My friend L and I often ask ourselves why we choose to write when there are so many easier things we could do in our spare time, such as rock climbing, politics, or swimming with sharks.
I was ten when I realised I lacked the drawing talent to be a comic book artist. So, I decided to write instead. I thought it would be easier, which shows how little I knew, but hey! I was ten.
Since then, I’ve written so much. Horrible poems. Cringe fanfiction. Even more cringe original fiction. The worst, life-writing (never again).
In my years and years of writing, I’ve produced exactly one good poem. A handful of okay stories. And my baby: a novel. Goes to show that when you write, quantity really does count: the more you churn out, the greater the possibility of producing something that you actually might be proud of. (I know! Crazy!)
Writing has always felt deeply personal to me, not a thing I do to share with others, so Sehri Tales was not something I felt was initially for me. I loved reading the entries every year, but I always thought it was for ‘the other kind of writer’, the kind who could share their work without wanting to die a thousand deaths. The kind for whom sharing one’s writing didn’t feel like you were presenting your flayed guts on a plate, ready for others to mock.
But HERE IS THE THING. Sehri Tales is not like that. No one is mocking. We’re in it together. The commitment is the heart of it, the promise to churn out 250 words every night of the month, even when you’re not feeling it, even when every word you produce is drek, even when you hate yourself, and you wonder who in God’s name you thought you were fooling by ever claiming to be a writer. Are there some people whose words you read every night and think, I should just give up now, it doesn’t matter how much I try, I’ll never be even half as good as them? Yes. But it is a privilege to be in the same club.
There’s a real sense of community; of being among your people, regardless of generation or geography.
Because yeah, I have a club now. Living outside Bangladesh for more than two decades now, Sehri Tales is an opportunity for me to engage with people from my home country who are in many cases, much younger (or older) than me. There’s a real sense of community; of being among your people, regardless of generation or geography. And for someone like me, for whom writing has always been a solitary pursuit, that sense of a family is not something I ever thought I’d find with writing.
I’m not a big fan of writing as therapy. By which I mean, writing is excellent therapy, but I don’t think therapeutic writing necessarily makes the best art… Which is why I’m always surprised after I’ve completed a Sehri Tale only to find something personal has edged its way into it again. And that is the other thing about Sehri Tales, you read other people’s work and you realise, I’ve been there, I know that place. And we’re back to that, that communality.
Has Sehri Tales made me a better writer? Who knows. What it has helped me to do is give less of a damn. There’s only so much care you can lavish on a 250-word piece when you’re on a deadline; you do what you can with it and toss it out into the world. That fearlessness, that’s another thing Sehri Tales taught me.
Today, so much of what we consume is mass-produced and slick, engineered by robots off art stolen from out-of-work creators, while billionaires rub their palms together in glee and the planet goes to hell.
Sehri Tales is an escape from that. In its way, it’s the most genteel of screw yous to the establishment. A place where it’s okay not to be perfect. What counts is that we’re making something every night, 250 words of what is sometimes great and sometimes trash, but it’s ours, and it’s human. And as long as we’re here, the robots aren’t going to win.