Write From Your Heart: The Story of a Young Author
Ten-year old Zurisaday is not just a Benjamin G. Brown School fifth grader. She’s also a published author.
Zurisaday dreamed of writing since she first started reading every day. She first got an inkling that she might be able to write a book when she went to an author talk by Amir Shah about his writing process at a camp run by her mother. When Zurisaday came home from the talk, she sat down and just started writing.
The origin story of the story was actually an illustration. Zurisady drew the three main characters and showed her mother. Her mother, Prerna, told her they looked like characters in a book and Zurisaday says she “took her words to heart and started writing The Bindi Girls.”
Zurisady wanted to write about girls like her – Indian girls – and to write about a great adventure. The Bindi Girls follows three Indian-American girls on a trip to India, where they develop their interests and talents, meet up with family members, deepen their friendships, and learn about themselves as individuals.
Zurisaday hopes that her readers will come away knowing that “they shouldn’t be afraid to show themselves for who they really are, and that friendship is a bond that won’t break, and your friends are more loyal than you might know. And I want them to learn that they don’t need to be scared to unleash their full power.”
The book took Zurisaday over a year to write. While Zurisaday loves to write, she credits her two little brothers’ enthusiasm for her book with helping to push her through a period of writer’s block as well as some strategies from her father, Anoop. During the writing process, her South Asian friends advised her on Indian cultural details and ideas about where the characters should visit. (There is even a helpful glossary of terms at the end of the book.) Other friends provided positive feedback and were, in her words, “just excited that I wrote the book.”
She identifies most with the character Laal, who also wants to be a songwriter, but another character’s creative interests are loosely based on her artistic middle brother. In addition to the writing, she wrote two songs for the book, which she set to music with her piano teacher.
While Zurisady was writing, her father researched self-publishing and found a way for her to publish the book through Amazon. She was astonished to realize she could publish a book. When asked what she thinks about self-publishing, she answered philosophically: “I mean, there’s two sides. It either means that books might decrease in quality. Or, since more people can write, and have the freedom to write, there might be a lot more books that are really good and have a lot of diversity.”
Her plans for the future include fifth grade, more quiet writing, illustrating, piano, and playtime with her little brothers, and, of course, a sequel to The Bindi Girls! She offers this advice to other young writers to “just keep writing and … you can change anything, but to start, just keep writing from your heart.”