Writers on Writing is our regular conversation with a writer or industry professional about the writing craft, industry insights, and their own practice. This week, we spoke to Kavita Bedford about how she maintains her creative practice to craft fiction inspired by real-life events and relationships.
Are you a morning writer or an evening writer?
My practice is always shifting with life circumstances. I prefer the mornings. But often I write in the gaps.
What’s the biggest obstacle to writers trying to establish a creative practice?
Perfection or becoming too attached to one way of being can be an obstacle to our practice. When I first started writing, I wrote whenever and wherever. I didn’t have a focused practice, but I also was always working multiple jobs, and living a generally frenzied lifestyle, and so I just did it when I could. Then, when I allowed myself to commit to writing more deeply, I discovered I was a morning writer, and it was exciting.
I developed a strong, consistent practice; it was like a drug. But I also noticed, I would become upset if anything got in its way. I became rigid. In the last couple of years trying to write with a baby, my writing practice had to change again! All of that to say, I think it can be dangerous to attach to any kind of one identity. It’s a tricky balance as we are being asked to be consistent, turn up every day, establish routine – and equally to be able to break it and reinvent when needed. But that is the role of the artist or writer, to be able to both be disciplined and commit, and to be fluid.
In your opinion, is writer’s block real?
I don’t know if I connect to this term. What is true, is that creativity is its own life force, with its own ebbs and flows, and needs to be treated with that respect. We cannot expect the mind to just churn things out continuously. We need to develop a more reciprocal relationship with this force. It is like the breath; sometimes it is about inhaling ideas and absorbing and letting things lie fallow, and other times, it is about exhalation and output. Often when we are ‘blocked’, I think it is important to look at what phase in the process we are inhabiting and approach it differently.
Do you see a connection between mind and body when it comes to creativity?
The notion that we write simply from our minds is a myth. Our bodies hold our emotions and secrets and tensions and blocks. We need to engage the body, just as much as the mind, if we want to write with authenticity.
What have you read recently that you loved?
Practice by Rosalind Brown. It is a day in the life of a young student who needs to write an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. But it is about how we make routines, and think, and the pleasures and pain of thinking, and what it means to practice.
In your novel Friends and Dark Shapes, place is so much more than mere backdrop. How do you capture a place without resorting to mere description?
I grew up reading books about other cities and I knew I wanted to write a coming of age story about Sydney where the city was also a central character. The narrator is grieving the death of her father and I wanted to show the heartbreak of living in a place without a person you love. But also the heartbreak of a city that is changing shape before your eyes and where memories are being constantly excavated.
This involved peeling back the descriptive glamour of Sydney and trying to understand the city for what it really is: a place of confusing contradictions. I spent a lot of time interviewing people about their own relationship to this city. It is a vast place where different narratives exist, and for those who live on the outside, like migrants or refugees or people who live out in the suburbs, they also have a different experience of this city that is not included in the shimmering tourist image.
Kavita Bedford is an Australian-Indian writer with a background in journalism, anthropology and literature. Her novel, Friends & Dark Shapes, was published in 2021 in Australia, USA, and Italy and was Shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards, 2021, The NSW Premiers’ New Fiction, and Small Press Network’s Book of the Year. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including Guernica, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, ABC Arts, Roads & Kingdoms, and Island Magazine. She was a recent Churchill Fellow exploring migrant narratives between Australia and Europe.
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