“I love surprises”

"Stories change and evolve as you write,” shared noted screenplay writer Sooni Taraporevala at an IndieTalk session organized by DearCinema on July 19, 2014 in Bombay. Starting as a photographer, Taraporevala confessed, "I didn’t know what a three act structure was when I wrote my first screenplay Salaam Bombay! I didn’t study screenplay writing — I came to it via literature, photography and film studies (watching, analyzing and writing about films).

Sooni Taraporevala: "writing is re-writing"

"People say: only write what you know. Some people say: write what you don’t know. I say: Write what you don’t know but be responsible to the subject and find out everything there is about it before you start writing. Research is an invaluable tool… Our imaginations are limited while the real world is much more exciting — if you research the world is your oyster,” she mentioned. "The more particular you are about a story, the most universal it becomes. It’s not the other way around. Being generic and homogenous doesn’t make a story universal,” Taraporevala explained.
She mentioned that a friend had given her advice that she has found to be very true. "When I’m writing on any given day, I don’t stop at a full stop — i.e. at a place where I don’t know where I will be going the next day. I stop at a comma. It’s easier to kick start the writing the next day when you know where you’re going…
"Writing is re-writing… The more you re-write, the better it becomes. My average is more than seven drafts for screenplays that have made it to screen,” she confessed. "The flipside is… sometimes you develop a screenplay so much that it never gets made… An outline is like a rough blueprint. I make provisions for it to change in the course of writing the screenplay. If I don’t allow myself to be surprised during the writing, I am not going to surprise anyone else. I enjoy the moments when something that my character says or does surprises me. I don’t enjoy following a preconceived map that I have made. I like to explore, and I love surprises,” Taraporevala informed the gathering.