Rukhsana Khan inspires SCRF 2025 audience

The session titled “How to Write a Bestseller”, attracted a diverse audience of students, teachers, parents, and budding authors, all eager to uncover the winning formula for writing successful and memorable stories.

Khan opened up about the start of her writing career to the audience, which she said, stemmed from her years of ‘being bullied’ as a child after moving to Canada from Pakistan where she was born. “I had a difficult childhood and was bullied mercilessly, but writing became my lifeline. It was the stories I created that kept me going."

Then, before diving into the technique of creating, she challenged participants to ask a deeper question – why should anyone care about the story you're telling? “A great book satisfies a need the reader didn’t even know they had. It has to be a story only you can tell – so powerful it silences the inner critic and makes them say, ‘Wow.’ A story so immersive the reader forgets they’re even reading," she said.

She then broke down the key elements of great storytelling: write clearly, create engaging characters, bring settings to life, and let conflict drive the plot, stressing the importance of keeping the story fresh, exploring meaningful themes, pacing well, and “knowing your audience to truly connect with readers”.

Delving into character development, the Toronto resident highlighted one of the most challenging – and yet rewarding – aspects of writing: truly understanding your villain. “To write a convincing story, you have to inhabit several perspectives at once, especially when it comes to your villain. Your antagonist can’t just be evil for the sake of it; you need to understand what drives them. And just like your characters, your setting needs to breathe. It should feel so real that readers can step right into it," said the author of Big Red Lollipop, chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the 100 greatest children’s books in the last 100 years.

The session reached a powerful close as the Canadian read an excerpt from her critically acclaimed novel Wanting Mor — "Mor" meaning "mother" in Pashto — describing a haunting scene in which young Jameela washes her mother’s body in a mud house in Afghanistan. “That came from a real place,” she said quietly. With visible emotion, she ended the reading with a heartfelt tribute to her sister, Bushra, whose memory, she said, continues to shape her stories.