What was Arundhati Roy's writing process, especially for revision?

Twenty years of essays sit between her two novels, and they are the best evidence a writer has about how she works. The End of Imagination, The Greater Common Good and Walking with the Comrades argue in the open, with numbers, names and dates. The novels take the same material and refuse to argue at all. That difference is a method you can borrow without knowing anything about her drafts: write the case as an essay, in your own voice, at whatever length it takes, then put the essay away. What comes back into the fiction is the evidence, the transaction, the smell, the rule somebody obeys. What stays out is the conclusion, which the reader is now equipped to reach unaided.

How does Arundhati Roy structure a story without a straightforward plot?

The spine is a question rather than a sequence. In The God of Small Things it runs roughly like this: who is allowed to love whom, and what will this family do to the person who breaks the rule. Each scene either moves toward that question or shows the machinery protecting it, which is why a chapter about a pickle factory or a Kathakali performance at the temple reads as pressure instead of detour. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness swaps the question for a place. People converge on a graveyard that has become a guest house, and the converging is the plot. Both books work because something other than chronology decides the order of scenes, and both would fail the moment their author could not say what that something is.

How does Arundhati Roy write imagery this dense without slowing the story down?

Her descriptions are dated. Every object in Ayemenem belongs to a year, so a smell tells the reader where they stand in time as well as what the place is like, and a paragraph of pure sensation doubles as orientation inside a broken chronology. The river is one thing in 1969 and another in the present. The house, the factory and the sky-blue Plymouth carry their decade on them. Add her habit of making a described object work again later, and description stops being a pause. Put two questions to each detail in your own draft. What does it tell the reader about when and where they are, and which later scene will need it? A detail that answers neither is scenery.

What can writers learn from Arundhati Roy's use of repetition?

A repetition earns its place by changing what the phrase costs. The wording holds still. Le Guin's example is Micawber's something will turn up, which lands a little darker each time in David Copperfield, and Roy runs the same principle harder, so that a phrase invented by children comes back after a death and the childish words now hold the death. The practical form is a ledger. Write down each appearance of your repeated phrase and, beside it, what the reader knows at that point and what it costs the character. Where two rows read the same, one of them goes. Kundera's rule against synonyms belongs here too, since the temptation on the second appearance is to vary the wording, and varying it destroys the effect.

How does Arundhati Roy handle political material without turning fiction into an essay?

She gives the state a voice and lets it be intelligent. Biplab Dasgupta, the intelligence officer in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, narrates his own section in the first person, and he is witty, self-aware and entirely at home in what he does, which damages him more than any denunciation would. The equivalent move in the first novel is Comrade Pillai, a party man who fails Velutha politely and for sound tactical reasons. Neither man has been arranged to lose an argument. The rule underneath is that an idea belongs in fiction once it changes what a character does at a particular hour on a particular day, and stays out while it is still a position.

How do you write like Arundhati Roy without copying the surface style?

Keep your own sentences. The transferable part is a set of controls over what the reader knows, when, and at what price, and none of it requires long lines or lyric diction. Jhumpa Lahiri writes family shame at a much lower volume, in plain declaratives, and Roy's announced outcome, her carried question and her drifting refrain would all work inside prose that flat. Take one control and run it through an entire draft rather than sampling her texture. Then check the result the way she appears to: what does the reader dread, what does the reader know that a character does not, and which phrase has changed its price since the last time it appeared.

Fiction

Arundhati RoyWriting Style

Born 11/24/1961

Plant an image early and return to it late. A jump across twenty years then lands without a line of explanation.

Write like Arundhati Roy

Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Arundhati Roy: voice, themes, and technique.

Food inspectors turn up at Paradise Pickles and Preserves and reject the banana jam. Too thin for jelly, too thick for jam. Nothing in the rules covers that consistency, and Roy leaves the finding sitting in the book until it reads as a judgment on a family whose loves also fail to fall inside a permitted category.

The first chapter of The God of Small Things buries Sophie Mol, tells you Velutha is dead and shows you that Estha has stopped speaking. So the novel cannot be read for what happens. What is left is the accounting: which small permission was granted by whom, who looked away at which moment, and which rule about who may be loved and how much was being protected. Roy capitalizes that rule as the Love Laws, and once it has a name, every scene in the book can be measured against it.

The twins are seven in 1969. They see accurately and understand about half, which is how a reader ends up assembling a child's molestation, a caste killing and a mother's ruin out of details the narrator declines to explain. Baby Kochamma punishes them for speaking Malayalam by making them write out I will always speak in English, a hundred times each, and the punishment doubles as a note on the language the book is written in.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness runs the same instinct at a different pitch. Anjum leaves the Khwabgah and moves into a graveyard, where she rents rooms to the living among her family's graves, and the novel assembles itself around that address out of an intelligence officer's memo, Urdu couplets, a Kashmiri notebook and a roll call of the people camped at Jantar Mantar. Roy trained as an architect. Both novels are built rather than told, and her essays on the Pokhran tests, on the Narmada dams, on three weeks walking with Maoist guerrillas in the Dantewada forest, argue in the open what the fiction prefers to arrange.

How to Write Like Arundhati Roy

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Arundhati Roy.

1
Put the ending on the first page, then list the permissions
Find the event your draft is protecting, the death or the leaving or the confession, and state it flatly in the opening pages. Your reader can no longer read for what happens. Now write out the permissions that had to be granted before it could happen, one line each, in the order they were granted, including the ones granted by people who would deny having granted anything. That list is your chapter order. Then check each chapter for what the reader dreads inside it, and where a chapter has nothing to dread, you have written about the past rather than about the cost.
2
Separate what a character sees from what a character understands
Pick your least informed character and write a scene through their perception at full accuracy. Every sound, every surface, every adult sentence lands, and the interpretation stays partial or wrong. The reader finishes the inference, which is where the dread comes from. Estha reports the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man behind his counter with complete fidelity and no word for what the man does to him, and the reader supplies the word. Keep the perception precise and the conclusion short of the truth. The moment the character explains the scene, the effect has been spent.
3
Steal the narration's words from the people in the room
Take a page of your third-person narration and mark every word that belongs to you rather than to the character standing on the page. Swap a few of them for that character's own phrasing, including the pompous, the wrong and the borrowed. Do not tag the swap with he thought or she felt. A reader who cannot tell whose word it is will keep reading to find out, and the sentence carries the character's self-regard without a line of interior monologue. Two perspectives in one sentence, at no cost in length.
4
Bring the phrase back when it costs more
Choose a phrase, a smell or an object from an early scene and give it a job the reader can feel, then keep a list of every later place it appears. On each return change one variable and one only: what the reader knows, what the character has done, or who else is present. The words stay identical and the price moves. Baxter's warning belongs above that list, since a flat rhyme is worse than no rhyme at all. Where a return adds nothing to the bill, delete it and keep the first appearance.
5
Turn every abstraction into a transaction
Take the idea your draft cares about and delete the noun for it. Caste, class, shame, whatever it is, the word goes. Then write the rule as something bodies do: who waits outside, who is served second, which door is the one a particular man has to use, who sweeps the ground behind himself so his footprints leave nothing for anyone to step in. Roy gives Velutha's father that last one, and a reader understands the whole arrangement without being handed the term for it. Once the scene has produced three or four such transactions, you have earned exactly one sentence in which the plain word may appear.

Arundhati Roy's Writing Style

Breakdown of Arundhati Roy's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

Her long sentences add rather than subordinate. One clause names a thing, the next names the thing beside it, and the pressure comes from accumulation instead of grammar, which is why a paragraph can run half a page and still sound like someone talking. Then she stops. A four-word line lands alone and reframes what the flood was for. She also welds words together when a perception has no seam in it, so trees are dustgreen and a bus rail has a sourmetal smell, and when Estha has too much time to think, Later comes apart into Lay. Ter. Length is where she puts the emphasis, and it tracks the temperature of the scene rather than a rule about variety. Read her aloud and the pattern is audible. The long stretch seduces. The short one convicts.

Vocabulary Complexity

Two languages lie on top of each other, and English is the one with a price. Chacko carries his Oxford years around like furniture, Baby Kochamma punishes the children for Malayalam, and words stay unglossed on the page for a reader to learn from their position in the sentence: mundu, veshya, Naaley. The second layer belongs to the twins, who capitalize whatever frightens or thrills them, so a man behind a counter becomes the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, Chacko's locus standi comes back as Locusts Stand I, and the phrase the aunts use to excuse a man's appetites arrives as Man's Needs. James Wood calls this borrowing free indirect style and traces it to Joyce, whose Uncle Charles repaired to the outhouse in the pompous verb Uncle Charles would have picked for himself. Roy pushes it into typography. That is why a word invented by a seven-year-old can come back at the end of the book carrying a death, with no adjective added to it.

Tone

Nothing in the voice raises itself. At the Kottayam police station the Inspector taps Ammu's breasts with his baton, gently, the way a man tests mangoes in a basket, and the prose refuses to be outraged on the reader's behalf, because the calm is what identifies the gesture as routine rather than exceptional. Restraint is the whole tone. Comedy sits one line from atrocity and neither one cancels the other, so Baby Kochamma's ornamental garden, and years later her satellite television, stay funny in the way that ruin is funny. Roy does judge. She waits until the scene has produced its evidence, then a short flat clause passes sentence, which is why readers who remember the prose as lush often cannot find the lush part when they go back for it.

Pacing

Things can change in a day. That line arrives early and keeps arriving, so the reader spends the book waiting for a day that has already happened, and curiosity turns into dread. Inside a scene she slows to the width of a gesture: the leaf-shaped birthmark on Velutha's back that the family called lucky, a hand on a factory rail, the smell of an old bus. Then she crosses from 1969 to the present in a clause. Klinkenborg's instruction to resist chronology describes her order exactly, because she narrates in the sequence memory hands things over, which puts the consequence in front of the cause and leaves the reader walking toward something they were told about on page one.

Dialogue Style

Speech in Roy is rank made audible. Chacko has a Reading Aloud voice and a set of Oxford Moods, and the family can hear which one is running before they hear a word of content. Comrade Pillai discusses Velutha's future over tea and stays useless with perfect courtesy. What people say is usually smaller than what is at stake, and the pressure sits in who may open a conversation, who may end it, whose English gets corrected, and who is discussed while standing in the room. The twins hold entire exchanges by reading words backwards. That looks like a game. It is also two children building a private channel inside a house where the public one is expensive.

Descriptive Approach

Pappachi discovered a moth. The credit went elsewhere, he stayed bitter about it until he died, and the moth then leaves entomology altogether to become the cold thing with dense tufts on its back that lands on Ammu's heart when she is frightened. Description works that way through both novels. An object enters as furniture, gets used as an instrument, and is produced at the end as an exhibit, so the room contains nothing idle. Watch the Meenachal for the clearest case. Children swim in it in 1969, and in the present it has thickened into a ditch behind a hotel that empties into the same water, which lets Roy leave what happened to Ayemenem unstated. She described the river twice and let the reader do the subtraction.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Arundhati Roy uses across their work.

The Love Laws

Roy promotes the constraint to a proper noun. Instead of writing a scene about caste and desire, she names the rule that decides who may be loved, and how, and how much, after which every relationship in the book can be measured against a statute the reader is able to recite. The gain is economy. A named rule needs no restatement, so a glance between two people registers as a violation with no paragraph of context behind it. The difficulty is where the name comes from. It has to sound like something the family would say about itself, and Roy's does, which is why it indicts the people who use it.

The sensory pin

When the chronology breaks, she puts a physical object on both sides of the gap. The leaf-shaped birthmark on Velutha's back, the sourmetal smell of a bus rail, a plastic watch with the time painted on it at ten to two: the body registers continuity while the calendar jumps. A reader will forgive a broken sequence and will not forgive a lost thread, and the pin holds the thread. Choosing it is the work. The object has to be in the scene on its own business, or it reads as a signpost, and a signpost tells the reader that the author is worried about being followed.

The micro-inventory of power

Hierarchy in Roy arrives as a series of small transactions. Who pours, who waits, who may be touched, whose name gets shortened, whose footprints have to be swept away behind him. Mammachi remembers a time when Paravans crawled backwards doing exactly that, and the detail settles the entire question of what Velutha's presence in the house means. The tool converts a social order into scene-level action, which keeps the critique inside the story. Too much of it produces a checklist. The discipline is to keep each transaction attached to something a character wants at that moment.

Chapter titles in the characters' words

Look at her table of contents. Pappachi's Moth, Abhilash Talkies, Wisdom Exercise Notebooks, The Cost of Living: the headings come out of the family's own vocabulary rather than a narrator's summary of events. A reader is inside the household's idiom before the first sentence of the chapter, and the titles double as an index to the motif system, since each one names a thing that will return. The mechanism is cheap to copy and easy to botch. A title taken from a character's mouth has to be a phrase that character would repeat, or it hangs over the door as whimsy.

A silence the narration keeps working on

Estha stops speaking after the police station and does not start again. Roy keeps him in the book at full resolution anyway, walking to the market, cleaning, listening, so the reader receives a mind that produces no dialogue at all. The device solves a problem most writers solve badly, which is how to hold a character whose position is refusal. Grief that talks turns into explanation. Grief that keeps working, buys vegetables and washes its own clothes stays in the room, and the reader supplies the ache. It demands exact physical writing, because a character who says nothing has nothing else to be made of.

Big Things and Small Things

The title states her rule about scale. History, the state, caste and the party belong to the Big Things, and Roy assigns the plot to the Small: a boat, a jar of pickle, a toy watch, two children and a carpenter. The large forces stay in the book as pressure while the small ones carry each event, which is how a novel about a political order manages to be about a mother and a man who mends things. Reversing that assignment is what sinks most political fiction. Deciding in advance which scale carries the plot settles a hundred later questions about what a scene is allowed to be.

Literary Devices Arundhati Roy Uses

Literary devices that define Arundhati Roy's style.

Prolepsis, or the outcome placed first

Roy hands over the ending early and then spends the book on the mechanism. Sophie Mol's funeral happens in the opening chapter, long before the narration arrives at the drowning, so a reader who knows the outcome reads every subsequent kindness as a step toward it. García Márquez opens One Hundred Years of Solitude with a man in front of a firing squad and reaches back from there for the same reason, because foreknowledge converts suspense into inevitability, which is a stronger engine for a book about a family than surprise could ever be. The cost is disorientation. She pays it down with refrains, recurring objects and one emotional question that survives each jump. Straight chronology would have made that ending a twist. Announced, it becomes a verdict the reader watches being earned.

Child perception with adult consequence

The twins are the book's instrument rather than its subject. Roy gives them accurate senses and half a dictionary, so the reader receives the data and performs the interpretation the children cannot, which is what lets the taboo material land with no narrator explaining it. Faulkner built the first section of The Sound and the Fury on the same principle, with Benjy registering everything and ordering none of it. Roy's version is milder and more useful, because her children are bright and funny and wrong only about the things the adults have agreed to hide. The device also solves a tonal problem. Delight and horror can share a paragraph when the perceiving mind has no rule against putting them together.

Rhyming action, played loud

A phrase returns after the damage and the same words produce a different reaction, which Baxter calls rhyming action and prescribes in small doses, since the rhyme works best half heard. He faults Nabokov for the opposite failure, symmetries so insistent that a novel starts to feel like an exam. Roy takes the risk on purpose. Her refrains are capitalized, frequent and impossible to miss, because her subject is a family that keeps its accounts in euphemism, and a reader has to recognize the euphemism on sight for the return to register at all. What holds it together is drift. The words stand still while the cost climbs.

Documentary assembly

Her second novel is put together out of found forms. A memo from an intelligence officer who narrates his own section in the first person, Urdu couplets, a Kashmiri notebook, a roll call of protesters at Jantar Mantar, and at the centre a graveyard where Anjum rents rooms to the living. These pieces are not chapters of one voice, and the coherence comes from the address they share. Beside it stands the tighter machine of the first novel, where a single narrator holds every thread. Both structures do the same work by different means, and the second one buys her scale. A country's worth of people can be brought to one gate, and the last word goes to a dung beetle lying on its back with its legs in the air, ready to save the world.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Arundhati Roy.

Copying the lushness and leaving out the net

The prose gets called lyrical, so imitators write more image per line and assume that was the engine. What they lose is the return. Roy's best-known sentences work because a phrase, an object or a label was placed earlier and comes back carrying a bill, and the pretty line is a knot in a net tied across the whole book. With no net, a beautiful sentence is spent where it stands. The reader enjoys it, forgets it, and nothing later collects on it. Build the recurrences first, as a list, before improving a single adjective.

Jumping in time without carrying a question across the gap

Nonlinear structure is easy to produce and hard to make expensive. Writers cut between eras and expect the arrangement to generate tension by itself, then each section starts the reader over, because nothing is owed from the previous one. Roy holds a single question open under every jump, about who did what to Velutha and what the family agreed to say afterwards, and her sections are ordered by how close they come to answering it. Name the anxiety your reader carries across the break. If it cannot be stated in one clause, the structure is a maze rather than a fuse.

Writing the child's perspective for charm

A young perspective invites cuteness, and cuteness lowers the stakes to nothing. Roy's children get accuracy instead of charm, and the accuracy is what makes a reader flinch, because the horror arrives fully described and unnamed. The technical requirement is information control. The child gets the sensory data and the social cues, adult interpretation is withheld, and the distance between them is where the reader lives. Test a page by asking what the reader knows that the child does not. If the answer is nothing, the perspective has become decoration.

Reaching for the political vocabulary instead of the transaction

Her reputation as a political writer sends imitators to the abstract nouns, which read as commentary rather than narrative. Trust drops, because a reader can tell when a scene has been assembled to demonstrate a term. Roy works from the other end. A rule appears as something bodies do, a door, a queue, a language switched mid-sentence, a back entrance one man is required to use, and only once the scene has produced that evidence does she allow herself the plain naming, usually inside a single clause. Her essays are where the argument runs in the open. Keeping the two modes apart is most of the skill.

Books

Explore Arundhati Roy's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

The God of Small Things
The God of Small Things

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Arundhati Roy's writing style and techniques.

What was Arundhati Roy's writing process, especially for revision?: Twenty years of essays sit between her two novels, and they are the best evidence a writer has about how she works. The End of Imagination, The Greater Common Good and Walking with the Comrades argue in the open, with numbers, names and dates. The novels take the same material and refuse to argue at all. That difference is a method you can borrow without knowing anything about her drafts: write the case as an essay, in your own voice, at whatever length it takes, then put the essay away. What comes back into the fiction is the evidence, the transaction, the smell, the rule somebody obeys. What stays out is the conclusion, which the reader is now equipped to reach unaided.
How does Arundhati Roy structure a story without a straightforward plot?: The spine is a question rather than a sequence. In The God of Small Things it runs roughly like this: who is allowed to love whom, and what will this family do to the person who breaks the rule. Each scene either moves toward that question or shows the machinery protecting it, which is why a chapter about a pickle factory or a Kathakali performance at the temple reads as pressure instead of detour. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness swaps the question for a place. People converge on a graveyard that has become a guest house, and the converging is the plot. Both books work because something other than chronology decides the order of scenes, and both would fail the moment their author could not say what that something is.
How does Arundhati Roy write imagery this dense without slowing the story down?: Her descriptions are dated. Every object in Ayemenem belongs to a year, so a smell tells the reader where they stand in time as well as what the place is like, and a paragraph of pure sensation doubles as orientation inside a broken chronology. The river is one thing in 1969 and another in the present. The house, the factory and the sky-blue Plymouth carry their decade on them. Add her habit of making a described object work again later, and description stops being a pause. Put two questions to each detail in your own draft. What does it tell the reader about when and where they are, and which later scene will need it? A detail that answers neither is scenery.
What can writers learn from Arundhati Roy's use of repetition?: A repetition earns its place by changing what the phrase costs. The wording holds still. Le Guin's example is Micawber's something will turn up, which lands a little darker each time in David Copperfield, and Roy runs the same principle harder, so that a phrase invented by children comes back after a death and the childish words now hold the death. The practical form is a ledger. Write down each appearance of your repeated phrase and, beside it, what the reader knows at that point and what it costs the character. Where two rows read the same, one of them goes. Kundera's rule against synonyms belongs here too, since the temptation on the second appearance is to vary the wording, and varying it destroys the effect.
How does Arundhati Roy handle political material without turning fiction into an essay?: She gives the state a voice and lets it be intelligent. Biplab Dasgupta, the intelligence officer in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, narrates his own section in the first person, and he is witty, self-aware and entirely at home in what he does, which damages him more than any denunciation would. The equivalent move in the first novel is Comrade Pillai, a party man who fails Velutha politely and for sound tactical reasons. Neither man has been arranged to lose an argument. The rule underneath is that an idea belongs in fiction once it changes what a character does at a particular hour on a particular day, and stays out while it is still a position.
How do you write like Arundhati Roy without copying the surface style?: Keep your own sentences. The transferable part is a set of controls over what the reader knows, when, and at what price, and none of it requires long lines or lyric diction. Jhumpa Lahiri writes family shame at a much lower volume, in plain declaratives, and Roy's announced outcome, her carried question and her drifting refrain would all work inside prose that flat. Take one control and run it through an entire draft rather than sampling her texture. Then check the result the way she appears to: what does the reader dread, what does the reader know that a character does not, and which phrase has changed its price since the last time it appeared.

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