Why Scope Matters, featuring Tara Dorabji

Feb 10, 2025

Tara Dorabji

This week we’re focusing on a little celebrated but much important aspect of storytelling: your story’s scope. How much ground are you trying to cover and how do you execute the pacing? These are the questions you must answer if you know and understand your scope. This week’s guest, Tara Dorabji, has a new novel, Call Her Freedom, that spans more than five decades, and yet, it’s a relatively short book. And so, it packs a punch. Books can cover a single day or a hundred years, and consideration for how to unfold stories of such extremes and everything in between originates with the author. Join us for a bit of a deep dive into this fascinating conversation, and Tara Dorabji’s insights about writing, publishing, and more.

ABOUT TARA DORABJI

Tara Dorabji is the author of the novel, Call Her Freedom, winner of the Simon & Schuster Books Like Us first novel contest. She is the daughter of Parsi-Indian and German-Italian migrants. Her documentary film series on human rights defenders in Kashmir won awards at over a dozen film festivals throughout Asia and the USA. Tara’s publications include Al Jazeera, The Chicago Quarterly, Huizache, and stories in the anthologies, Good Girls Marry Doctors and All the Women in My Family Sing. She lives in Northern California with her family and rabbit.

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