LAVANYA SANKARAN
THE DAY YOU COMMIT TO A WRITING ROUTINE IS THE MOMENT YOU start taking yourself seriously as a writer. Up to that point, you have been a reader.
If you are anything like me, you have been seduced by books your whole life, stories swallowed whole, spilling first down your ears in the voices of family storytellers and then that magic moment of literacy, where a book invites you in and wraps itself around you – and there you are, encased in a bubble as nourishing as a womb, there content to remain until the book finishes, sometimes lingering in its embrace for days afterwards, and sometimes leaping into the next book before the words from the first have a chance to stop reverberating through your brain. Books become the texture of your life; keeping company through the rise and fall of emotional tides; they accompany meals, they sing alongside music, travel on planes and cars; comfort you outside dentist’s offices, and emerge instantly out of one’s bag the second someone says, will you wait a moment, please? In the trilogy His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman talks of daemons, parts of human souls that, in some universes, manifest themselves in physical, usually animal, form alongside their humans. For readers on this earth, books play that role. They are our daemons. There is so much you can tell about my state of mind from the book I am reading at that moment. There is so much I can tell about you from the book you have in your hand.
If you read this way, where reading is tightly woven through your life journey, knotted through the emotional landscape, guiding the rise of intellect, influencing spiritual and physical growth – you probably began to play with words early. You, like me, journeyed through your adolescence on a tide of new words, savouring them, deploying them upon the unwary. You have probably looked up their meanings, traced their development through the history of language, backwards, to some source word in some other language: Latin or French, German perhaps, or some Scandinavian tongue, the surprise of the odd Sanskritic or subcontinental word.
And, at some point, you began to write. Not just as a class assignment, some bit of homework that you were compelled to do as a child, but to play with words on your own, to explore language at length and in privacy, as you might explore your own sexual horizons. Secret word journeys, where you have out-Agatha’d old Christie, and Rushdie’d and Marquez’ed your way through sentences, entire scenes. You share these verbal masturbations with no one, or perhaps just read to an admiring audience of one or two, your mother perhaps, or a cousin, someone who will listen, smile and say, goodness, someday perhaps you will become a writer.
And you think to yourself, yes. Perhaps. But that is still in the realms of future possibilities, like sexual intercourse, or foreign travel, or owning property. At this point of time, you are still a reader, and that is the only truth you know about yourself, the one thing that stands by you, that you can fervently turn to, eyes closed. You are a reader.
But the writing, like diarrhea induced by an overindulgence in words, begins to flow out of you, in a dribble, in fits and spurts, but relentless. You can’t help yourself. You write beautiful letters that people are thrilled to receive. Your sentences develop into scenes – and then, one day, your brain breaks free and starts weaving. Situations, characters, an imaginary mental party where the guests are all new to you but let you discover their stories. And so, on weekends, or at stolen moments when you are supposed to be working on something else, the financial analysis of some company perhaps, a legal report, a plumbing operation on some old copper pipes, driving a truck whose goods you are supposed to be delivering from points A to B, you start capturing those scenes in to words of your own choosing.
And then you think, oh, good, dammit, this actually reads as well as the last author I’ve read. This is pure Wodehouse; this is pure Updike; this is not bad at all.
And then you think, crap, this reads like Wodehouse or Updike or the last author I have read. It is pure derivative drivel. It doesn’t read like me. I don’t even know what me sounds like.
I finally had that ‘Me’ moment when I least expected it – seated cross-legged on the floor, tailor-style, with my laptop in front of me and a six-week-old baby asleep in a cot by my side. I hadn’t touched my computer in weeks, through the last two months of my pregnancy and the early weeks of a new baby, but this day felt different; it had a new energy. Or perhaps it just seems that way in retrospect. I typed in two sentences, and then a paragraph, and already, I knew, this was it. Ta-da! Ta-FUCKING-da! This was my voice and no one else’s. The story that was emerging was mine to tell.
Of course, after I crossed that rickety bridge, when my writing journey broke away from other writers’ voices on a path of its own, it still took years for the first book to get written and a few more after that for the second. But that moment, of finding my voice and following it, marked my transition from reader to writer. It was then that I also committed to writing routines.
Routine is the scaffolding that allows us to build our work. A good routine allows the brain to automatically start moving in certain directions, away from the everyday and into an enchanted writing forest, it allows for quietness and focus, it creates spaces where words can play unfettered.
It tempers the putative excesses of a creative life, where the very act of breathing can provide fodder, where temptations abound in the books that surround us, in every deep meaningful conversation, in observing other people, in the process of ordering a cup of coffee. The siren songs of La Vie Boheme urge us to immerse ourselves in experientia: love, drugs, music, words, travel, meditation, life…. In other words, it is entirely possible for an errant writer to goof off, smoke up, fuck around, and argue that all of it is grist for the literary mill. Routine smacks you on the hand and puts you back to work.
The fact is, writing is both a cold and a passionate mistress. The fire of it consumes you, when you write, everything else ceases to exist; it is an all-encompassing world. Every time we write fiction and create new worlds, we dimly mimic the great cosmic acts of creation that have preceded us, from the collusion of time and space that created the original Big Bang, to the energies that recombine carbon-based life forms into new ones, we explore through our work the birth of life, of stars, the invisible world of dark matter, we search to uncover our internal God particles, our creative Higgs-Bosons.
This is exhausting. Writing demands. It assumes that you exist to serve it and doesn’t care particularly about any other aspect of your life. As a human being, you may have other concerns: loves and lovers, a child perhaps, or a job. There is the business of eating and drinking and fornicating and finding a safe place to sleep. A long writing session, untempered, in full flow, followed by another fix and another, leaves you drained, exhausted, happy, tremulous, weak-jawed, shaken. It interferes with your body functions and reduces your capability to interact with the world. Ideally, you would be left alone, in the literary version of a drunk tank, to sleep if off, to sober down. It is possible to live like this, but not with other people. And not for long. Depression, suicide and alcoholism are the common markers of a creative life, but if you would prefer not, thank you very much, then your best defense is in routine.
For that is what a good routine does: it takes us into the privileged world of the highly creative; it creates a space that is free from all outside interference and influence, that is free of shame and the fear of vulnerability, where the brain can tumble and dance in primordial fashion. And then, it allows us to leave that votive space and descend safely back to reality. And do this daily.
When I fantasized about living a writer’s life, I thought it would all happen at night. I have an affinity for dark, quiet places, my mind settles into the night automatically. I had visions of chasing the hours past midnight, producing piles of manuscript in time to greet the dawn. Write at night, sleep through the morning, meet interesting friends for late lunches at interesting cafes. That sort of thing.
Ah, reality. Reality was my new baby, soon a young toddler, and all the non-negotiable (to me) structures of new motherhood. By the time night rolled around, I was too tired, in the manner of earnest young mothers, to do more than settle into bleary-eyed sleep alongside my child. If I wanted to write, I had to find some other way. In defiance, I started waking up early.
Classical philosophy holds the two magical hours before dawn to be the moment when the mind is at its most peaceful and most open to insights. Classical philosophers, I am assuming, were by and large, tight-arsed yoga types who did their surya namaskars to the rising sun and possibly did not like to serenade the witching hour with glasses of whisky. But I was determined to write, so wake up at four I did. For four years, until my first book was complete. I did not leap out of bed, eager to greet the day. I crawled out, eyes closed, and spent the first ten minutes of that sanctified hour standing over the basin, splashing cold water over my eyes and muttering my go-to curse word to myself, in varying intonations. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuck. But those early morning hours gifted me with quiet and vital writing energy before other competing duties of the day began. In a quiet and dreaming world, I had, effectively, created my writing bubble.
For my second book, I developed a slightly more mannered routine: after an early breakfast, I would make my way to a neighbourhood coffee shop. The coffee shop bordered on a medical college, and thrummed with the energy of students buzzing on caffeine and friendship and blared Bollywood songs over loud speakers.
Into this cheerful cauldron of noise, I would descend each morning. I would nestle into my corner table, always a little anxious that someone else might have collared it first; it was one of two that were next to laptop charging points and was in somewhat high demand. I would open my laptop and my writing pad; plug my iPod into my ears and surround myself with my own music; white noise to balance the babble around; a soundtrack to my writing.
They knew me there, perhaps not by name, but by habit, bringing my bottle of water and my coffee to the table without a word and leaving me alone for hours, muttering to myself in the corner. They did not seem overly bothered by me despite the fact that I was alone and yet communicating daily with people and landscapes that no one else could see, in a workaday version of lunacy. I was an oddball, certainly, but not alone in being unusual: a coffee shop on a busy road attracts a charming range of humanity; people who work there are trained to take things in their stride. The beggar-worshippers, with their trays of god-pictures and attendant cows, looking for tips and contributions. Students-in-love, seated next to each other and conducting their courtship twenty-first century style, with their phones, sending text message across the table, sharing photographs and videos, heads close together, eyes on small screens as they twittered and pecked at each other. Tibetan monks, looking for enlightenment in a coffee glass. The daily visits from the eunuchs who supervised commerce on that street; they would march up to the counter, business-like in their sarees and make-up, take the proffered ten-rupee note and leave. What would happen, I once asked the coffee shop staff, if you refused to pay? Then, I was told, the eunuchs would raise their skirts for all the coffee shop patrons to see.
That seemed like a small price to pay to witness an act of such astonishing bravery. To conflate gender identity and to raise one’s skirts to a judgmental world – wasn’t this what I was attempting to do myself? My story-telling was not going well, and every day, in that coffee shop, I battled on. The story I was telling was not the story I had planned to tell, but I was committed to the ride as I traversed the rapids and cascades and hidden rocks of a rushing river, heading to a destination unknown and navigating, for the first time, the hidden follies of a first novel. The daily trip to the coffee shop kept me safe while I did so; it was my raft on these treacherous waters; it was a routine that, when I woke up, fearful, I could cling to on this perilous journey.
I haven’t been back there since.
Each time I approach a fresh piece of writing, fear washes through my stomach. It doesn’t matter what I have written before and how well I might have done it. Fear. That I will never write well enough; that the energy pulsing through me will not emerge as powerful and beautiful words on the page; that creativity will vanish, it is a mirage, no, perhaps I was not, in fact, put on this earth to write, perhaps I should just stick with being a reader. Performance anxiety. I start writing. The miasma lifts and descends. Lifts and descends.
Complacency is the death knell of evolution. That awful moment when we sit back and go, ‘all good! I know where I am and what I am doing’ is almost always followed by the tragic evidence that we don’t. So now, I am upending my life. I am revisiting my routine afresh. I am unraveling and rewinding the threads of my life, forming new patterns. Here are some things from the toolbox that I am working with.
Read well to write well, the saying goes, and despite finding my own voice, the writings of others are still powerful and magnetic influencers. On my best days, I read writing that inspires me, that explores themes that I am looking at, and uses language that is, simply put, fabulous. On other good days, I need to hear my voice in isolation – and since I cannot be without reading, I seek books from the other end of the literary spectrum. Yes, some of my best writing has been nourished by murder.
This crime writer took her pen
And gave her readers four dead men
When she saw how well she’d done
She gave them murder four-plus-one
But this can never be more than an occasional practice: I worry that to allow my reading to devolve to pleasuring the limbic centers of my brain alone, the reading equivalent of binge-watching television dramas, is to drown the fecund writing brain in literary plastic and fast food. Je lis, donc je suis. I read, therefore I am. I read, therefore I write.
Writing is high-octane performance, played out to an audience of the soul and the self – the audience-of-others appears much later and is irrelevant at the actual moment of creation. Like all performance, writing demands the very best one can give that moment; I have learnt to practice for it – and to warm-up to it. Warming-up can take many forms: reading, writing a paragraph or two on a related topic, writing a poem, or lines of poetry. It can be reading aloud of verse or prose; or the act of memorizing. There are two Sanskrit shlokas that, repeated eleven times each open creative energies in my brain. It can even be math. Yes, it’s true, there’s something about algebra, the resolute, sweaty solving of quadratic equations, that miraculously prepares the brain for words.
I have started, once again, waking up before the dawn.
A long time ago, when the world was young and I naive, I assumed that writing was – like reading – a purely mental act, supported by physical quietitude. As I progress, I realize it is, of course, anything but. Writing is physical, involving a great many parts of the body: the head, the back, the spine, the hands, the legs, the gut. And it is as fully nourished by the energies of the body as by the brain. In fact, like all art, writing exists in that space where brain, body and spirit intersect. It took me a while to learn this lesson, and in stages: first, I started writing standing up, then I learnt to move before writing and after writing. Now I am exploring how different movement yields different writing; the words that emerge after yoga are filled with palpably different energies than after lifting weights or dancing. Or walking. Or swimming. Or sex.
Sometimes I write to music. And sometimes to silence.
I practice Vipassana meditation. It is the strongest thing I do and it opens doors to strength and self-awareness. But meditation is a spiritual exercise and an extremely powerful tool. Writing is also a spiritual journey – and I have learnt that the two in tandem need to be deployed carefully – or they will destroy each other.
I draft my fiction long hand; non-fiction on the laptop. Fiction requires a different pace from me, one suited to the pace of my writing hand and aching fingers. Then I will transcribe it, rewriting really, into the computer. At home, I write in my study, standing up. (Unromantically, with my laptop or notepad placed on an old filing cabinet.) I write in coffee shops around the world. And every now and then I will push away from the cities into a rural calm, on a writing retreat, where I give myself over entirely to the writing, for it to use me, abuse me, do with me what it will. Occasionally, I will go on retreat with other writers or poets or artists, and the synergy of those moments is rare and wonderful, a comforting, understanding hug from The Lonely Writers Club, (Loonies Welcome). Who else can ever truly understand?
Writing at the level of literary fiction is not something that one can do all day. That is impossible. Relaxation away from the process is important. Yeah, I’m talking about stupid-time. Say what you like, its anodyne distractions are both soothing and reviving. I need to spend some time with my eyes crossed and my tongue hanging out, scratching my balls and picking nits out of my beard. In my secret life of Stupid, I fantasize about out-gunning Sarah Connor in Terminator movies and starring in odd porn movies with Japanese subtitles. I am the undisputed videogame champion of Plants vs. Zombies; the slickest, smoothest Assassin of Assassin’s Creed. I can out-Spock Leonard Nimoy and out-data Data. Sherlock is my Watson. I will abuse substances and consume oleaginous, starchy foods. I will break out my dance moves. I will sing and send the dog cowering from the room. And I have absolutely no doubt that Valmiki, Homer, Vyasa and Murasaki Shikibu did likewise.
And of course, lastly, or firstly, or alongsidely, there is the rest-of-life. That business of people, money, society. Some of these we writers are forced to engage with – and others we must force unto ourselves. Writing is a narcissistic and powerful and self-absorbed God; it will take all we can offer and leave dead, dry shells behind, eviscerating our sense of self and all the myriad reasons we must engage with this particular life, in this particular life-time. So connect we must, with others, with their lives and their concerns, for our own sake, so we may remain sane, linked to the circle of life on this mortal sphere, for, on those days when the Goddess is unforgiving and turns her face away; when meaning fails and all is empty, there is someone there to pull us back from the edge.