Truman Capote Posts

Scholastic Writers Academy

Scholastic Writers Academy, short story collections

During the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, Scholastic Writers Academy was launched. I conceptualised the programme for Scholastic India. These are online workshops of 20 hours, 10 days x 2 hours every day, except for the weekends and national holidays. Two hours of a mix of lectures, presentations, interactive sessions, writing on camera, one-to-one mentoring in breakout rooms and peer review. Every participant is expected to write a short story. Every workshop culminates in a published anthology of the short stories. It includes the mentor’s note.

The faculty of Scholastic Writers Academy are handpicked. They are inevitably folks who have a deep interest in literature and understand its nuances. Also, they are extremely kind, gentle, firm and have excellent mentoring skills when interacting with the school students. Our fabulous mentors include or have included in the past, Rahul Saini, Sucharita Dutta-Asane, Neil D’Silva, Harini Srinivasan, Priya Ranganathan, Ujwala Samarth, Madhumita Gupta, Sushmitha Talisetti, Saachi Gupta, Kanchana Banerjee etc.

In the short span since the workshops began ( June 2021) till date, we have mentored more than 1200 students and had more than 55 editions of the workshops. Scholastic India has been incredibly innovative and determined with its outreach efforts with schools. Also, using the social media platforms to promote this programme. As a result, we have had registerations from across India and even abroad — the USA, Middle East, and Singapore.

Most often the workshops are general and we encourage students to come up with their own story pegs and see it through. But we have also had thematic workshops on science fiction, horror, Nature, animals etc. The students are in the age range of 9 to 17+. We make batches of junior and senior.

The success of these workshops is incredible. And I am not saying it because I am part of the core team that works on it. It is the word-of-mouth success too. Students have registered for it not once but multiple times! They join the workshop with trepidation and nervousness. Some join because they have been encouraged to do so by their parents and schools. But within two days, the kids are yapping away happily to their mentor and with each other. Remember that these groups meet ONLY online. They do not know who will be in their batch from beforehand. They are complete strangers to each other. By the time the workshop is over, two weeks later, the children are a raucous bunch and share a special bonhomie. They do not want the classes to end. They leave on a high note. At the concluding session, parents tell us over and over again, how their children look forward to these sessions. They grin and are cheerful. They do not want to be disturbed. Even kids who are normally restless are at peace and disciplined about writing daily. They look forward to these interactions.

Later, they regroup for the official book launch. These are also held online on Scholastic India’s Facebook page. All the recordings of the past book launches exist on the page. There is a fixed format with Mr Neeraj Jain, Scholastic India, MD, the mentor, and a chief guest — inevitably this person is an educationist. It is such a thrill watching these virtual book launches. The children are animatedly chittering at meeting each other once more. Their eyes shine with delight at being able to hold their physical books aloft.

At the book launches, the children share the impact that these workshops have had upon them. It is not only that their writing skills have improved ( SWA does not teach grammar!). But it is the sudden realisation that with a bit of focus, discipline and determination they can create and be productive. They have learned to improve their social skills as they are forced to engage with the other participants. They have improved their vocabulary as they are encouraged to offer peer review in class. They realise that writing a short story is not as easy as it seems and they need ideas and vision. There are many other aspects that they touch upon but it is the massive confidence boosting measure that really astounds them. They discover aspects of themselves that they did not realise they had within them.

Registerations are open throughout the year. To register, please click here.

Every book that is published by Scholastic India as part of the Scholastic Writers Academy is available on Amazon India. In fact, schools buy entire sets of these books. And/or they prescribe individual copies as supplementary readers in their institutions. Libraries order multiple sets as everyone is very proud to see school children write imaginatively and spin stories and ultimately be published by a 102-year-old brand like Scholastic. The same publishing house that published Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Andy Warhol, Sylvia Plath, John Lithgow, Robert Redford, and Truman Capote. It is also the publisher of Dav Pilkey, Liz Pinchon, and J.K.Rowling ( in the USA).

We have even launched an edition for adults — 18 and above. The inaugural workshop was very exciting and energetic.

Register and be published by Scholastic India!

7 Feb 2023

Karthik Venkatesh on Granthika, a digital tool

Karthik Venkatesh, a publisher, who often writes longreads on different aspects of publishing. He published an article in The Hindu on Granthika . It was heavily edited. Later he reposted the longer version on his Facebook  wall. I am c&p the text here with his permission. 

RK Narayan’s novel The Vendor of Sweets set as always in Malgudi is the story of Jagan, the sweetmeat vendor, his inner tussles between his Gandhian ideals and the pulls of his business that often leave him in a quandary and his imperfect relationship with his wayward son, Mali. Mali makes his way to America to join a creative writing course and returns a few years later, totally Americanized, with a Korean-American partner in tow. Back in Malgudi, Mali comes up with a grand money-making venture in the form of a story writing machine. It’s a machine in which would-be writers would only have to enter a few details like the number of pages, the number of characters, the place and time, the type of atmosphere and so on and the machines would churn out the story for them, or so goes Mali’s sales pitch.

The romantic image of the writer crouched over at the writing desk pouring his heart out on paper, with the several crumpled pieces of paper strewn around the room evidence of his hard work is one of literature’s most overworked images. It was this image perhaps that Mali sought to change. With Mali’s machine, churning out a story was a matter of pressing a few buttons. Mali’s story-writing machine is of course fictional, but to look at how writers have used technology to aid their writing endeavours is to come across several little nuggets of interesting information.

Historically, writing in longhand was the way most writers worked. Many like John le Carre still put pen to paper (the occasional writer like John Steinbeck swears by pencils), choosing to voluntarily forgo the mediating medium of the machine. A few lucky ones in the past had the benefit of a scribe (a la Veda Vyasa and Ganesha), but that couldn’t have been a cakewalk either. It required the writer to compose the piece in his mind and then regurgitate as the scribe put pen to paper or palm-leaf. The odd scribe is likely to have struggled to keep pace with the writer. But, arguably, more often than not, the scribe’s lot would have been to play the waiting game as the writer struggled to put it all together in his head.

And then, the typewriter came.

In 1874, Mark Twain purchased his first typewriter (a Remington) for $125. Seven years later, a typed manuscript of Twain’s Life on the Mississippi was sent to his publisher. Twain did not type it himself. In 1875, he had written to Remington to say that the machine corrupted his morals because it made him want to swear and so he gave the machine away, twice, only to have it return each time. Life on the Mississippi was dictated to a typist from a hand-written draft and was in all likelihood the first typewritten book. Among the typewriter’s other early adopters were Nietzsche and Henry James. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was also typewritten and its heroine, Mina Harker makes references to learning typewriting in the initial part of the novel. Clearly, the typewriter had arrived and for the next century or so, it was the writer’s machine of choice.

In the sixties, Jack Kerouac typed On the Road on a roll of paper which he had created by taping several together several sheets. What kind of paper it was is unclear. Among the possibilities are regular paper, a thermo-fax roll and sheets of architect’s paper. He did so because he thought the job of changing the paper would interrupt him and ‘thrust him back into the world’s inauthenticity’. Two weeks after starting On the Road, he had a single single-spaced paragraph a hundred and twenty feet in length all ready. The typewriter had played a critical role in birthing a classic.

The famously acerbic Truman Capote heard about Kerouac’s unusual ways and cuttingly remarked, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

And then came the word-processor.

Who was the Mark Twain of the word processor? There are several claimants most of them small-time with the exception of sci-fi writer Frank Herbert of Dune fame. After Dune’s success in 1965, it is said that Herbert submitted drafts of his works to his literary agent on 8-inch floppy disks in the 1970s, but no evidence exists to confirm this. The New York Times of March 24, 1981 published a rather interesting report which detailed how Jimmy Carter had accidentally deleted several pages from his memoir by pressing the wrong keys on his word-processor.

Among the early adopters of the word processor was Stephen King so much so that in the January 1983 issue of Playboy, he actually published a story entitled … “The Word Processor”! Later republished as Word Processor of the Gods in King‘s 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, the story talks of a word processor that is actually capable of altering the past and in effect, the future and whose discovery changes the lot of a frustrated middle-aged writer. Apart from King, Tom Clancy was an early adopter too and his 1984 thriller The Hunt for Red October, is often cited as one of the earliest word-processed best sellers. Since then, writing (Capote would call it typing) on the computer has pretty much become the norm.

In the second or third quarter of 2018, writer Vikram Chandra of Sacred Games fame hopes to have a beta version ready of Granthika, a digital tool for writers. While its first version will be designed for fiction writers, in the long run, a version for non-fiction writers as well, which will add all the features necessary for that genre, such as footnotes and endnotes, citations, etc. is also planned. Eventually, the goal is to build specialized versions for domains like legal writing, journalism, corporate documentation, scientific publishing, etc.

Its website lists its many components (it calls them ‘Multiple Independent Tools’): ‘a spreadsheet to keep track of dates and events, and to calculate the ages of characters, index cards to visualize the structural outline of the document, a timeline – perhaps drawn on a wall – to visualize the relationship between events (and) a word processor that doesn’t organize any of the above’.

The problem that it seeks to solve is the problem of writers making mistakes in their text and be able to keep track of all the logistics in the text. Among the instances of mistakes it cites to make its case are from Sherlock Holmes—Dr. Watson’s travelling injury (shoulder to leg) and his changing first name (John to James)—and more recently, an oversight in The Prisoner of Azkaban.

Granthika is on the face of it, as cutting–edge as it gets. The creation of a writer who understands writing and coding, it might just become to the early 21st century writer what the typewriter was to the late 19th and the word processor to the late 20th. Like it or not, most writers are typing now and with Granthika, Mali, Twain and King have actually been fused together!

(C) Karthik Venkatesh 

5 February 2018 

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