Meet NUNUm's Contributor: Gargi Mehra

NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Interview with ​Gargi Mehra

What was the first book you remember picking up and reading by yourself?

There must have been many children’s books but the first one I remember is a Famous Five, called, quite simply Five Have Fun.

What writer(s) or which book(s) influenced your decision to become a writer?​

PG Wodehouse. I first read The Mating Season at age 12 or so, and remember thinking where can I read more of this hilarious material? And how can I write like this? Reader, I still can’t write like that, but that doesn’t mean I don’t try.

Is there a writing craft book that you would recommend to new writers?

There’s a book I don’t see widely recommended called Be a Successful Writer: 99 Surefire Checklists by Gordon Wells. It kickstarted my writing practice. I still have it and still refer to it!

Is there a writer who has influenced your current writing style?
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At the moment it must be a mash-up of all the styles I read online and in print. However the writer I have in my mind and whom I’m always trying to impress is the one and only – PG Wodehouse.

Why write flash fiction?
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Honestly I picked up flash due to paucity of time. I had written short stories of 2-5000 words for ten years and though I loved it, I was beginning to find it increasingly difficult. With two kids and a fulltime hectic job, I do my writing on the weekends only. And it would take at least 2-4 weekends to finish a short story. But I had a number of smaller ideas that I found I could explore within a shorter 

word count. And I could finish writing them within a weekend and editing them the next. As an added bonus, I found that writing and reading the stories aroused as much emotion as an entire short story.

What advice would you give someone who is just starting to send their work out to journals?

Try and evaluate honestly if your work fits the journal in terms of theme and writing style. I ignored this step in my early stages of submitting and paid for it with a ton of rejections until a more experienced writing friend bluntly told me my voice needed improvement.

This story explores emotionally difficult terrain, yet it contains moments of humour and absurdity. What does humour allow you to say that a more straightforward treatment of the same material might not?

I think the humour and sarcasm make it more memorable and induce more pathos than a straightforward treatment which might only elicit sympathy for the narrator.

Why do mothers appear frequently in your work?
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It’s the first and closest relationship most humans have. Its only natural that this provides the most material.

If someone else in the story were allowed to narrate it, who would it be? And what changes would they make to the story?
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Only the mother could narrate this, and she would insist the whole thing was a misunderstanding.​

Gargi Mehra is a writer, a computer engineer, and a mother. She plays the piano and thrives on word games including crosswords, Scrabble and Wordle. Her creative writing has appeared in several literary magazines online and in print. She lives with her husband and two children in Pune, India.

NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art