Shyam Selvadurai, a creative writing instructor and mentor at the University of Guelph, is also an award-winning novelist. His first novel, Funny Boy, won the WH Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award, as well as the U.S. Lambda Literary Award.
Selvadurai has published three more novels since then, including Cinnamon Gardens and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, the most recent being The Hungry Ghosts.
Alongside of writing fiction, Selvadurai is also the editor of two anthologies, Story-Wallah! A Celebration of South Asian Fiction, which gathers the fictional works of South Asian writers in one volume, and Many Roads Through Paradise: An Anthology of Sri Lankan Literature, a collection of Sri Lankan poetry and fiction.
Funny Boy is a novel that features the narrative voice of Arjie Chelvaratnam, a young child growing up in Sri Lanka in the midst of a war between the Buddhist Sinhala and Hindu Tamil in the early 1980s. At the same time that he is observing his country’s crumbling political sphere, Arjie is also faced with the realization that he is different than other boys. Funny Boy is a story of a young boy dealing with being gay in an environment that reinforces strict gender norms.
Having taken one of Selvadurai’s creative writing courses as a student, I had the privilege of studying the craft of writing a short story through Selvadurai’s perspective. His insights into writer’s block and the creative process offer more than academic insight for University of Guelph students, but also inspiration to write.
When asked on his advice for aspiring student writers, his answer was to “keep writing.”
“[…] you have to write on a regular basis because a work of fiction, whether it’s a short story or a novel, is nothing but an accumulation of pages, so you have to sit down and write. You have to have structured time in your week that you write.”
Selvadurai’s second important piece of advice was to read, which he believes can be very helpful when experiencing writer’s block.
The Ontarion had the opportunity to sit down with Shyam Selvadurai and chat about writing, childhood, and Funny Boy.
Danielle Subject: At what point in your life did you decide that you wanted to be a writer?
Shyam Selvadurai: Well, when I was quite young I used to stage plays in my parents’ drawing room, it was a bit like Arjie in the novel, though different. I never wanted to be the bride, I wanted to be the wedding planner. My parents, as opposed to Arjie’s parents, thought ‘Oh, he’s artistic, we must encourage this and nurture it,’ so they sent me to theatre classes and dance classes. So, I thought I wanted to be in theatre, and I would write plays and do them and all that. When we came to Canada, I went to study theatre at York, and then by the third year I realized that theatre wasn’t a fit for me. I had taken a playwriting class and I got really interested in writing. In my fourth year I took another playwriting class and it was very clear to me that this was the area in which I was most happy. But, you know, it was in the 1980s, there were very few South Asian actors, so it didn’t seem that anything would come of it, and then at the same time you had the beginning of this sort of wave of multicultural fiction. So I just made a very conscious decision that I would move over into fiction, and I took one creative writing course, and after that I just decided I would write, and I just never looked back since then. I somehow stumbled on the thing that I was meant to do.
D.S.: Why fiction?
S.S.: Well, I mean, I’m not really a memoir, biography, journalist, travel kind of writer – it’s not me. I don’t like memoir for myself personally, because to me it feels like you’re exerting power over other people because you have the last say, no matter how much you try to, in the memoir, say you don’t have the last say, you have the last say. And I don’t really have anything much to say, my family’s too normal for a memoir. I love fiction – I love the form of it, I love the challenge of it, I like that it goes to more poetic truth than a memoir on some level because you have a greater distance from the subject, so you’re working on larger themes because you’re slightly distant from it. Even in my case, when I write quite a bit of autobiographical fiction, it’s still fiction.
D.S.: I assumed you probably included autobiographical elements in your writing, I think most writers do.
S.S.: Sure, all writers do. Mine, to me, I always call them autobiographies of time and space and feeling, rather than autobiographies of plot and character.
D.S.: Do you believe that writer’s block exists, and if so, what advice do you have for combatting it?
S.S.: Oh, definitely it exists. I think it’s a necessary part of the creative process, because what you start off with and what you end up with should be two different things, because you’re writing organically. It’s quite common to get blocked. I think the major thing is to put it aside for a while and then go back to it—you could look at other writers and see what they have done dealing with similar themes or plotlines and see if that helps you. You could get a reader, someone who you trust to read and give feedback—I mean good, constructive feedback that will allow you to move past it. But generally speaking, you’re on your own. This is the hardest part of being a writer—the sense of loneliness. It is you, and you alone, who could figure this stuff out.
D.S.: In your novel, Funny Boy, Arjie examines the lives of the adults in his life. Is there something to be said about a child’s ability to perceive the world in a way that adults cannot?
S.S.: Yes, I mean I think especially from the writer’s point of view, that [there’s] a kind of freshness, a vision brought to bare, when you’re dealing from the child’s point of view—the innocence of the child, particularly in Funny Boy, where you have this growing societal violence and injustice, that I think a child’s point of view is perfect for that novel.
D.S.: Arjie experienced an almost loss of innocence when he was scolded by his elders for dressing up as a bride. This event forced him into a self-awareness that he didn’t have before. Do you recall any experiences in your childhood similar to Arjie’s? Any moments that made you realize things you wish you didn’t know about the world?
S.S.: Well I don’t know, I mean, what child’s life isn’t full of those moments, you know? All sorts of moments—realizing you’re rich and other people are poor, you’re well-fed and other people are hungry, realizing the violence in Sri Lanka, being aware for the first time that you’re a minority, then becoming aware on some basic level, even as very young, that you’re not the same as other boys, and the way you are is not right.
D.S.: What message were you trying to communicate to your readers through this novel?
S.S.: I was trying to communicate the idea that, I mean, when I wrote the book I grew up without having any reference of being gay, especially in the South Asian context, and I wanted to write a book so that somebody else in the future could read this book and think ‘I’m okay, it’s okay to be me,’ and that future has come to pass because the book is out there and it is part of the core English lit. curriculum in Sri Lankan universities, so every year hundreds of students read this book and are touched by it I think, I hope.
D.S.: What advice do you have for aspiring writers at the University of Guelph?
S.S.: Keep writing. The books won’t just produce themselves, you have to write on a regular basis because a work of fiction, whether it’s a short story or a novel, is nothing but an accumulation of pages, so you have to sit down and write, you have to have structured time in your week that you write, and I think that’s very important to do. So that’s the first thing, and the second thing is to read, especially in the field in which you are interested in writing in. I think it’s very important to read a lot, because then you have references that you can turn to when you’re blocked, or when you need inspiration on how to proceed.