Do Your Research

USING THE TOOLS OF JOURNALISM TO WRITE MORE VIVID FICTION

IN 2010 I interviewed the artist Gieve Patel in his studio in Mumbai. It was a bare, spartan room with a balcony open to thick tropical foliage. A few feet behind Patel, a human skull lurked on a trolley arranged with his paints and brushes. He liked having it around, he said, because it reminded him of his medical college days in the sixties. My pulse quickened—the protagonist of my then unpublished novel, Inside the Mirror, was an aspiring artist, unhappily studying medicine at her father’s direction. I questioned him further, and Patel told me something I’d never heard during all my research into art and medicine in mid-century India. When I returned to the United States, I immediately rewrote the first pages of my novel using what I had…

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Poets & Writers (Digital) - 1 Issue, March/April 2025

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