No Good Deed Unpunished is a new story by Dinika Amaral (GSAS '11, '13) which appears in the current issue of
The Iowa Review. We had a chance to interview Dinika to find out about her writing process.
What did you study at NYU? Did you always want to be a writer?
I got an M.A. at the Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program and an M.F.A from the Creative Writing Program.
My parents still relate stories about my writerly aspirations since the third grade. I think I also wrote terrible poetry for our school magazine –
Pigtails. In undergraduate school I was all set to be a journalist and became Editor-in-Chief of our college newspaper, but that was instrumental in showing me I wasn’t a journalist. After that I putzed around in advertising and marketing before living the dream in New York City as a banker. One day, a client and I were waiting on lawyers in a conference room and on hearing I wrote stories for fun and reviewed plays for these online magazines, he told me how his dream had always been to become a filmmaker. After we closed, I researched small competitions, part-time programs and emailed him. “You can still pursue your dream.”
Yes, he wrote back,
but the money is too good and I can’t live without it now.
After that I knew I had to do something that involved my passion for literature before the ka-ching of the banking world got me, so I applied to NYU and Draper took me in. After that it was like I’d swallowed the blue pill. But, I became a writer, a serious and real committed to it no matter what writer, during my M.F.A.