Everything you need to know about Sehri Tales 2023

After five successful years of sehri-time storytelling, Sehri Tales is back with their annual month-long "boot camp for creativity". The sixth season started off last night. 

Sabrina Fatma Ahmad, a writer, academic, and journalist who earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia in Canada, established the Sehri Tales writing competition in 2016. To help herself and others break out of a writing slump, she launched the 30-nights-of-creativity campaign, which unintentionally enhanced her mental wellbeing. "I honestly cannot believe it has been five years since our first Sehri Tale", she tells The Daily Star. "In the span of the past few years, we have been (somewhat) successful in creating a community that is bound by the love for storytelling. The response has been mostly positive and we have witnessed slow and steady growth, which is perfect because it has allowed us to focus on a real community."

The transition from a personal challenge to a community partnership was an enormous one. Ahmad started Sehri Tales as a self-challenge, without first thinking about the structure and regulations. As the challenge became public, she tweaked it to make it more purposeful in terms of the themes, prompts, time, and word limit. "When I was doing it myself, I was challenging myself with form, and was experimenting with poetic prose and poetry formats. I soon realised this would be difficult for newbie writers," she said. 

In 2018 and 2019, Sehri Tales partnered up with Litmosphere and made the challenge open to all the members of the group. In 2021, they launched their own Talespeople Facebook group to host the challenge. Last year, they had 1,000 new participants, bringing the community to a little less than 3,000 members. "While the numbers might seem overwhelming, it is important to note that not everyone writes, and we are glad to have cheerleaders and voters on board," she explained. 

Sehri Tales has now established itself as a Ramadan tradition for writers in Bangladesh. The rules are simple: each night at midnight, for the entire month leading up to Eid-ul-Fitr, Ahmad shares a prompt, and participants have until 6 AM (sunrise) to write original poetry, flash fiction, or create unique art, and then share it online with the hashtag #sehritales2023. Each topic can only elicit one piece of artwork from each participant, and fiction and poetry can be up to 250 words.

"250 words is something you will have to master if you are writing editorials, college essays, and a bunch of other real life cases. The challenge hence allows participants to practise this skill in a fun way," Ahmad points out. 

Since the idea of Sehri tale is to come up with an instant plot, participants are always free to scale up the story later. It just provides a good start to the writing process, and helps in pulling people out of a writer's block. Furthermore, keeping the stories short ensures that all of them have equal chances of being read. 

Ahmad emphasises on the importance of prompts as it provides people something to start with, and adds a fun Jungian element to the creative process. These prompts are mostly chosen spontaneously, upholding the significance of the challenge and they are influenced by things she is watching, reading, or listening to at the moment. Some prompts, however, are inspired by the sponsors who lend in their support to motivate the participants and make the challenge more fun and competitive. This year, they have Kraftz, Semya and Bookworm as gift sponsors who would be sending a small token of appreciation to the top talers on their specific prompt days. The prompt for Day 1 was 'Begin'. 

Daily Star Books and Star Literature have joined Sehri Tales as a media partner this year. Top 3 stories will be republished daily on The Daily Star website, and a weekly column will be published in print on Star Literature, highlighting Sabrina Fatma Ahmad's thoughts and observations on the ongoing challenge. The community has also partnered with Puthika, an app that will be selecting three other stories to publish on their platform everyday. 

Sehri Tales has partnered up also with Sister Library, a concern of Goethe Institut, which focuses on encouraging people to read more about women writers and women's experiences. The platform organises an online reading each month, where an elder sister is asked to read out excerpts from the picked passage. Ahmad will be joining as an elder sister for April, under the quarterly theme of 'memories'. Representatives from Sister Library will also be judging a prompt and picking their favourite tales for a live event, after Eid. 

Sehri Tales joined hands with DIYer last year to present the Sehri Tales Handbook, which provides a beautiful space for participants to jot down their ideas and impressions. They will be announcing another exciting collaboration this year, and readers are asked to stay tuned for further updates.

Maisha Islam Monamee is a student of IBA, DU, and a freelance journalist who likes reading, scribbling, and blogging. Follow @monameereads on Instagram.