Craft Talks 2025
Writing workshops tell you what to do to fix your writing. But every experienced writer knows that writing is not a problem to be solved — it is a problem to be lived.
Craft Talks make their subject the problems that don't resolve — and ask mentors for an honest account of their own work: the questions that animate it, the difficulties it keeps throwing up, the answers that haven't come.
Craft Talks are, to our knowledge, the first initiative of their kind by a literary institution in Pakistan. They are now integral to what LUMS Young Writers Workshop does, and we offer them freely to everyone living their intractable writerly problems.
Kafka’s In the Penal Colony provides an insight into the psychology of power at play in the violence that has been inflicted on the Palestinians. What does it mean for writers to refuse to be “tourists” to this spectacle of suffering?
On WhatsApp voice notes, bird’s nests, truth, beauty, my friends, their minds, the mind of my dog, being big, being small, facing my reality, fashioning a life, writing a novel, coming of age, et cetera.
Read More. Write More. These seem to be the only two proven ways to improve as a writer.. But what about all the other pieces of advice so prevalent across craft books, lectures, workshops, MFA programs, and that one pretentious group of English majors. Does any of it work? Is there a Holy Grail of Writing, a possible secret third thing?
Don't be in a toxic relationship with your writing. Do some PDA and shout about your love from the rooftops. Don't act cool. Don't take advice from blocked writers. Look stupid.
This craft talk is about community -- about how our communities shape, inspire and sometimes challenge our work as writers, and how there can never be one without the other.
This is about the many ways I was unable to finish my novel sooner than expected and how those reasons benefitted or affected my writing. I talk about how writing is impacted by one's lived experiences and that one feeds the other. Some personal anecdotes, some jokes, and some craft advice.
In a life where where conversations are made of small talk - where you talk about everything but what matters most, ‘Why Write’ is an essay about the question of why we must endure and suffer through the process and journey of arriving at our own truth rather than being served the truth on a platter in a world of self-help and influencers.
This craft lecture takes its title after Vijay Seshadri's translation of Ghalib to celebrate the perpetual agony of writing. The speaker delves into what it means to "become" a writer, and why one should wish to never create the perfect piece.
Observations on writing in community and having your best thoughts around your best friends.