By Diya Shetty, Grade 11
For her masterclass, titled “Breaking Biases”, author Divya Anand was greeted by a room packed with enthusiastic children. A quick poll revealed that every one of them had read Misfit Madhu, Divya’s book about a girl in 7th grade who builds an app that goes viral. Divya began taking us through her own process of dismantling stereotypes when coming up with a story and its characters. In her words, “I try to write about things I know about, and things I’m interested about.”
As someone working in product management, Divya explained the parallels between writing and building products in technology, in terms of breaking biases. Up until 2011, crash tests for cars were conducted with an average human male’s proportions. This could be potentially dangerous, leaving a woman or a child worse off in a car crash. Another example was Alexa, and how she was bad at understanding the voices of young girls. Many members of the audience shared their own anecdotes of the same. Though they don’t “have a bad intention”, these thought processes in product design with embedded bias that can exclude significant sections of society and have a detrimental impact.
There are two ways an author can go about writing a story. The first is to start with a character, and to have the character ‘speak to’ them, to inform them how the plot develops. The second is to start with a storyline and then develop characters. The latter was preferred by the author.
Divya didn’t mince words. “I have no moral, I have no lesson…My only objective is to come up with an entertaining story.” As a thought-provoking exercise, the audience was asked to think of the worst thing that could happen to a trading app (like the one in the story), and the kids brainstormed on possible alternate storylines to Misfit Madhu, in which leaked exam papers were sold. Most of the storylines were not as dramatic as the original, and this was used to establish how to build “escalating tension” and a powerful climax.
As a strategy to get inspiration for stories, Divya recommended something a tad unconventional. “All authors do this, by the way—we eavesdrop on people.” She encouraged the audience to do a ‘what-if’ exercise while eavesdropping on strangers—to think about the backstory of the conversation, where the people came from, their jobs, etc. There’s always something interesting to listen to! Listening to conversations can also be useful to understand what is realistic for each character to say.
After coming up with a storyline, the first thing to do when developing a character is to decide the name. “Names have a lot of meaning.” She described how Indian names particularly carry cultural or familial significance—interestingly, in India, if you know someone’s full name, it could potentially tell you a lot about them; where they are from, their culture, religion, heritage etc. It is easy to make many assumptions about their traditions, beliefs or values. One can choose names thoughtfully depending on their relevance to the storyline.
Every character has a “big want” or aspiration. This could be to fit in, or to be popular. They also have “a big fear.” Divya also added, “Any sort of main character should have a quirk that makes them interesting.” When describing a character, instead of directly writing their traits, it should be brought out implicitly through descriptions. By expressions stating that the character pushed the hair out of her eyes, or that her glasses fogged up, you can indirectly reveal emotions or intentions without outright stating them.
The children were then asked to create their own character descriptions, and the audience began sharing the unique, nuanced characters that they developed. With that interactive activity, Divya’s engaging and insightful masterclass came to a close.
