At the fag-end of my undergraduate education, I’m sitting in my first Creative Writing class. It’s a fiction workshop. I’ve never written fiction since those 12th-grade essays in English Language exams. I did exceedingly well then – none of that ‘and then I woke up’ nonsense – so this shouldn’t be difficult for me, not at all. Through this 12-week class, I will find out if I can become a Real Writer, like Iowa Writers’ Workshop-Joan Didion Art of Fiction-Dan Humphrey Inside manuscript hiding in a Brooklyn loft. Like, Granta – Cat Person – has opinions on bestseller lists and a sample short story waiting in inboxes of illustrious publishers – did you read (book name) – yes, but it’s so derivative of (book name) – the (genre du jour) is so saturated – booktok sucks. Okay, I tell myself. Real Writer in a 12-week how-to for dummies.
Our sugary professor invites us to do a round of introductions – everybody here is a seasoned Literature-type looking to experiment with genres outside their comfort zone. They are minoring in Creative Writing and they want MFAs while I think writing can neither be taught nor seriously done. The blue-haired socialists, the snowy offsprings of the internet age, they say they are all tired of writing about themselves. They are sick of insertion, surfeited with the ‘I.’ And I’m like, oh. Have you figured yourselves out? Is there no memoir agitating your horizons?
Must be nice.
Personally, I am still caught up in an obsessive, hackneyed search for meaning. Your friendly-neighbourhood confessional poet, journal truther, inner life deluder. Every word I write is an act of becoming, every epithet carves inlets and outlets into me. I can’t forge fiction, nor abstract distance – I can’t write all the time.
At home in Bombay, a sky is blue is blue is blue. Friends have been pickled into truths over time. Family is a wave on the Arabian Ocean that crests and always comes back. There is no need to write, there is no need for memory. We drive past our 200-year-old school past midnight, playing songs we heart-by-know. ‘For The First Time’ by The Script, ‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA, ‘Good Riddance’ by Greenday. We live, by grace, in ‘we’s. We tell the same stories, bricked person-by-person, comedic timing chiselled into our clayminds. We know what the real is. It is open, and wombic, and honest. We do not fear forgetting, and we do not fear ourselves.
At university in Delhi, I am a swinging wind vane, in airs made capricious by climate change. I pace through the day: wake up sweating when the AC is switched off; my roommate rummaging for class; there is nothing to eat; I think about whether my professor thinks I’m smart through my 10.10; 11.50; 3, is my outfit weird?; 6.30; gym, my eardrums are shredded by a brown boy’s Brit-rap playlist; there are mosquitoes in the shower; bong rips and friends, iced coffee and there is nothing to eat; sleep and dream of fuller times. Intentionality collapses into the interstices of routine. There is no space for the meta. I’m too imbricated to imagine.
If home is real enough to be taken for granted, and university renders me unthinking in its regiments, then, well, when (and what) do I write?
I write in danger. I write blind. When the ‘real’ is compromised or transient or tenuous, then I must commit truth to paper, create truth in paper. When the real darts mercurial – somewhere in between life and inner life – I catch whiffs of reality, embroider dreams around it, and forge my fiction. I write in love. I write when I’m afraid I’ll forget, when I’m afraid I’ll never know who or what we are. It is an act of desperation. A jam preserve. A looting of life.
In the past two years I have written a poem about a Woody Allen Protagonist Type; a love letter claiming to be Salman Rushdie’s last midnight child; a feverish 10,000-word diary of my time in Paris; ad nauseam about how my fingers feel on these photosynthesizing screens. I’ve written elegies as I break through the girls I could’ve been, won’t be, and am; and odes and odes to happiness, eyes eating sun and fingers finding gold.
This makes me a fake writer (if I may borrow the identifier for a moment). Real Writers don’t wait for threats or disquietude in the realm of the real. They know very well what the real is, they detail it – in characters who do plot and speak with authority in conversations. Real Writers are obsessed with observations and specifics – how cold the draft felt swarming through the metro line 4 that one Thursday, the dirty guilt on his face before he got up from the table for the last time, the smudged ink on the margins of the legal paper. These are the tiny acts that amount to behaviour, character, plot. Writers see these things and know what they mean. If writers’ plots or people are complicated, their imposition of perception, their belief in the senses, is not.
Writers urge me that this is the world we are living in, these are characters who have flesh, here is a plot which has teeth, you must believe, you must believe. Fiction is assertion. Even if this is just in the context of one novel or essay, readers suspend disbelief, and make a leap of faith. Writers, on the other hand, have to be godmen who can inspire that leap. Thus, the adages of good writing are framed around confidence and how to hack it. Write what you know! (Seriously, I don’t know all that much.) Show don’t tell! (Me, I love to tell, repetitiously, maniacally.) Worldbuild! (Long ago French philosophers taught me the world is but ideology and hyperreality.)
And yet, I’ll say it straight: I believe, in my heart of darkness, that there is a book inside of me. Pulitzer-certified, upper echelons of the literary pantheon, generation-defining book. (Novel? Memoir? Cultural criticism? TBD.) If I am to retain this belief, I must ask whether being a Real Writer means I have to step out of the self – or at least, the unending anxiety of its search. Instead of getting caught up in existentialist nitpicks or complacent in the everyday, I have to snatch reality, grab it by the garters, and mercilessly write it down.
Maybe my uncertainty in knowing the ‘real’ is some kind of woman problem. It’s like I’m stuck in 11th grade, furiously asking a man ‘what are we.’ Sadly, Simone de Beauvoir would call my writing a woman’s “babble.” At the close of The Second Sex she writes that “[w]e women are still too preoccupied with seeing clearly to try to penetrate other shadows beyond that clarity.” (For her, this is because women have been denied transcendence and subjectivity because of the feminine myth that fixes, objectifies, disempowers). Our writing is spontaneous, and diaristic to a fault; it represents a constant impulse to ‘find yourself,’ to ‘become’ through writing. It does nothing more than tan on the beaches of selfhood, never daring to wade in waters of the sublime.
But I was raised in the wet warmth of women babbling about their worlds. My mother wrote blogs and then a book, Taylor Swift turned my schoolyard crushes into self-mythology, Sylvia Plath held my hand in a mental institution and offered to preheat the oven. Their style could not be universal, but teenage-me found them sublime, luxuriating in their hot confusion, manic declarations, and hysterical fits. They didn’t lay claim to what was big and real for the world, they were happy to talk about the brags of their hearts, and dancing in refrigerator lights. These are specifics, to be sure, but from a very peculiar, particular vantage point in the world. So, I borrowed their ways of seeing, draped them over my eyes, and stitched my selves into a story.
For a while, that was alright. I did not have to be outside myself or a universalist to write about the state of women’s safety, skinny love, and teenage malaise – I could see these things with truth-force and basically no irony. They gave me access, they gave me a mandate, and so there was an ‘I’ who could comfortably write the damn thing. South Bombay comment on coloniality. High-schooler on hookup culture. Marxist analysis of Art and Gentrification. But the seams were always going to be visible. Not only have I lost my sense of what ‘real’ things to write about are (I couldn’t write a serious essay on feminist politics without giggling into gas), but I have also lost faith in the ‘I’ who is out there, having an opinion, preparing plot, and asking people to believe.
Riven by reality, call me a postmodern princess. I have lost my religion, lost faith in hooks to hang from – Marxist, feminist, Reductress-Headline-ist, Swiftie Who Loves Kanye West-ist – these old identities fall from the stars, slithering dead in a post-truth no man’s land. Creeping into adulthood, identification through check-box dispositions is not enough. There is no essential shoe that fits, no Tumblr-niche big enough for Whitman and me. I’m in my no-era Era. The 1975 told teenage-me, “I know you’re looking for salvation in a secular age, but girl, I’m not your saviour.” I am still coming to terms with the truth that nothing ever could be.
Rita Dove wrote of bad confessional writing: “It goes skewering in deep, exclaiming, Ooh, look at all this blood! But I’m like, No one’s interested in your blood. Make me bleed as I’m reading.” My difficulty is that the specific position I occupy – carved out by literary idols and exes, Twitter threads and strange nightmares – feels inseparable from the world. Everything is confessional, even when not explicitly so. When I write about Freud or Benjamin or Gandhi, I am only ever writing about myself. Mine is an old problem, that my personal is (in the broadest, most charitable sense) political, and having no clarity in either sphere means all I do when I write is work through who I am, and where we are. I am spent, creatively and emotionally, describing how a smile teases my skin, rolling a rock up a hill.
There is a powerful argument about how, shockingly, class relations and gender politics are central to these creative dynamics. But this isn’t a political theory essay, and I maintain that there is more to my disease than womanhood or looking at that damn phone all the time. Not knowing what is real has become an aesthetic principle, my aesthetic principle. So, I broker my writing bashfully. I mull over ecstasy, I mull over regret, look at me now - mulling over mulling. Yes, this is tedious and indulgent. It is common and base. But where else can honesty come from?
As I sit down to start my first fiction piece in years, with an outline of a narrative horrifically and avariciously about myself, I realise that this is my principle simply because I have no other choice. I must lose sight of the burning forests, I can only cover the swaying trees.
I am content, depraved, resplendent, and exultant, in a little corner of culture, dying as a casualty of the 21st century, and shimmering as its finest export. I have found joy in babbling, in feminine phrases light as a droplet, about our state of cultural decline, irrelevant intimacies, and flights of fancy. Who will read me? Perhaps nobody. But to write as I do – in danger, blind, desperate – is the only way I want to. Sure, creation is centripetal. Most writers start from themselves, writing what they know. I write because I will stay forever in the limbo of ‘knowing.’ And even if I can never move on, if I never leave the beaches of selfhood, I will not give up my claim to the sublime.
Call it delusion, or narcissism, or the tell-tale signs of inexperience. You wouldn’t be the first to do so. As I listen to the feedback the fiction class has for my story, I hear things like, “the writing is good but, the writing is good but.” The characters and the plot are wrecked by abstraction. Why don’t I write a normal story? Not to try to be theory, memoir, and short story all at once. Write clean. That’s good advice. Wise, and practical. But I dwell in possibility, a rarer house than prose.
cannot wait to read more from you 💌
I think you're the "voice of our generation, or at least a voice". Can't wait to read more!!