Rants of a Writer...

Here I am, sitting again, staring at a blank sheet of paper. A writer is not scared of dark; he does not wake up with a start after seeing a dark figure, most of the time it is the white colour which is a nightmare for him. You may want to test this by showing a white sheet of paper to a writer and demand a ransom out of him, though I do not advise this for the risk of him having a heart attack.

The question also is whether a writer should write about a memory from my past, a dream for the future or just pull out a feather from his imagination. Sometimes I feel that after writing a paragraph or two, all three of them gets mixed up to an extent that it becomes new reality for me, a new memory and a new dream. I feel if I could play a recap of my life, it would be very different from how I remember it now.

Another challenge is how writers keep coming up with innovative and interesting plots and characters. I have been told that writers keep observing people around them to get inspired for writing new stories. Well, I am not so sure about it. After all who live around pirates, secret service agents, conniving politicians, arm dealers, ghosts, wand wielding kids, dragons, parallel universes, aliens, talking dogs and cats, vampires and other such plots and characters I have never seen in my ordinary life.

You must be thinking that if it is such a scary job then why writers keep coming back and face their worst fears almost every day. Till the time I did not start writing, I could never understand the logic for so many people to vent out their thoughts, imaginations, standpoints on relatively lesser avenues of writing – fiction and non-fiction further categorised into horror, politics, suspense, thriller, love, sex, travel, cookery, religion, philosophy, business, education etc. For determining a definite answer to the question, I advise you to try writing a paragraph on any subject that first comes to your mind. You will have to establish a line of thought, one or more characters, an opening and a closing. After writing a couple of lines, I am sure that you would get your answer.

It is your chance to play God, to create people out of nowhere, to write and control their destiny, and to feel a power beyond your comprehension. It will also bring you closer to understanding the decision God takes while writing stories for your life i.e. if you think there actually is a God who holds strings to our lives. You would understand that sometimes there is no logic; sometimes you twist life of one of your characters just for fun, just because he was not doing anything interesting enough to be kept alive till the end of novel.

Having said that, since God is in this business for a long time, I believe God has figured out of a way of having a logic to almost everything which happens to your life – no loose ends.

The writer they deserve

Sometimes I do not wish to write. It is a fear of falling short of expectations. Maybe this story is not as good as the last one, maybe it will not seem real enough; one of the characters might talk too much or come across as fake; and then there is always a temptation of twisting the end. But writing is much like life, no matter how much we liked it today, there will always be a tomorrow, there will always be good and bad times.

I was happy when I did not consider myself a writer, for I could write whatever came to my mind, in most uninhibited and candid manner. But then they said that you are a good writer and ever since I have to live up to that so called definition of ‘good’. Unlike me, he enjoyed being a writer. I hated that about him. I asked him once “Why do you not delve deep into human emotions, write about human misery, anger and happiness?” He smiled and just answered “I don’t deal in chemical reactions.” His characters were flowery, pointless, superfluous and pompous. I told him that I had read books in which animals talk, far better than his work. He simply agreed with me and said “My friend, it is only natural. Animals make much wiser talk.” It became my obsession to criticise both his work and his indifference towards its futility.

I remember that morning more clearly than I remember what I ate for lunch today. I was standing near the lake. Rays of sun were reflecting so much that I had to turn around as I waited with a troubled head. Police kept trying but could not locate his body. We would have never known about it, if it was not for a kid who had seen him earlier that morning. The kid said that he walked calmly into the lake and kept walking till he disappeared. Later that evening I kept sitting beside the lake, imagining him with his smile; a smile with which he disarmed the world and mocked it with each word he wrote. What troubled me most is that how can a person who was so nonchalant about his approach towards world, could take such a grave decision. I had trouble imagining what kind of agony he must have been going through, which he used to hide behind his deceptive smile.

The news of his suicide went viral. People, who had never heard of him, were talking about him in their business meetings; publishers who did not touch his work were now digging his grave (not literally) to find an unpublished novel, a half story written by him. Characters of his story were famous now. They were talk of the town. People wore costumes described by him to book reading forums and in local festivals. There was talk about making a movie, on misadventures of a stupid cop, based on one of his novels.

I kept staring at a blank sheet of paper and could write nothing, for no matter what I thought of writing, I felt guilt. Thought of writing something meaningful brought me a pain, a feeling that I was somehow deceiving him; that he was standing somewhere near and was mocking me. He had never criticised my work, but now it felt that he had being doing it all along. He had proved that after all everything is futile, like pretentious and hollow characters of all his stories. I hated them and I hated him, for taking away everything I had; my sense of purpose, the characters which I was proud of and a society which revalidated my beliefs.

I received a package today. It was from him. I kept staring in disbelief. My hands trembled when I opened it. There was a letter. It said –

“My friend, you were right all along. However you would have understood by now, this society only deserves the garbage I write.

PS: Please find my new book under my new name and in this one, animals talk. Hope you will enjoy it.”  

Things about her….Poetry in our life

Sometimes I get a little suspicious of my wife. No, No, don’t get the wrong idea! Not the kind of suspicion Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith shared for each other. I have never been able to understand how she manages everything and I am not talking about household chores. For instance, I have never been able to remember any traffic routes but she seems to have a google map in her head. Is it possible that she may have been chasing criminals on these very roads earlier in the day? Whenever we are planning a vacation, she already seems to know a hell of a lot about various hotels, places to visit and places not to visit and so on. Is it possible that she might be on some international espionage assignment and is yet able to make it home to cook dinner? I guess I will never be able to figure things about her, so I will just restrict this article to our conversation the other day.

I was writing a poem. I am not a poet; I just try to rhyme things and at times use my poems in my stories. After thinking for a couple of hours, I came up with the following lines:

It wasn’t my place to be, for I am only a traveller,

an observer, an onlooker, at best a road dweller.

I once called things I owned, proudly as my own.

Now the world is mine to use, all things known.

 

She was standing over my shoulder. I expected her to say something good about the poem. She kept looking at the words for a minute and then moved away with indifference. I looked back and asked her, “Hey! What happened?””Nothing” she said. Now with my experience of the last five years, I knew that “Nothing” is never “Nothing”. So I decided to prod on.. “I mean, what you think about the poem?” “Ohh! It’s nice”, she said. Now “nice” is another word which I know is  not nice by any standards. While a man would mostly do the stuff himself to  impress a lady, a woman would only offer help when the man is ready to admit that he is stupid. So I said “I am not able to complete the poem, can you help me with this?”  “Oh you are a writer, you will figure it out” she said without looking at me. What did I do wrong? I had already admitted that I am not smart enough to do the job. Why wasn’t  she helping? Oh yes! Once you have admitted that you are stupid, you also have to make the lady feel her supremacy.  “You do these things so naturally!. In fact you do everything so beautifully! Just see what you feel about the poem.” Finally, she was interested!

 

“Hmm.. maybe we can change some words. For example “place to be” does not seem to fit in and neither  does  “all things known”. We may also have to change  “road dweller” and “use” she said. “So what do you have in mind?” I said hiding my annoyance over the fact that I had spent  almost four hours in finding these words.  She spent the  next ten minutes scribbling, striking words out, writing and then rewriting and mostly staring at the paper. After ten minutes, she came up with the following version:

 

I do not stop, for I am a traveller, an explorer,

My pilgrimage is long, for I am still a seeker,

I chose the world over the crossroads of “own” and “renounce,”

The world I own as an observer, an onlooker, at best a road dweller.

 

I kept looking at the poem, trying to find my words. Now I am beginning to think that they train their agents in all kinds of art including poetry as well!