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<\/a>Leonid Pasternak, The Passion of Creation<\/em>, c. 1880.<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n
When does writing begin? The act of committing the first words to a page\u2014as I am doing now\u2014is cited for its difficulty. Though those words might well be deleted from the final draft, the resistance of the blank page is justifiably famous. It\u2019s an entrance to the unknowable, like the doorway on your first school-going day as a child. Once you\u2019ve gone through, you\u2019re in a different domain; you\u2019re in<\/em> the story, which involves inhabiting a new space and a new self. Before going in, you stare at the lit doorway of the blank page, partly with anxiety and partly with exhaustion. Exhaustion because the blank page is not only the beginning but the end of something. It\u2019s the end of the hours or days or months you\u2019ve spent considering both the subject and the prospect of writing about it. Arriving at the blank page represents our coming to the end of the undecided space we call living. <\/em>Now we must get down to telling.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I experience this sense of loss as I put down the first word\u2014the loss of procrastination and the freedom to not write, which are for me synonymous with life\u2014yet I feel I must question this model by which we determine at which precise moment we start to write. The question might be particularly pertinent to me, who frequently returns\u2014according to some\u2014to my life as a subject. When did I decide, I\u2019m asked, that I would write about an uncle in my next novel, or a cousin or the Calcutta I used to visit in my childhood or the Oxford of my student days? But, prior to this, surely another moment occurs: the realization that my uncle was extraordinary in a way that could be written about. Subsequent to this comes the idea of formulating a story in which he\u2019s a character, after which comes, eventually, the act of putting the first words about him or where he lived on the page.<\/p>\n
Naipaul calls this transition the \u201cdiscovery of one\u2019s material,\u201d the difficult transition a writer must make from a passionate apprenticeship in literature to annexing an imaginary world that\u2019s their own. After this\u2014I would hazard\u2014the matter of success begins to become, oddly, irrelevant in a way that it wasn\u2019t before. The apprentice reads great literature and wants to produce it; his work must, then, carry the stylistic marks and the themes of what\u2019s been approved as literary. However, at a certain juncture, the apprentice may find he wants, inexplicably, to write about his uncle. He hesitates: he isn\u2019t sure if his uncle is a legitimate subject for literature. We grow up with mythic heroes, and uncles don\u2019t generally adhere to a definition of the heroic. Surely novels need to tackle themes and conflicts that are significant according to a critical consensus. Finally, he sets aside his disquiet. This is how writing begins.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve written at least twice about my uncles (I use \u201cuncles\u201d literally but also as a shorthand for whatever I once thought unfit for serious literature). The first time was in my first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address<\/em>. The last was in my sixth, Odysseus Abroad<\/em>. On both occasions, these uncles re-presented themselves to my imagination through a process that can only be called translation. That is, I found they were already extant in other books. I encountered one of my uncles when reading Sons and Lovers<\/em> as an undergraduate in London. Reading of Walter Morel\u2019s life-loving expansiveness and the way he whistled doing odd jobs, I felt my uncle\u2019s proximity. This wasn\u2019t a fully formed thought; it was an unexpected recognition of the familiar. Later, I discovered he was in other books, too: A House for Mr Biswas<\/em>, for example. To discover them was, in a sense, to be involved in translation. I didn\u2019t have to remember him\u2014reading became a form of imagining his world: reading was the beginning of writing.<\/p>\nOdysseus Abroad<\/em> was, years later, the outcome of a confluence of confused identities. In 2001, for the first time in my life, I bought a painting: a charcoal sketch, really. It was by an artist whose work I loved: F N Souza. He\u2019d been living in self-imposed obscurity in New York and had come to Calcutta, just a year before his death, to exhibit in a gallery. The prices, given Souza\u2019s reputation, were staggeringly low\u2014I bought the sketch for fifty-five thousand rupees (a little more than eight hundred dollars, using the conversion rates of today). An uncle who was unmarried and who, despite being a shipping executive, had lived in a bedsit in London for thirty years had then retired and was in Calcutta, spending most of his time doing nothing in his brother\u2019s home. It was I who\u2019d urged him to return to India in 1991 to attend my wedding. Since then he\u2019d gone back to London for only brief periods. One afternoon, he came to my flat, unannounced, and challenged me: \u201cI hear you\u2019ve bought a painting for fifty-five thousand\u00a0rupees?\u201d I took him to where it hung in the drawing room: a charcoal sketch of the head of a man made up of wild lines and intermittent smudges. \u201cYou may as well have paid me fifty-five thousand rupees for farting,\u201d said my uncle. \u201cBut this is a great picture!\u201d I protested. \u2018And the man in it looks a bit like you, doesn\u2019t he?\u2019 \u201cGranted,\u201d my uncle replied, \u201cthat the work of an idiot and the work of a genius look very alike.\u201d So saying, he went off. I stood there, assessing my purchase and the resemblance of the man in it to the man who\u2019d derided it. I recalled suddenly that Souza had called the sketch \u201cUlysses.\u201d It came to me: was not my uncle a bit of an Odysseus-like figure? He was a wanderer. He owned no property. Could I write a book in which he played Odysseus? The thought\u2014the \u201ctranslation\u201d\u2014occurred that afternoon. It took a decade (the period of Odysseus\u2019s travels) for the consequences of the idea to fall into place, and me to begin the novel.<\/p>\nWhen does writing really start? Convention tells us that it\u2019s when we commit the first word or sentence to the page; put pen to paper, as I still do. The lead-up to this moment comprises memory, receptivity, and the transmutation\u2014the fission\u2014that turns intangible thoughts and images into words and story. You experience things; you live; from these experiences you produce writing. Today, for me, I feel this model holds less and less true. Since I\u2019m writing about my life so often\u2014or rather, of life in general as I know it\u2014I find it increasingly difficult to demarcate the life I live within the book from the life I live outside it; the writing I do with words from the writing I do without words. Writing is an unpremeditated awareness of something coming into existence. Many things become part of the aura of possibility we call \u201cwriting\u201d\u2014the street one is walking on; a balcony with a man in it; sounds from a neighboring street. To produce a book containing that street or balcony constitutes only a part<\/em> of what writing is. Writing spills over from the book, into a domain where there are no words, only a consciousness that something has happened. What has happened is not an event; it\u2019s writing, which can begin at any point of time, in that any moment is a moment of possibility.<\/p>\nLet me give an example. Many of us buy books for different reasons\u2014we\u2019ve heard of the author or of a particular novel; it has won a prize; the book is on the curriculum (there\u2019s a curriculum even after we leave school, and we obediently get what\u2019s on it). Or it could be that we\u2019re drawn to the title, or are absorbed by the book\u2019s jacket. It could be a combination of all or some of these reasons. The number of books we buy far outnumber those we read. Again, the reasons for not reading are multiple\u2014deferral, because of the paucity of time, is a common one. But a powerful cause for not reading is because the writer in us\u2014I use the word \u201cwriter\u201d not for one who\u2019s produced books, but for whoever is possessed by the possibility of writing\u2014takes over from the reader. This might happen when we\u2019re transfixed by the jacket and keep studying it, unable to proceed to the first page. The image on the cover, its design, the lettering\u2014these have thrown us into the realm of possibility. Once we\u2019ve entered the story which that possibility engenders, reading the novel itself becomes redundant. We may not write a word, but the writer in us predominates. A version of the novel emerging from the jacket\u2014or even the title\u2014holds us in its spell. That\u2019s why the crowd of unread books on our shelves is never, generally, a burden. They signal a possibility\u2014not that we will one day read them but of how the idea, and moment, of writing is constantly with us.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This is the fifth installment\u00a0of Amit Chaudhuri\u2019s column,\u00a0The Moment<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nAmit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist, poet, and musician. His seventh novel,<\/i>\u00a0<\/i>Friend of My Youth, will be published in the U.S. in 2019.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When does writing begin? The act of committing the first words to a page\u2014as I am doing now\u2014is cited for its difficulty. Though those words might well be deleted from the final draft, the resistance of the blank page is justifiably famous. It\u2019s an entrance to the unknowable, like the doorway on your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1370,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32655],"tags":[23992,34021,1804,34022,7101,976,34023],"class_list":["post-125177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-moment","tag-a-house-for-mr-biswas","tag-a-strange-and-sublime-and-address","tag-calcutta","tag-odysseus-abroad","tag-sons-and-lovers","tag-v-s-naipaul","tag-walter-morel"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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