By Kate Rix

Vikram Chandra begins his short fiction course by asking students to read an essay about storytelling. The essay, he says, is important because it asks big questions about why we tell stories and enjoy listening to them — even the same ones over and over again.

These are the questions that inspire Chandra to teach. Undergraduates in his short fiction workshops will know him as a teacher who looks closely at the role stories play in building culture. He wants his students to consider the power of fiction by diving into the writing life — he requires they attend literary readings and write two short stories of their own. For a student more interested in interpreting literature than creating it, this may be a grueling exercise, but constructing a story from scratch, says Chandra, is the best way to see technique laid bare.

  “I’ve always thought that if you’re a scholar of literature, it might be interesting to try writing a story,” says Chandra, seated near the window of the small Wheeler Hall office he shares with his wife, lecturer Melanie Abrams. In recent decades, for students of literature “to think about form wasn’t intellectual enough,” he continues. “Talking about beauty wasn’t correct. But it’s interesting for the students to have to think about how these things are constructed and how they work on an imagined or intended reader.”

Digging into the anatomy of successful fiction appeals to Chandra because it’s a way to teach literature from a writer’s point of view. He is a novelist, after all, and spent eight years writing Sacred Games, the epic Bombay-based thriller that was published last year. The book earned Chandra a major publishing advance — a rumored $1 million —  and received international critical praise for its rendering of life in one of India’s most chaotic cities, as well as for its modern form.

“When I sit around with other writers, often the center of the discussion is form, how does story work, how does it succeed, what is the pattern that it makes — all those things that writers talk about,” Chandra says. “I could have taught a straight-ahead literature course, but I am a writer. It didn’t seem as profitable for the students or as enjoyable for me to do things that way.”

His students seem to agree. Kathryn Ball, a graduate student from South Africa who is at Berkeley on a fellowship, is auditing Chandra’s short story class. Ball says that Chandra’s familiarity with the mechanics of crafting fiction is reflected in the way he teaches. He encourages students to see narrative as a form of social commentary, she says, and, through classroom discussion, looks to expose the way writers use narrative threads to steer the reader.

“But despite a focus on the inner workings of narrative, Vikram manages to salvage his course from being yet another session in literary criticism,” she adds. “He is famous for asking the question: "So, did you like the story?" For me, his sheer delight in story-telling as a cultural legacy adds a luminosity to his teaching. Here is someone who teaches truly for the love of the tale itself.”
 
Chandra was born in New Delhi and came to the U.S. in 1984 to attend Pomona College, where he earned a B.A. in English. Then he moved to New York to enter the directing and screenwriting track at Columbia University’s Film School, but left halfway through to begin writing his novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain. He completed that book while working toward Master’s degrees at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston.

Chandra comes from a family of writers. His mother, Kamna Chandra, is the writer of several Hindi films One sister, Tanuja Chandra, is a director and screenwriter who has directed several films including Sur and Sangharsh. His other sister, Anupama Chopra, is a film critic and recently published a well-received book about Bollywood heartthrob Shah Rukh Khan..

At Columbia he was required to take an acting class, and he worked hard to get out of it. “But it was an amazing experience, experiencing writing as a problem from an actors point of view,” he says. “You realize how much of their craft has to do with timing and motivation. It forced me out of my comfort zone.”

Even with the success of Sacred Games, Chandra has continued to teach and uses his own experience to guide that work. Students in his courses write analytical essays as well as short stories, with the aim of seeing fiction as not just political or historical problems to be analyzed, but also artifacts created by somebody.

Chandra has thought for a long time about what makes successful fiction—almost 20 years. All that nonstop writing, on top of book tours for Sacred Games, led him to try taking a break from writing for a year.

Still months away from that year’s end, he says it’s lovely to be able to live a “normal” life, uncluttered by a developing plot. “You’re with friends at dinner and there’s some thread that comes with you,” he says. “You starting to think about the next book, collecting images. It feels really nice to have time when I don’t need to be in the discipline and I can play.”

This holiday from writing is giving Chandra a chance to catch up on books that were piling up, waiting to be read. He has started planning his next novel, and knows it will take place partly in India and partly outside. This parallels Chandra’s own life. He and Abrams have a home in Bombay and spend several months a year there.

“There’s such rapid change in India, such profound change. You feel like you are being sprinkling with stories and images when you walk down the street,” he says. “Even the farmers in the field have cell phones.”

When he’s in the middle of writing a novel he keeps up a steady regimen, teaching two days a week and writing four, from 8 am until just before lunch.

“I’m very slow. I try to do 400 words, and at the end of those I feel emptied and that I’ve done a good day’s work,” he says. “It’s important to keep that up day after day. I try to stop at 400 no matter what, like running a marathon. It’s an attainable goal for every day.”

His own writing craft is very structured and highly routine, as is true for many writers. Chandra wants his students to get to know their own writing rhythms and voices and chooses readings that demonstrate some aspect of the writing craft. But the course is also focused on modernity in literature, with plenty of readings that explore the role of the individual in society, romantic love, and the notion of a nation-state.

He begins the course with an essay by Brian Boyd that makes an evolutionary argument for fiction. Listening to stories, Boyd argues, has helped extend our attention span and imagination. We have to be able to concentrate, follow characters through time, and trace causality. Evolutionarily, that widened space of attention turned out to be very useful.

“When you start telling children stories, that’s what you’re trying to do: widen their capacity for memory and recall and causality,” Chandra says. “It would seem to make sense that evolution would link that experience with pleasure. We’ve created everything that is essentially human in that space of recall.”