Writers are crazy

(Old post)

If you think you’re a writer, the most dangerous thing you can do is a necessity. You must read others. Read the greats that have gone before, and read the goods you would look in the eye if they weren’t racing so far ahead.

A little reading leaves you feeling pleasantly buzzed, like a couple of beers on warm afternoon over light banter with a non-judgemental friend. It’s something you can go home and write about in your journal, and add a smiley face at the end of the entry even. The whole activity feels really healthy.

A moderate amount of reading can prop you up. Like that cheap coffee table with a short leg, that’s balanced on top of two second hand paperbacks. It makes you critical. It makes you imagine your mirror image looking back at you with great brown wings, a golden beak and a mad swiveling beady bird eye. You feel like you can tower about all those lowbrow peers of yours, when you’re actually standing tip-toe on your brains to achieve an illusion of height. You know enough words by now to be able to call yourself descriptive. Grammar and editors don’t scare you shitless, words don’t make you neurotic. Creation doesn’t make you euphoric. It makes you smart.

A lot of reading… OK, hold on because this is where you begin to go crazy. The roller coaster’s seat belts snap and you find the damn machines roaring down a convoluted rail, definitely not the same, sane one you espied while shifting from foot to foot on solid ground. The Books are all over your room now. You can hear them crawling around at night. In your head, of course. Words take on the dimension of a fragile glass with some very, very combustible substance inside. They’re pretty, and really fascinating too. But spooky as hell. So, it’s like you’re possessed. You must have more of these strange things, because you’re addicted to them by now. But they’re of so many bloody kinds, they make you feel really inadequate. You spend hours in your own head, frantically making more of these glass bombshells, trying to arrange them in the most explosive way possible, and running out in the middle of it all to see what others have done/are doing, how close are they to exploding in your face, oh hell, you need to get back.. make More More More!

Are you going crazy, yet?

Resuscitating the Writer

When I write my autobiography several decades later, or maybe next week, I'll make sure to add a few pages on how to reclaim youth wasted by delusions and dreams. Right after the chapter on my rude awakening.
So Yes, I was immature. And Yes, I was being a coward. And YES, I'm lazy. But I'm willing to cut myself some slack, because look - I'm suffering for it now, okay?

Now let me paint you a portrait of the artist as an uninspired, sadly regular young woman -

Things were not going as expected. She had completely side-stepped the trial by fire, the stormy lunches with her parents, and suicidal tendencies. It was disappointing, because she was getting good at those, and had come prepared for them. Posterity would blame it on Murphy, and woe how utterly uninteresting the next chapter in her life promised to be. Its working title was 'The Time of No Shenanigans or The Advent of the Good Girl'. She was afraid even her word processor would breakdown from sheer boredom. But purgatory wasn't even a smidgen of mud on the horizon.


Alright, enough. Any more and I'll cry. So here's the quick and dirty - I've screwed up, and after watching me give stellar screw-up performances, my parents have decided to intervene. The Reformation has begun. And the beginning lies in trying to figure out what the hell I want in life (apart from a lot of money, and coffee). Something must also be said of the the Reclamation bit, because that's the bit that'll be hitting you in small, smelly, gooey bits. Unexpectedly. It has wings. I'm talking about reclaiming the writer-persona, and picking up wordcraft with a vengeance. Weapons of choice are my blog, and Tyrannosaurusy word doc that'll be my NaNoWriMo novel's nanny.Yep, I'm taking part in NaNo third year in a row, and this time it's to win, baby!

I will also be plotting secret shenanigans, and adopt a secret identity to give these nefarious plots life, so you can stop crying now.

Alchemy of Desire

A very desirous read. I reached the half mark in the 500+ pages book last night, forcing a sleepy, weary, and guilty me into the wee'st hours of the night. Guilty, why - my end of term exams start tomorrow.

If there's one thing I love about exams, it's how I always manage to dig out a riveting serial, an addictive series of books, or even a single unputdownable book just before they're about to start. And then I make it/them last right until I have the freedom to study anything but course material.

This time, it's Tarun J Tejpal's Alchemy of Desire. The book's less of a tome, and more of a siren call I tells ya. When I casually dumped it into my shopping basket a week ago, I didn't even find the blurb very interesting (I'm a blurbaholic). Someone had been raving about the book sometime back and I decided to give it a shot since my mum was being extra generous with my book budget. What followed since can be hinted at by distorting an age old Bangalorean auto adage - trust a snake and a woman, but never Alchemy of Desire.

I won't get too much into the plot, because I haven't finished the book yet (and unfortunately, this is one of those books that you never want to finish but end up devouring in a primal bookwormy frenzy anyway) but its sensuality is seriously addictive. The narrator is this perfectly faceless being, and I'm happy to leave him at that. It is the worlds that he talks of being embedded in, leaving behind, immersing in, emerging from, and the people that populate it that really catch my attention. It's the narrator's story for sure, but the other characters, particularly his wife Fiza, are never relegated to the background. I keep waiting for the little tidbits he feeds the reader about her, and am happy remaining netted in the barely controlled but exquisitely articulate description of the erotica of love and companionship.

Even the seemingly external narratives he threads in are made tolerable by the inevitable, and constant friction of desire between him and Fizz. Only when he begins to talk longwindedly about politics in a half-baked veteran journalistic way does the prose get tiresome. It almost begins to seem like he is yammering in a hallucinatory state, and I found myself skipping first sentences, then entire paragraphs.

Some way past the half mark, another story begins to creep into his seemingly aimless narrative, and things he'd only hinted at earlier now show promise of being slowly disrobed. Some 300 pages into the book, he finally begins cluing the reader in about himself, and even as my dislike for him grows, I can't pass the room I've kept the book in without literally having to tear my thoughts away from the witchy, luring book.

On a different note, a part of my wants to rush at his journalistic rambles because the Indian decades he speaks of seem so unreal. History that was made just before I was born seems irrelevant, someone else's imagination playing havoc in unwritten history texts. Someday, the generation after mine will read it and I'll still be wondering who those people are, where did they come from, and why I never noticed they were there..?

Hypodermic Needle

ED: A reminder to read, and be read, because I live by my word and that of others'.