Meet NUNUM's contributor: Snehal Bhadani

NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art

Interview with ​Snehal Bhadani

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

​When I was a kid, my dad used to bring me to the neighbourhood library and I’d pick out as many books as I wanted. The first major series I remember reading on my own was Nancy Drew. Seventeen years later, I still go back to that same library and pick out whatever calls to me.

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

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It is thoughtful, encouraging, and wonderfully humane. It makes writing feel less intimidating and more possible.

Is there a writer who has influenced your current writing style?

I am still developing my style, but I have certainly been shaped by writers like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, and more recently, Han Kang. I am drawn to writing that is intimate, searching, and attentive to emotional texture.

Why write flash fiction?

I love flash fiction and micro creative nonfiction because they allow you to preserve a particular thought, image, or moment without having to build an elaborate plot around it. It can also expand your reader base by making your work feel more accessible and easy to read and less intimidating to new readers or to those without time to indulge in longer pieces.

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

Put your work out there. You never know where it might resonate. At the same time, try not to place all your hopes on one journal. Keep building your portfolio, keep submitting, and the  good news will come on its own.

What makes a piece feel finished to you?
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I find finishing a piece to be the hardest part. Usually, I stop editing when I feel that adding more words would only dilute that core feeling. A piece feels finished when the emotion settles and leaves just enough unsaid.

Why write at all?

I think human beings are born to create, whether through writing, art, tools, software, apps, or anything else they make with intention. For me, writing is one way of documenting my life and it comforts me to know that I've created something tangible that can be found and felt by others.

What do you hope a reader carries away from your work?
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I hope a reader walks away with a sense of resonance, as though they have briefly inhabited a familiar emotional space. If someone finishes a piece and feels that it has verbalised something they had felt but never quite articulated, that feels like a real success to me.

Snehal Bhadani is an emerging writer based in Singapore whose work spans poetry, creative nonfiction, and haiku. Her writing has previously appeared in trampset, Blue Marble Review,and an anthology by Wingless Dreamer Publishers.
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NUNUM

Blending Flash Fiction & Art