» Sabyasachi Roy

The Art of Not Knowing What You’re Writing Yet

Writers pretend like they know what they’re doing. They don’t. The ones who say they do are lying or legally obligated to sound confident for their MFA programs. Sometimes we walk into actual furniture. My knee still remembers the time I backed into a table after a plot twist surprised me. People act like you…

Issue Six Hundred Fifty Four Special Feature

A Craft Essay About Never Knowing How to Stop

By Sabyasachi Roy You ever notice how beginnings get all the glory? Everyone’s obsessed with “the hook.” Grab the reader by the collar, shake them, spill coffee in their lap. But endings—no one talks about the fact that endings are basically a con. Like… “wrap it up neatly.” Excuse me? I can’t even wrap Christmas…

Issue Six Hundred Fifty One Special Feature

The Writing Voice You Don’t Choose

Everyone says: find your voice. Like it’s in the lost and found, under a scarf and someone else’s umbrella. As if you walk up to the desk: “Hi, yes, mine’s the lyrical-yet-accessible one with hints of irony.” No. Voice finds you. Or worse—voice squats inside you like a raccoon that refuses to leave your attic….

Issue Six Hundred Fifty

The Tyranny of “Show, Don’t Tell”

By Sabyasachi Roy Say it once: John was sad. Bam. Done. Quick. Clean. But no, apparently I must paint a whole oil canvas. His eyelids sag. Shoulders wilt. He stares at the rain like a broken blinds catalogue model. His sigh echoes through the century’s blah blah. Congratulations. Turned a sad guy into a slam…

Issue Six Hundred Forty Nine

“This Has Already Been Said”

By Sabyasachi Roy Writers love declaring originality dead. “Everything worth saying has already been said,” they moan, as if the Muse herself retired early and moved to a quiet villa with no forwarding address. And maybe it’s true—most “big ideas” are ancient. Love hurts? Shocking. Time passes? Groundbreaking. Death is inconvenient? We’ve been singing that…

Issue Six Hundred Forty Six Special Feature

Self-Doubt as a Constant Companion

By Sabyasachi Roy Self-doubt doesn’t wait for failure. You don’t have to flop publicly or get rejected. Doubt shows up before all that, like it already read your draft and hated it. Some days it whispers. Other days it screeches: Who told you, you could write? Why does this matter? Who’s going to care? And…

Issue Six Hundred Forty Five Special Feature

Rest, Burnout, and Permission

By Sabyasachi Roy Burnout doesn’t knock. It just slips in, in a quiet manner, like the obedient nobody in a corporate setup. But somewhere down the line you start noticing. In a good, or bad, or in a neutral manner. Burnout starts like that, maybe with a feeling when you think it’s just a phase…

Issue Six Hundred Forty Three Special Feature

In Praise of Repetition Loops, Echoes, and the Power of Return

By Sabyasachi Roy I woke up humming the same two lines of a poem for three mornings straight. And you know what? I kind of loved it. That stuck-in-your-head feeling is exactly what writers can aim for. A phrase that creeps back into your brain—whispered at the start of every chapter—turn into a little drumbeat…

Issue Six Hundred Thirty Eight Special Feature

The Sentence as a Spine: How Syntax Shapes Story

By Sabyasachi Roy Writers talk a lot. Plot arcs, character depth, themes that whisper and shout—it’s all very lovely and MFA-scented. But underneath all that flourish and philosophizing, there’s one unsung hero holding the whole mess together: the sentence. That’s right. The humble sentence. You know, that thing your seventh-grade English teacher ruined for you…

Issue Six Hundred Thirty Six Special Feature

The Beautiful Blur: Writing in the Liminal Space Between Genres

By Sabyasachi Roy There’s a weird little place where poems go when they get too talky, and where stories wander off when they forget to have plots. Welcome to the genre blur. Population: writers who mutter, “I don’t know what this is, but it feels right.” If you’ve ever stared at your own Word doc…

Issue Six Hundred Thirty Five Special Feature

The Art of Rewriting: Where Good Writing Goes to Die (and Get Resurrected)

By Sabyasachi Roy First drafts are liars. They tell you you’re brilliant, only to let you down when you read them the next day and wonder if your cat walked across the keyboard. But that’s okay—because the magic happens when you rewrite. Writing is a romantic affair, but rewriting? That’s where you grab your manuscript…

Issue Six Hundred Thirty Two

Plot Holes? I Prefer to Call Them “Opportunities for Interpretation”

By Sabyasachi Roy This article can come with an alternate title, Gaslighting Yourself into Believing Your Book Makes Perfect Sense. This is not without a rational outing. You spent years hammering out your novel, agonizing over every plot twist, ensuring airtight logic. And then some smug reader points out that your main character, locked in…

Issue Six Hundred Thirty One Special Feature

Unusual Writing Formats: When Your Story Demands Footnotes, Letters, or a Series of Haikus

By Sabyasachi Roy A few years ago, I decided to write a short story for a competition. It started as a simple tale of a man trying to return a library book, but somewhere along the way, my brain decided, “Hey, what if the story was told entirely through increasingly absurd footnotes?” What began as…

Issue Six Hundred Twenty Seven Special Feature

Writing Advice I Ignore But Still Pretend to Follow

By Sabyasachi Roy Writing advice, ah. So full of wisdom. So universally agreed upon. So… annoying. Don’t get me wrong—I respect the craft. I admire the dedication. But some of the so-called golden rules of writing? Yeah, I nod along, then go home and do the exact opposite. And somehow, miraculously, the universe does not…

Issue Six Hundred Twenty Four Special Feature

Am I A Writer or Just a Person Who Owns Too Many Notebooks?

By Sabyasachi Roy At what point does an obsession with buying notebooks become a cry for help? Because if owning stacks of untouched Moleskines made you a writer, my bookshelf alone would have penned a Pulitzer by now. And yet, here I am, staring at another blank page, wondering if I actually write or just…

Issue Six Hundred Twenty Three Special Feature

Articles by Sabyasachi Roy