Women Writers' Fest 2018
On February 23rd and February 24th, SheThePeople.TV organized the Mumbai edition of the event Women Writers' Festival 2018. The event was held at The Title Waves in Bandra on February 23rd and at GoetheInsitut /Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai on February 24th.
The choice of two events made sure that a larger participation of the people both from South Mumbai as well as the suburbs.
The event focused primarily on women writers including both - fiction and non-fiction writers. The topics of discussion covered all the genres and lifestyle followed by the women writers, from parenting from parenting, speculative fiction, crime writing, business writing, gender issues, urban living as well as new media like blogging.
Some of the eminent women personalities were the speakers of the event like Annie Zaidi, Kiran Manral, Sagarika Ghose, Meghna Pant, Elsa Marie D’Silva, Anjali Kirpalani, Aanam Chashmawala, Ila Johari, Prerna Sinha, Kavya D’Souza et al.
One of the panel of the Women Writers' fest discussed on "The Business of Blogging". Panel consisted of famous bloggers across versatile industries like fashion, beauty, parenting and writing. Prerna Sinha of Maa of All Blogs, Aanam Chashmawala of What When Wear, Kavya D’souza of Streak Hue Fall and Ila Johari of The Fleamarket Queen talk about the difficulties of blogging, and what it takes to be a successful blogger. The panel was moderated by
Anjali Kirpalani.
Start with what you have – whether that’s a camera phone or a DSLR. You can slowly build your blog with time. It helps to freelance or work part-time while starting out as a blogger since this gives you the security of having a fixed pay check coming in at the end of every month.
The issues faced today and in the past when it came to blogging was discussed, the sources of revenue, how to create the brand identity of the blog etc. were some of the questions discussed by the panelists.
While discussing about the consistency in running a successful blog, Aanam's words were “I found it to be a very challenging for people to take me seriously but I think when you speak to a person, they learn to take you seriously. As a woman, it’s a tad bit more difficult to be taken seriously especially if they see you wearing red lipstick. But there’s more to that and I made it a point for them to take me seriously. I have a team of four now and I am 26 years old. Anyone who sets a meeting up with me won’t dare to not take me seriously The topic concluded with the discussion about the challenges of blogging.
Kavya's take on the challenges was, “The biggest challenge is that things are changing every day.
There are no office rules and there is no hierarchy. The internet is a portal that is fast changing. You’ve to keep up with what is coming out on social media. Being in the public eye just might be the biggest challenge of all.”
Day 2 of the event involved discussion about the relationship of women writers and crime writing, 'When Women Write Crime" was the focus of the SheThePeople.TV's Women Writers' Festival 2018 panel. The panel was informational and insightful one with responses from panelists comprising of crime journalists and writers. Puja Changoiwala, Archana Sarat, Aarti V Raman and Annie Zaidi talk about the research that goes hand in hand with being a crime writer and the expanding genre of crime fiction, among other things, panel was moderated by Meghna Pant.
According to Archana Sarat, a 2015 statistic by National Crime Records Bureau revealed that a 2.24 million crimes against women were reported in the past decade.
The sub topics of the discussion were whether the crime writing is male centric only to which Puja Changoiwala's viewpoint was that it's a matter of expertise and is independent of the gender. It also focused on the researching aspect of crime fiction writing. The writer has to go beyond the Wikipedia in order to add details in the book.
"Writing needs to be designed by the author so as to say what it has to naturally and not in a manner that is preachy."
Annie Zaidi
Puja Changoiwala’s novel The Front Page Murders is about a serial killer in which she had to trace 20 years of his life. This took extremely intensive research where she interviewed the people related to or who knew him and even interviewed the killer himself. Even the publishers are seeing demand of more true crime stories and this is one genre that is taking off.
You can catch this conversation on SheThePeople.TV’s Facebook page.