On Seeing Deeply: What Arundhati Roy Taught Me About Attention and Art
Storycraft: Helping You Thrive Through Story - Mini-series on Learning from Great Writing
If you’re new here, every week I share tips, insights and actionable ideas on writing, travel writing and mindful travel through the lens of a novelist and travel writer (Lonely Planet, DK Travel, etc.) in three newsletters: Storycraft, Write Your Way Around the World and The Green Travel Guide.
Welcome, thanks for coming on the journey!
Mini-Series: Lessons from Great Writing
There are many writers that have shaped me both as a reader and writer. In this mini-series I’m sharing a few of my favourites and the lessons I’ve learned from their writing. Alongside each week’s essay there’s a free mini-resource included on the themes covered to help you hone your writing craft, and at the end of the series there’ll be a complete Writers’ Reading Kit for subscribers (resources, tools and reading lists). Onwards…
2. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Wonder, Simplicity & Purpose
3. Seamus Heaney: Writing as Excavation
4. Gabriel García Márquez: Beyond Magic Realism
5. Arundhati Roy: On the Secret of the Great Stories
“…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic.” - Arundhati Roy
There are some books that I find myself returning to again and again. Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things is one of those books.
I vividly remember how I felt the first time I read it. Her writing pulled me into that lush, dreamlike world of Kerala (the world in which she grew up) that she brought so fully to life on the page.
Here’s a little taste of her writing:
“It was raining when Rahel came back to Ayemenem. Slanting silver ropes slammed into loose earth, plowing it up like gunfire. The old house on the hill wore its steep, gabled roof pulled over its ears like an old hat.”
From her writing, the main lesson I learned was that beauty and force can go hand in hand in writing. One doesn’t cancel out the other. Rather, it can build a resonance that stays with the reader - being able to evoke contrary emotions simultaneously makes for fiction that lives on in the memory longer.
I learned that story should reflect the political and social context that surrounds it - but that this can be brought into the narrative through small details. When she writes about caste, class, colonial legacy, power, and injustice, it is deeply embedded in everyday life.
I learned how to mix intertextuality and hybrid influences - to draw in references to other works. Her writing can reference English classics, Indian epics, local performance arts (e.g. Kathakali), various languages, and multiple narrative traditions. That layering and awareness of different literary traditions brings a richness to the writing (and the reading!).
I learned that these small details can become a talisman within the story, and that they gain resonance and meaning through repetition. Whether gestures, smells, local flora or fauna, these objects or images become laden with memory. They begin to ‘hold’ memory and act as gateways or portals into trauma or love.
I learned that you can play with time in your storytelling. Roy’s story travels in fragmented ways. It’s nonlinear. It shuttles between past and present, memory and rupture. Roy begins threads, interrupts them, circles back.
I learned the power of close observation - of being as fully open as possible to life around so that you can bring that in all its layers, contradictions, beauty and force to the page.
I learned that the lyrical and political can mix. Her writing is lush, rich in sensory detail, time-deep and immersive - the poetic adds rather than distracting here. Yet she is not scared of tackling inequalities or injustice in her writing.
I learned that a writer’s work can embrace fiction, non-fiction and memoir - that there are many ways of writing and engaging with the world around you.
I learned the power of tapping into that childhood voice we all carry - and I have often written fiction with younger narrators because there is both a clarity to the way they see the world, and at the same time things that can only be grasped at - that wonder, curiosity and becoming is at the heart of her storytelling here.
Roy herself was influenced by writers like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, John Berger, Joyce, Nabokov. All storytellers who write with moral conviction and force, who play with voice and form, and ways of seeing.
For me, The God of Small Things is an almost perfect novel. It does not surprise me that after writing it, she turned her attention mainly to non-fiction and activism, writing essays on environment, inequality, democracy, and indigenous rights, and now more recently to memoir. She is a truth-seeker, whether in fiction or non-fiction.
“I was definitely influenced by them … I’m grateful for the lessons one learns from great writers, but also from imperialists, sexists, friends, lovers, oppressors, revolutionaries — everybody. Everybody has something to teach a writer.” - Arundhati Roy (The Paris Review)
Recommended Reading - Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things (1997)
Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (2015)
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2018)
My Seditious Heart (2019) [collected non-fiction]
Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025) [memoir]
“I think there is an increasing danger of novels becoming too streamlined, domesticated. When you read Vasily Grossman or the big Russian novels, they are wild and unwieldy, but now there’s a way in which literature is being commodified and packaged—is it romance, is it a thriller? Commercial? Literary? What shelf should we put it on? And now we have the phenomenon of the M.F.A. novel, which can often be a beautifully confected product. There are no rough edges. The number of characters, the length of chapters, it’s all skillfully orchestrated—and I’ll say that male novelists are allowed leeway there. They’re more easily allowed the big canvas. But with a woman, it’s like, How many characters are there in that book? Isn’t it a bit too political? I’d ask them, How many characters are there in One Hundred Years of Solitude or War and Peace or whatever?” - Arundhati Roy in The Paris Review
Mini-Lessons for Writers from Arundhati Roy’s Writing
1. Let your “small things” do heavy lifting.
Roy’s attention to tiny gestures, objects, sensory cues makes a scene feel lived and layered.
Pick a scene in your draft: identify one mundane object or gesture (a teacup, a threadbare curtain, a child’s toy). Write a short paragraph where you let that object reflect internal emotional conflict or memory.
2. Use time as a fractal, rather than something linear.
Roy shows that memory, trauma, longing don’t obey chronological order.
Take one emotional turning point in your story and write it three times: once in past tense, once in present, once as memory triggered mid-scene. See what changes in voice, rhythm, meaning.
3. Weave politics into lived life
Her fiction doesn’t feel “political” in the abstract; it shows social forces as shaping intimacy, identity, love.
In a scene, pause and ask: what sociohistorical or power relations are presupposed here? Try embedding one small reference (a news snippet, a family anecdote) to that structure.
4. Let beauty and force co-exist
Her prose often pauses for lyricism, even in confrontation or violence.
Take a high-tension moment in your work (conflict, confrontation). Then rewrite a sentence or two in that moment to heighten sensory/language beauty (metaphor, rhythm) without weakening tension.
“To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you… To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple… Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.” - Arundhati Roy
What are some of your favourite books, the ones that gave you the encouragement to write, that inspired your creativity? Why?
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Write With Purpose: Develop Your Voice as a Writer
Happy to share, that Write With Purpose is now live. So if you are ready to develop your writing voice, discover the greater ‘why’ behind your writing, and align your writing practice to write in a more compelling, powerful and purposeful way, then Write With Purpose is for you.
It’s self-paced, allows for quick engagement (taking 1-2 weeks+ to complete), and includes 17 audio lessons, a 54 page workbook full of actionable exercises, prompts, and recommended reading. It’s suitable for both travel and fiction writers. Any queries, drop me a DM.
What Others Say ❤️
“…there’s so much I can take from it in order to grow my writing style.”
“Just what I needed to haul me out of a creative slump!”
“Thanks for the encouragement - your words remind me that our stories belong here.”
“While going through the lessons I already found out five experiences that I am longing to speak about. Your work will encourage me to start it right now. Thank you again.”
“This is brilliant, Laura. Just discovered you. Very glad to have found you.”
Find out more about how to Write With Purpose here.
Also this week:
In The Green Travel Guide - Future-Proof Travel: How to Go Green in 2026 along with a free mini-guide to 7 Green Adventures To Do This Year
In Write Your Way Around The World - The Part of Writing that Writers Hate - And Why It Matters + news on upcoming Travel Journal Club
Over on Notes, sharing reading recommendations from a few of my favourites and a sneak peek at book edits for the upcoming travel book.
If you enjoyed this content, a ❤️ share, restack or recommend is greatly appreciated!
Until next week,
Laura
Laura McVeigh
Author | Travel Writer | Storyteller
lauramcveigh.com | lauramcveightravel.com | travel-writing.com | greentravelguides.world
Laura McVeigh is a Northern Irish novelist and travel writer. Her internationally bestselling writing has been widely translated. Her latest novel Lenny (described as a ‘remarkable novel’ (BBC) and ‘an essential read’ (Irish Independent)) travels between Libya and Louisiana. She has authored books for Lonely Planet, DK Travel, bylines in Irish Times, Irish Independent and her writing has been featured in BBC, Newsweek, New Internationalist and many more. Former CEO of a global writers’ organisation working with writers from 145 countries, Laura is founder of Travel-Writing.Com and Green Travel Guides. She works with writers, founders, and sustainable brands on storytelling. Laura also writes weekly on writing, travel writing and green travel on Substack.
Thank you Laura for this synopsis of Roy's style. I have read and loved both of her fiction books. Total joy. This week I finished reading her memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. Very powerful - upsetting, insightful, propulsive and hopeful. Highly recommend it. I will review it in my October Reads.
This is great, thanks for sharing Lauren. I’ve always enjoyed Roy’s writing (I’m busy re-reading God of Small Things before we head to India). I’m looking forward to reading her latest—she had a great interview in the NYtimes in August which is worth a read (if you haven’t already).