With Kaylie Seed
Photo by Tajinder Kaur
The main characters of If I Tell You the Truth are both fierce and courageous women, can you tell our readers where your inspiration for Kiran and Sahaara’s voices came from?
Kiran and Sahaara are an amalgamation of experiences, witnessings and emotions. As a Punjabi girl growing up around women who empowered me to be who I am, sisterhood has always been an important part of my life. My friends and I have had candid conversations about everything from relationships to toxic in-laws to healthy friendships and sexual abuse.
I remember sitting with my friends as a young adult, discussing the fact that a powerful man had abused one of our loved ones. We discussed all sorts of strategies to bring about justice for
the victim but encountered roadblocks every step of the way. The worst was the knowledge that community leaders wouldn’t support us in speaking the truth. The “safety” of a powerful man was more important than any victim. It was experiences like this that solidified Kiran and Sahaara’s voices. I wanted them to speak all the truths that we were told to keep to ourselves. I wanted to craft a world where their radical truth-telling could be a tangible reality.
If I Tell You the Truth is a mixture of poetry, prose, and illustrations. What was the process like for you to arrange these mediums to create a story that flows so effortlessly?
It was a huge learning experience and definitely didn’t begin so effortlessly. In my first draft of the book, the majority of the story was told in prose and punctuated with poetry between prose chapters. As the story evolved through revision, I considered all the ways in which poetry may be more meaningfully woven in to drive plot and conjure emotion. I think that the effortless flow naturally came about because I tried not to force too much plot-progression into a single poem. I read and re-read the transitions to make sure that readers wouldn’t feel like they missed a step in the story because they didn’t fully process one stanza.
A follow-up to the question above, how did you choose which parts of your novel would be written in poetry and which would be written in prose?
I find that narrative poems are helpful in drawing out drama in brief snapshots. It gets trickier to bring to life complex, multi-character scenes within a handful of stanzas. I’ve written three-character scenes as poems but I don’t think I could go any wider than that without completely confusing the reader.
I also considered pacing. There were sections we needed to breeze through and some we needed to steep ourselves in. Poems were helpful in moving us through large swaths of time during which there were only a few major events. Where we needed to slow down and fully saturate ourselves in a certain setting or exchange, prose worked better.
If I Tell You the Truth focuses on some heavy topics including sexual abuse and immigration trauma, were these emotionally draining for you to put onto paper, and if so, how were you able to compartmentalize so that you didn’t burn out?
I tend to write in small chunks and then give myself breathing space. After I meet my word count goal for the day, I spend the rest of the day doing things that bring me joy and calm—reading, drawing, yoga, Netflix. It also helped that the writing was spread out over the course of months.
Recording the audiobook for If I Tell You The Truth was actually much more difficult. I narrated the book over the course of four days and had to fully immerse myself in the emotions of each character in order to bring them to life over audio. Audiobook narration is a lot more like traditional acting than people may realize. I think it requires the narrator to draw from the same emotional well that a stage or film actor would. Before I recorded some of the heavier scenes, I pushed myself to fully submerge into character, imagining the frightening spaces that my characters would be walking through, the anger and fear coursing through them. This took a whole lot out of me and I was glad that we finished recording in under a week.
What was the most surprising thing that you learned while going through the process of creating and writing If I Tell You the Truth?
Less is more! Perhaps this isn’t the most thrilling surprise, but I learned, after my first draft was way longer than I originally planned, that I could strengthen the story with concision. I think that when you get so immersed in backstory and worldbuilding, you intuitively feel you need to give your reader all of the context that is in your head. But that doesn’t always serve the story. I had to really think about what scenes and bits of context the story could survive without. Some of those less-than-pivotal scenes were cut from the story entirely or transformed into bite sized poems.
Now that you’ve written two gorgeous novels, I have to ask, will there be another book from you in the future?
Yes, I hope so! I’m currently working on a fantasy novel about teenage Punjabi witches, set in Canada.
What advice would you give to aspiring authors who are trying to navigate the publishing world?
Don’t doubt the value of your voice. Rejection can be discouraging but it doesn’t mean that your work isn’t worth reading. As writers, we’re going to experience creative growth for as long as we choose to craft stories. Our work was precious at our first drafts, it’s precious now and it’s going to be precious once we have twenty years of experience under our belts. We need to be able to give ourselves space to grow, though. That means listening to and applying feedback without allowing the feedback to diminish our desire to create.
What is your “must-read” book recommendation and what book has had the most impact and influence on your writing?
V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is one of my all-time favourite novels, melding everything I love about historical fiction with fantasy. I don’t know that there’s a singular book that’s had a profound impact on my writing, but Neil Gaiman’s MasterClass course on writing was fundamentally formative for me. I finished the course sobbing because I was so moved by Neil’s teaching.
Lastly, who is your inspiration when it comes to writing and why?
Sunni Patterson was one of the first spoken word poets I encountered online. The fierceness of her voice, political conviction and imagery completely mesmerized me. At the time, I didn’t know that I, too, could be a poet. I just read and reread her poems aloud because I felt so much power coursing through her words. When I finally picked up a pen and eventually stood behind a mic to share my words, it was through the inspiration of poets like Patterson. The magnetism of her performances were my reference point for how to convey passion as a poet. The rest, I suppose, is history.