been published in over 100 magazines and anthologies, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and the O. Henry Prize Stories, and translated into 30 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Hungarian, Turkish, Hindi and Japanese. Her work has been made into films, plays and dance dramas, and performed as operas. Her awards include an American Book Award, a PEN Josephine Miles award, a Premio Scanno, and a Light of India award. In 2015 The Economic Times included her in their List of 20 Most Influential Global Indian Women. She is the McDavid professor of Creative Writing in the internationally acclaimed Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and lives in Houston with her husband Murthy.
