How strange, the demented feeling it gives me. I realized that I have spent agonizing whole days before a pen and a notebook, with nothing better to do but jot down notes at random.
I rap out sentences. It does not help me think, it only eases my crabbed heart. I wish a notebook could laugh.
Every writer scrounges for inspiration in different places, when the gods of creativity aren’t there. I poached from current events and embellished to suit my reportage. I felt no shame in raiding the headlines.
You move on and try writing humor. It is necessary, I’ve been taught, when attempting contemporary satire. Sharp-eyed humor relies on topical reference points. True enough, some facts cannot be improved on, and cannot be delicately twisted. They are either surreal or too tame to be good.
So you try fictional writing, but you’ll need a sanctuary where you can escape and create!
Writing fiction is a weird procedure of telling artful lies—this peculiar habit of inventing imaginary people who talk and sleep, dream and make up, kick and kiss another, which is bizzare in itself.
That is why writers find ways to make it possible—from lent literary, to variations on the hypothesis that a writer’s style may resemble her person, as well as her nature. What is the possibility that a writer’s style reflects her pre-occupation as well? How can one learn to write as naturally as could be?
How do you make out something publishable or worthy of your editors respect? Charged with dreams and glory, artists tend to be more cheerful than writers and some what more eccentric. The prose is inexhaustible, you try to cobble out riveting portraits of these eccentrics on rage—repose and off guard, and amply supplied with dimples and warts.
How far can you broaden the boundary that is permissible in terms of language? We are always puritanical on that, once we have the idea.
In my efforts to give a clean copy, I become complicated, as I stubbornly pay small heed to my faults and vulnerability. They are stronger than I am, they are me.
The deadline flashes and the pressure is wicked and confusing. Sometimes, when it threatens my sanity, I wish I had listened to my mother and did something practical like becoming a doctor or lawyer. Or horror of horrors, a bright housewife.
It is said that to come up with a copy, during a writer’s block, is like pushing the waves—one needs a cool, calm, credible intelligence, an unending lesson in tenacity and perseverance, and a lot of vision and imagination.
The strangeness of life and the world are stories worth recounting. You’re watching a circus of human behavior, marvelous movements and curious minds pass your village.
Sometimes, what they call creative breakthrough (especially when worked out metaphors have been milked to the limits) as you work on more tales than the Arabian Nights, is just a pipe dream.
Sometimes and with reason, writing can be a prolonged and disenchanting misery: imprisoned in that darkness of the unconscious. No matter how much you scream for the muses, it is only a sound above the groan. So you just keep on going, amassing thousands of words and finding credence.
But as a contented inmate of this singular institution of pen pushers and congenital unemployables, I will try to cram the paragraphs with facts and give them weight and shape, even if they are no greater than that of blue butterflies. I’ll worry about my editor, who has a marvelous sensitivity to verbal phrasing and structure—and patience.
