Interview with Writer Natasha Khullar Relph

1. Have you always been a writer?

I grew up in New Delhi, India, and I’d always been interested in writing but had never really considered it as a career option. The closest I came to getting formally educated in journalism was when I applied for a degree in mass media before I went to college. As it turns out, the results of the qualifying exam for engineering came out a day before I was to give the qualifying exam for journalism, and since I had my top choice of university for Information Technology, I said, heck, why not do that?

And then I failed my first year in engineering.

I started writing while I prepared for my semester exams, and was earning a full-time living with it by the time I finished college. I guess I was always meant to end up in journalism. Just took a few detours on the way.

2. When did you realize that maybe writing was actually a "thing" you could do, get published and even sell?

Pretty much immediately. As I said, I was a college student in Delhi when I first decided to become a writer. It was 2002. Within the week, I had learned about query letters and started sending five per day. When I decide to go after something, I typically do so with gusto. I pitched and I wrote on a regular basis. By the time I graduated three years later, I’d already worked at a national magazine in India, created a profitable online business, and been making a full-time living with my writing for two years.

Graduation was a formality—I was already a full-time professional writer by the time I finished college.

3. What was your first sale as a writer and how did it feel to sell your work?

I was looking for things to do as I retook my exams and the words of my English teacher, who had always told me to explore writing, echoed in my head. I looked for resources online, pitched a story to a US-based magazine for college students on surviving failure in college, and got an assignment. A cool $100 later, I was hooked.

4. How has writing helped you in other areas of life besides being something you could earn money from?

I can’t think of an area of my life writing hasn’t contributed to, really. There’s nothing I can imagine myself being other than a writer. But if you’re looking for specifics, there is one particular aspect of my life that was changed completely through my writing. I wrote a novel a couple of years ago about some traumatic incidents in my life. I wanted to write the novel to tell the story, not to heal, but I was amazed at how different I felt a few months after I finished the novel. I had gotten mentally stuck in my trauma—and so had my writing—and that novel opened up a trapdoor that released all the negative energy and allowed me to be free once again. I was, incredibly, healed.

5. What was your biggest accomplishment as a writer?

That’s a tough one, because I don’t think in terms of biggest accomplishments anymore. I’ve had a career spanning 20+ years. I’ve won a bunch of awards, hit a lot of my income goals, and done meaningful work that I’m proud of. I’ve written 10+ books. So now I think in terms of the last year I’ve lived, or how my days measure up to the ideal in my mind. That’s where I feel my biggest accomplishments are right now—I feel like I have an incredible level of control over my life and the work I choose to do. Freedom is my highest value and I think my biggest accomplishment, over my entire career, would have to be that I’ve managed to live my life so far with a level of freedom that not many people are lucky enough to experience.

6. Who has inspired you the most in the writing field?

I tend to be more inspired by pieces of work than people in general. So I’m more likely to see a really good piece of writing and be influenced by its history—how did the writer come across this story, how did they pitch it, how did they report it, etc.

I look at the Pulitzer website frequently as well as “Best of” writing books and find stories in there that catch my interest. It’s a great way to learn from the best writers by just following the trajectory of their work and their writing.

Gene Weingarten’s stories typically fit into this category. This is one of his stories that made a big impact on me and influenced my writing.

(Trigger warning: child death)

7. What are some of the challenges you have faced as a writer and how did you overcome them?

My location probably put several editors off hiring me and understandably so. It’s harder to trust someone all the way across the globe when she’s asking for as much money as your current stable of writers, but she’s less accessible. The way I overcame it was by one, writing near-perfect query letters and proposals that would impress editors greatly (even if that meant I was putting in a lot more effort than my Western counterparts) and two, by focusing on stories in my own backyard. I pitched India-based stories that only I could because of my location and learned how to make them relevant to their readers.

I live in England now and I still do that. A couple of years ago, a US newspaper passed me over for a regular freelance journalism gig because I’m based in Brighton, not London. They emailed me this year to say they’d really like to work with me now because they’ve realized that the stories they were publishing were too London-centric and they’d like to see someone cover the whole of the country.

I’ve long said that my biggest challenge—my location—turned out in the end, to be my biggest advantage. And that’s still true today.

8. What is the best writing advice you have ever received and why do you feel it is important?

I think Susan Glaspell says it best: “In writing… remember that the biggest stories are not written about wars, or about politics, or even murders. The biggest stories are written about the things which draw human beings closer together.”

9. What sort of writing do you do now?

I returned to journalism again this year after a few years away. I’m now filing weekly stories for global newspapers and magazines, just as I’ve always done. I’ve also published eight books in my Freelance Writer’s Guide series of books and I’ll be bringing out more books in the series this year. And I’ve written a couple of novels, which I’m thinking about indie publishing.

Outside of my personal writing, I love working with and coaching writers to help them achieve their goals. People I’ve worked with have broken into top publications like National Geographic and The New York Times within weeks of working with me, grown their incomes to six figures and beyond, and finished books that had been languishing on their desks for years. One of my best abilities as a coach is being able to see exactly what is keeping a person stuck and I like nothing more than to experience that moment when I finally help someone move through that block.

10. Where can we find some of your work online?

You can find me at www.natasharelph.com.

I also run a weekly business newsletter for writers. You can find that at www.thewordling.com

11. What advice do you have for other aspiring writers thinking of taking the leap of getting their work published?

Just start. You’ll get far more clarity after you begin than if you’re trying to figure it all out before you start. And more opportunities start to appear, too.

12. What are your final thoughts about being a writer?

I wish I hadn’t listened to all the experts and the advice about starting with local publications and the “realistic” advice about freelancing not being a viable career.

I was told I couldn’t do it from India. I was told it was impossible to make a decent living with it. I was told you could chase the awards or the money but not both. I was told that if you wrote stories about social issues, you wouldn’t get paid for that work. My highest-paying assignments have been about human rights issues.

The hardest thing for me, personally, was learning to trust my gut and to allow myself to follow my own path, even if that meant that I had falls along the way. Because now I am proof that it doesn’t have to be love or money. For me, it is both.0

ABOUT NATASHA:

I’m a freelance journalist, author, and entrepreneur.

I’ve lived and worked from four continents and many countries. I currently divide my time between Brighton, UK, and New Delhi, India. 

I hate moral policing, love nerdy conversations, and have frequently been responsible for friends and family locking themselves inside their homes after reading what’s been written about them in national magazines.

Before reaching career nirvana as a freelance journo, I spent a year as a corporate slave working nine-to-nine in a four-by-four excuse for a cubicle. Luckily, I came to my senses and gave up my formal attire and make-up for sweatpants and dark circles.

Since then, I’ve managed to convince editors at The New York Times, TIME, CNN, BBC, ABC News, The Independent, The CS Monitor, Ms., and several other publications to publish my stories. 

As a magazine features writer, I have contributed to several women’s and general-interest publications, including various international editions of Elle, Marie Claire, Vogue, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan. 

My assignments have required me to trek up and down the tsunami-ravaged coast of India, live with Tibetan nuns, interview coffin makers, learn how cellphones are designed, and so much more. 

I was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Journalism; the recipient of the Development Journalist of the Year award at the Developing Asia Journalism Awards Forum in Tokyo, and the winner of the Silver Excel, a trade magazine award, from the Society of National Association Publications (USA) for my work on female wastepickers in India. 

I’m the author of Shut Up and Write: The No-Nonsense, No B.S. Guide to Getting Words on the Page and seven other bestselling books for writers. My work has also been included in the books The Lonely Planet Travel Anthology: True Stories from the World’s Best Writers (Lonely Planet, 2016), Breaking Out: How to Build Influence in a World of Competing Ideas (Harvard Business Review Press, May 2013), Voices of Alcoholism (LaChance Publishing, April 2008), and Chicken Soup for the Pre-Teen Soul 2 (HCI, June 2004). 

You can reach me anytime at tasha(at)natasharelph(dot)com.