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Kritika Pandey on Writing Fiction That Outwits the Pattern
by Writing Workshops Staff
6 hours ago
On a snowy day in Amherst, around one of those long seminar tables, Kritika Pandey heard the question that would reorganize her sense of what fiction is for. What if the dead mother in her story were still alive? Or what if the narrator simply was her mother? The moment was, in her own words, genuinely horrifying. It was also the beginning of a conviction she now teaches: write from the mind of someone you are too afraid to humanize, and give even your inner villain a credible, intelligent voice.
That instinct sits at the center of The Alien in Me: Writing Beyond Identity, a four-week online fiction intensive Pandey is leading this July through WritingWorkshops.com, the official education partner of Electric Literature. In an age when machines can assemble plausible sentences on command, she asks a sharper question: what can a story do that a pattern cannot? Over four Sundays on Zoom, you will learn to handle the passage of time inside a scene, to build escalation and causality without leaning on tidy logic, and to write dialogue that reveals character, delivers information, and moves the plot all at once. You will also practice shifting points of view until your fiction can go where consciousness breaks loose from mere biography. The global winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Pandey makes the slipperiest questions of craft feel not only answerable but thrilling to chase.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Kritika:
Writing Workshops: Hi, Kritika. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Kritika Pandey: I am a person who's always trying to slip out of personhood, as it were, because I find it exciting in ways that regular, stable, coherent selfhood is not. This is of course an impossible undertaking. But the Sisyphean struggle of never quite managing it makes it worth wanting. I guess this is also why I write. I write because I can never quite say what I want to. And that in-between place of not knowing is the place of freedom.
Writing Workshops: What's the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?
Kritika Pandey: All language is only ever artificial. It's a shared system of patterns and predictions we use for surviving our minds, while surrounded by others, without ever reaching the whole truth. What sets us apart from talking machines, therefore, is that human language is messy, inefficient, embodied, and almost always excessive. The job of fiction is to take this excess and turn it into an experience as recognisable as it is strange. So my responsibility as a writer and a teacher of writing is to approach this contradictory relationship with language not as a problem to solve, but as the very reason to tell stories.
"The job of fiction is to take this excess and turn it into an experience as recognisable as it is strange."
Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn't have before, what is it?
Kritika Pandey: They'll know how to write from where consciousness breaks out of mere biography.
Writing Workshops: What's the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.
Kritika Pandey: "I would be lying if I said my mother's misery has never given me pleasure." - the opening sentence of Burnt Sugar, by Avni Doshi.
Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?
Kritika Pandey: It was a snowy day in Amherst. We were sitting around one of those long seminar tables, workshopping a story of mine where the protagonist was angry, but the anger didn't quite know where to go. And in this story, like many others before, the mother was dead. "But what if her mother were still alive, though?" one person said. "Or what if she IS her mother, maybe?" said another. This was a genuinely horrifying moment, as you can tell. But it was also when I first felt the most important instinct that drives my writing today. Write from the mind of someone you're too afraid to humanize. Give your inner villain a credible and intelligent voice. It is the most sincere act of imagination, and the writer's first responsibility.
"Write from the mind of someone you're too afraid to humanize. Give your inner villain a credible and intelligent voice."
Writing Workshops: What's a craft move you're slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, a small, specific technique.
Kritika Pandey: Fragments. The awkward second thought that follows a seemingly complete sentence, only to tell on it, and sometimes even become the real one.
Want to learn the small, exacting moves that make a sentence turn on itself? Kritika teaches them live, every Sunday for four weeks.
Enroll in The Alien in Me →Writing Workshops: What's a book you press into people's hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?
Kritika Pandey: The Dao De Jing. Because if you can muster the courage to take seriously the things the book tells you, even half the time, you stop mistaking domination for power. And in writing, what you force is always less interesting than what you stop interrupting.
Writing Workshops: What's the worst writing advice that sounds smart?
Kritika Pandey: "Find your voice" — because it makes voice sound like a lost object that must be retrieved before you can start writing, when really, voice is what happens in the act of writing.
Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: "Most writing classes won't tell you this, but..."
Kritika Pandey: Writing does not always satisfy you, and that might be part of why you keep writing.
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Kritika Pandey: The jilted and vengeful Miss Havisham!
Writing Workshops: What's your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?
Kritika Pandey: Encouraging, but serious about the work.
Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?
Kritika Pandey: I hate words, the way Sally hated Harry when she knew it was love!
Pandey does not promise that writing will satisfy you. She suggests instead that the lack of satisfaction is part of why you keep going, and that the most interesting work tends to happen in whatever you stop interrupting. If you have ever wanted to write fiction that resists easy interpretation, that reaches past identity markers toward the stranger truths underneath, consider this your invitation. Bring a finished story, a handful of fragments, or a single restless idea. Over four Sundays this July, you will leave with one fully considered story and a sharper way of seeing every story you write next.
Four Sundays with Kritika Pandey, beginning July 19th. Come write the story only you could write.
Save Your Seat in The Alien in Me →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
