Reflective Writing

I had always been very hesitant about showing my prose writings/poems to people. Given my involvement with theatre, and the fact that I’m primarily an actor, dramatic writing—I think—came far more easily to me. Asking people to read my plays, therefore, was easier and did not involve me breaking into a sweat, and wanting to crawl into the earth and bury myself there permanently. If I trace this feeling of nervousness, I find its origins in my second year in Kirori Mal College, from where I had been pursuing my bachelors. I had written something—which was terrible—and I gave it to one of my professors to read. He was a professor of English and a man whom I greatly respected. However, he was also known for his short temper and the fact that he never minced his words.

I don’t think I was ready for that.

Anyway, when I went to the staff room the next day to find out what he thought of my written piece, he looked at me and said, ‘Basak…Get a life.’ Of course I was mortified. Now, however, it reminds me of a conversation that I had had with another playwright last year. We were at a party and he said, ‘My greatest fear as a writer is that I produce something and people look at me and go: what is wrong with you? How could you have even written this?’ I understand that this came from the fact that the playwright I was talking to never ‘played it safe’ and always ventured into contentious territory in his works. But this also informed me of the inherent vulnerability of the artist when he/she shows you his work of art. Or maybe I’m wrong. There’s a famous story in which Faulkner, after having written As I Lay Dying, calls his editor and hands over the copy and says: I think it’s the best American Novel yet written! And he was right. It was indeed. So maybe there’s no point in generalising. What is true however is that when the professor said, ’get a life’ I questioned my very existence. Now that I think of it, I over-reacted, and the many subsequent artistic failures (and a few successes) over the next years hardened me towards criticism. However, for the next four years, I continued writing prose poems, on and off, but never showed them to anybody—other than my parents who I knew thought of me as the next Kafka.

So the first time I actually showed my written material to people was in the Crafting Poems class. Indeed when people discussed A Moment of Violence (Title needs to be changed) I could hear them analysing, critiquing, decoding what I had written and—I don’t know whether people noticed this—I shut my ears and closed my eyes in order to block out all voices. When discussion began, I was ready for people to struggle to find words that would do justice to the horrible and horrific thing that they had had the misfortune of reading. But when the discussion didn’t turn out like that, when the criticism was more tempered, and people didn’t ask me to get a new life altogether, I was surprised and I felt the dizzying nervousness subside. 

And I learnt of my adjectival excess. Of how, often, the adjectives that I used would slow down the pace of the piece and how sometimes it would seem like a pointless exercise in sesquipedalian obfuscation. How the adjectives, instead of enhancing the descriptions, would render it opaque. Of course my influence was coming from a writer called Cormac McCarthy. He has a distinct writing style and is known for often using an odd and unusual vocabulary. And my writing style, was also shaped by McCarthy’s—if you read him you will see how greatly it is derived from his and how I wear his influence on my sleeve. Of course whereas he deployed the style to talk about the violent, biblical, psychedelic, hallucinatory, western outback, I used it to talk about the city at night.  

So when I was charged with the crime of overusing adjectives, I went back and read a few of my favourite passages from McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and saw that the adjectives had been used, but economically and precisely. Now you may say that I am over dependant on McCarthy. That may be true, even though I have had other influences that have dictated the particular kinds of world that I want to build. But what has interested me always is the sensory experience of writing, something that hypnotises you with the rhythm and the sound of the piece, and there is a particular piece in Blood Meridian—a page long sentence—that seems to be the absolute culmination of this particular kind of writing. Nothing more hypnotic seems possible. And every time I attempt to create this kind of language, it is always that passage that has served as a lodestar.  

What I struggled with, however, was precision, and often my writing seemed to go all over the place. This became a particular challenge when I tried the Ghazal and The Villanelle form. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and was never satisfied with whatever I produced. It all seemed like nonsense. What was tough was to say what I wanted to say, sans adjectival excess and the freedom of not being restricted within a form. It was like trying to walk with no legs. This made me realised that I had sealed myself shut in a very particular kind of writing style—the McCarthy-esque writing style. For these two forms were such that they did not allow for a grand and extravagant kind of writing geared towards world building. I realised that I needed to explore other forms, do other things. So the recent poem that I wrote—Bombay 1947—is devoid of excessive adjectives and is replete with surrealist imagery which came as a conscious break from the kind of writing and the kind of worlds my previous poems tried to build.  ( I haven’t uploaded the ghazals and the villanelle yet, because I am not satisfied with them.)

The prosody workshop was particularly important for me, for it helped me articulate what I had always sensed—the consistency and inconsistency of rhythms. Always, while reading my own writings, I always ‘felt’ or ‘sensed’ that something was off, but I couldn’t exactly pin down what it was. And so, when I found out that it was a question of syllables, life became easier. And in many ways, life became easier, and tougher after the course. When I get back to my writing after my Masters is over, sit down at the computer, and write every day, five hundred words minimum, I will be writing from a perspective that puts precision on the same level as affect.

And, also, I will show my writings to as many people as I can.

Thanks