First, many non-resident Indians have taken to full-time writing supplemented by teaching and journalism. The Indian diaspora constitutes a sizeable chunk of the upmarket in Britain and America and this is good enough reason to get into this field. Add these to our own elite, and we get a decent print run to justify publication. Besides, Indian English appeals in its own way to the English-speaking elite: it is authentic stuff with a liberal sprinkling of English and Hindustani words that begin in one language and end up with another. Second, Salman Rushdie?s Midnight?s Children established a distinctive pattern for the Indian novel: the family chronicle that is also the history of the nation, a distorted autobiography that embodied in an equally distorted form the political life of India. Third, the rise of numerous writing schools that help chisel whatever latent writing skills you might have into a presentable package.

Hence the question: Which of the three factors has contributed most to the rise of the Indian novel in English? Obviously all three have interacted with each other but it has been argued that writing schools have done the most to polish writing skills acceptable to the market.

What do these courses ?teach? and can writing be taught if the love for language itself is not present? There are two books that serve as guides of almost all writing courses today: Thomas & Turner?s Clear and Simple as the Truth and William K. Zinsser?s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. There are several ground rules but the core is: leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip while reading a novel ? thick paragraphs of prose that have too many words in them. The strength of a sentence lies in the verb and the simpler the sentence the better. Never use a verb other than ?said? to carry a dialogue. The verb is the writer sticking his nose in. Also, never use an adverb to modify the verb ?said?. Don?t go into great descriptions of places and things.These tend to bring the flow of the story to a standstill. Work from the abstract to the concrete. A writer must have a story to tell that he feels he must tell.

Given these rules of thumb, writing cannot really be taught. Workshops, therefore, can be dangerous. The best the teacher can do is to function as a good editor to help a student train his ear so that he can come to edit himself or herself. And good editing really means not what you need to put in but what you can no longer leave out. If a student moves from one workshop to another, he is doomed to lose his sense of hearing or his sense of feeling which is what good writing is all about. All a writer needs is to be true to himself.