The Art and Craft of Fiction

For years there was nothing worth talking about regarding my writing. If I felt anything at all about it, it was that I could never be a writer. But then the desire to write stories came and I wrote a few and then a few more. An idea would come and complete itself in the form of a story. After my first collection of stories, Marriages are made in India, was published in 2001 and readers told me that I could write, if only to save my life, I began to write a novel. In more than seven years I completed my first novel, The Tailor's Needle, which is to be out this month in the UK. My second novel went much faster; it got written in a year's time. Emancipation, which is a thesis novel, is now complete and I am approaching agents for its publication. Along with this second novel, grew my second collection of stories, The English World and Other Stories, even this collection is now ready for publication.
I find it difficult to say where the craft of fiction ends and its art begins. Perhaps every author of fiction must of necessity encounter both art as well as craft in his writing.