Process Talk: More from Padma Venkatraman

Here’s a continuation of my talk with Padma Venkatraman about her middle grade novel, Born Behind Bars.

[Uma] Born Behind Bars is written in brief vignettes. Was that form there from the beginning or did it evolve? How did that work for you?

[Padma] That form was sort of there from the beginning,. I’d see a scene and then I’d write it down. That’s often how I write but sometimes with some books I feel like I want to tell it in a different way. This one stayed that way. I felt like in some ways some of it wanted to be a poem but I didn’t want it to be a novel in verse.

If you think of writing on this big spectrum with evocative, lush, rich prose on end and lean, spare verse on the other, then vignettes can fall somewhere in the middle and I wanted that. I was reading a lot of poetry during the pandemic, and I began to think about prose poems. I really liked the look and feel of a prose poem.

[Uma] I wonder if the small container of a vignette is also a reflection of how we were all in our own spaces, looking out at the world through defined windows. Thanks, Padma!

Finally, here’s a brief video snippet from our conversation, in which Padma talks about the voices of her child characters in this book.