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How did you come to write? "Is a question that most writers face some point at their careers. While doing a string of interviews, which later came out the book form, Interviews Across Time and Space, I found myself asking the same question in the hope of un!locking the key to a writer, but it did not take me long to realize that There is no special secret to it, as writers I spoke to came to different ways.
Manjushree Thapa, for example, came to "comparatively late in life ... after knocking my head against the wall for many years" and "giving in to the need for creative creative", while Pankaj Mishra, who has now changed himself to a thinker / writer of global repute, knew he wanted to be a writer from very early on.
However, it is always instructive to know how a certain writer came to write. This is the reason why I am talking about the making of VS Naipaul as a writer, based on "Letters Between A Father and Son" book, which has made me more than one way.
Although a collection of family letters, this book can be read as a part of the writing on Seepersad Naipaul, a writer with author-ly ambition, and his future-Nobel Laureate son, VS Naipaul. Covering a little more than three years, the correspondences start in 1950 when VS Naipaul, aged 17, leaves for Oxford on a government scholarship.
Early on in the correspondences, Seepersad Naipaul, whose dream of being a published writer unrealized, got his writer in his son the idea of a writer: "Your letters are their spontaneity in attraction. If you could write me letters about things and people - especially people-at Oxford, I could compile them in a book: Letters Between a Father and Son, or My Oxford Letters. "
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