I’m sitting in a small study, drafting a scene in my next novel. Staring at my computer screen, I deliberate for a long while among four nouns. Which evokes a truer sense of place and character? I insert a noun into the story, read the paragraph aloud, reject it, and then try another one. After a while, I work on some verbs.
Time speeds by. As I head to bed that evening, I think once again of Oscar Wilde’s famous quote about the writing life: “In the morning I took out a comma, but on mature reflection, I put it back again.”
Elsewhere on the planet, during the hours I spend pecking at my keyboard, children carry buckets of water long distances to slake their own and their families’ thirst. War rages, shredding land, buildings, and people. Refugees flee across borders, desperate for safety. Women balance loads of bricks on their heads to eke out a living. Unhoused families huddle in tents on sidewalks not far from my warm home. Young people are bought and sold to fatten the pockets of the powerful.
Isn’t it selfish to stay in the solitude of my study and generate stories? Why should I keep making art when suffering, injustice, and oppression are wreaking havoc on the planet? Why should you? How does one sustain a creative life given the seemingly selfish investment it takes to make beautiful things? Our gifts could be used to alleviate suffering and fight injustice. How dare we retreat and create?
Maybe you’re struggling with the same questions. Yet it’s vital to persevere in this work, and Just Making is an inquiry into why and how. I believe we must keep creating art—not by ignoring a world in distress but for the sake of loving it. How might those of us investing time, talent, and treasure to try to make beautiful things persevere when voices in our heads tell us it’s a waste of time? How can we keep making through pushbacks like risk, rejection, criticism, obscurity, burnout, jealousy, perfectionism, and even success? How might we develop strength through practices that help us stay the course of a life dedicated to creativity?
I wrote Just Making as a guide for creative people who are concerned about justice—those who are on the journey of a “long obedience in the same direction,” as Friedrich Nietzsche put it. Nietzsche would refute the claim that this is a divine mandate, but most creative artists sense a calling to create, no matter how we define the source of that call. Often, that includes a desire that our creativity is yoked to justice. Many of us want our labors to matter in the world—to create healing, repair, and goodness. We want our making to be just.
You might only be starting to discern that this work of making art is your narrow road. Perhaps you are already ascending the hill of a career in the art. Or maybe you’ve been trudging along for some time and feel you might already be heading downhill. (I’m squarely in the latter category.) In any case, I hope Just Making will encourage all of us to stay the course. I’ve gathered wisdom from a circle of other creatives to cheer us along the way, and I include stories and lessons from my three decades of working as a writer.
But first, in the hopes that one day you’ll find me and tell me your origin story as a maker, let me begin by sharing mine.
I’ve always loved language. As I learned English and Bangla, my mother tongue, I liked playing with words, paying attention to them, and—as the youngest of three children—wielding them as a mode of power. Slowly, by reading voraciously, I began to see the potential that stories have to bring order out of chaos and create beauty in a frightening world. I also saw the way that some stories—propaganda, or what novelist Chimamanda Adichie calls a “single story” in a famous TED Talk—can fuel chaos and ignite hatred.
How I thirsted for order and beauty as a child! I credit our father for that. Baba would point to a butterfly resting on a flower and muse about a Designer who created symmetry and beauty. He’d recite poems in Bangla and English from memory and share his enjoyment over a particular noun, verb, image, metaphor, or simile. He saw all of nature, art, and the sciences as proof of a great unseen Maker’s mind. Thanks to Baba, a deep longing for beauty and order was growing in my soul, even as my awareness of humanity’s entrapment in ugly chaos was increasing.
My sisters and I realized early that our parents had sacrificed substantially to leave their childhood villages in Bengal, immigrate to the United States, and raise us here. We knew we had three career options: become an engineer like my father, a doctor like many other Bengali immigrants, or . . . well, an engineer like my father and other Bengali immigrants who weren’t doctors. My sisters dutifully found their way to math and the sciences.
The problem was that I wasn’t drawn to those subjects. I earned decent grades but always had a penchant for poetry, stories, and scribbling in my diary. I was addicted to “fairy stories,” as my mother called fiction. She’d snatch away my library book and replace it with a math textbook, so my affinity for stories quickly went underground.
All three of us (Sonali, Rupali, and I) got into excellent colleges that my parents could brag about at Bengali parties. Surely after graduating, we’d land lucrative jobs that would allow our family to claim the American dream, live in luxury, and care for Ma and Baba in their old age.
Unfortunately, the work that interested me wasn’t lucrative. Bit by bit, I was drawn into the field of international development. Before long, I had declared a political science major as an undergrad and then enrolled in a public policy graduate school. I wrote a simple goal in my journal: before I died, I would eradicate world hunger, especially for children. Animated by both a fierce longing to alleviate human suffering and the intense idealism of youth, I decided to pursue a path of humanitarian service.
How, then, did I end up dedicating the bulk of my adult life to writing stories for young people instead of making sure they were fed? I credit the “fairy stories” for that.
I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that fiction had fueled a desire in my heart for the compassionate life. Take one of my favorite rereads, for example—A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The book stars Sara Crewe, an orphan who moved from riches to rags and back again. When Sara was in the darkest moment of her hero’s journey, hungry, cold, and wet with nothing much to give, Ms. Burnett illuminated for nine-year-old me the human impulse to be a generous giver.
Instead of fixing Sara’s problems with food, warmth, and dry clothes, the author chose a different route. She did this in one masterful scene in which Sara is walking along a street, cold and hungry, when she happens on a coin shining in the gutter. Heading toward a bakery to buy some fresh hot buns, she passes a girl who is begging and asks if she is hungry.
“Ain’t I jist?” she said in a hoarse voice. “Jist ain’t I?”
Just to look at her made Sara more hungry and faint. But those queer little thoughts were at work in her brain, and she was talking to herself, though she was sick at heart.
“If I’m a princess,” she was saying, “if I’m a princess—when they were poor and driven from their thrones—they always shared—with the populace—if they met one poorer and hungrier than themselves. They always shared. Buns are a penny each. If it had been sixpence I could have eaten six. It won’t be enough for either of us. But it will be better than nothing.”
“Wait a minute,” she said to the beggar child.
Sara enters the bakery and buys six buns. Then in a slow, arduous act of compassion, she gives five of six hot buns, one by one, to the girl, even though she is so hungry herself.
That scene remained with me for years after I read it. I didn’t grow up in a family that talked much about feeding those who were hungry, so why did I care so much about alleviating the suffering of others by the time I was a college student? That desire was cultivated by reading and rereading Ms. Burnett’s story and so many others like it.
Stories showed me that humanity, strength, and dignity could be found in giving, not simply in receiving. I could have heard a hundred sermons instructing me to be generous, but none would have made me want generosity the way that story did. As I reflected on how fiction had so deeply shaped my soul, I could see that choosing a career of writing stories for children wasn’t setting aside my passion for justice but pursuing it. It was my path in life; I sensed that somewhere deep inside my soul.
And so I wrote.
This is an excerpt from the introduction of Just Making.
