Tips for Writers, i.e., If You Are Serious about Writing

The progress on the book is slow, creepingly slow. I feel exhausted after a few pages of editing. I don't know why. The net is full of suggestions for writers and editors. Most of them by writers themselves. Shows that all writers find writing difficult, and there's not much help coming. And, if you post on your blog or facebook, feedback, useful ones, is also scanty.

Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing

I have a few friends who religiously reads my blogs and they do comment, most often. Surprisingly, the majority of people for whom I have been very generous with my comments and likes do not reciprocate. This is rather mind-numbing, innit?

It's hurting also. Yeah. But what can be done? So you cut your nails, polish the tips of them, those hardy accretions on finger tips, (this is quite essential for the fingers to tap in words on the keyboard and also to hold down strings on guitar frets), and with nose slightly in the air, with a demeanour of a Shakespeare in Love, go ahead and add some tips for writers to your blog.

So, um, here goes:

Decide the best time to write and write religiously in that time. Keep away diversions, manage chores around these times but keep your mind focussed on putting some words on screen. This may be early morning or late in the night.

Have your own space, uncluttered, where you are comfortable. If you have a back problem put a cushion behind your back. This is your holy sanctum sanctorum, your pavitrabhoomi, whatevah!

Sit straight and don't bend over the keyboard. Posture is essentially everything.

If you are a snacker have plenty around so that you don't have to get up and go to the refrigerator.

For providence sake, stretch those cramped muscles once in a while.

If phone is a disturbance, switch it off when you try to write. That's what I do. Calls can always be answered later using missed calls facility.

If you are a social media addict, well, tear off the internet cable or turn it off. Social (what social) networking is the bane of writing.

Remember you are a writer, so look like one. Keep that beard, grow your hair, look like a writer. Your idiosyncracies will be forgiven. Sorry, I forgot women, keep your hair extra short, that androgynous look, right baby?

Don't blame others for your own lack of success. You will get some critics early on in your writing career who are hard to assuage. So ignore them. 

Don't be too happy when something clicks. When I had my first success with a short story, a lot of my network friends turned against me.

Take long walks, there's nothing better to calm the mind and get new ideas.

Always keep a notebook, the more expensive the better. You will carry it with you if you pay a bomb. My Moleskine (unruled) notebook costs me one grand. That makes it Rs five a page. So I am careful about what I write in it.

Above all, follow Elmo Leonard's ten rules of writing pasted above.

Ganeshotsav Has Come and Gone, Some Thoughts

So a Ganeshotsav has come and gone. I almost miss the din and the sound of drums, which used to have me in a tizzy sometimes. Now, why I got into a tizzy is because I couldn't concentrate, and hence, couldn't write. Couldn't write means couldn't edit also. Editing requires more concentration, more contextual thinking, more care for language, et cetera. Writing is done just like that. 

But I feel as the late writer Khushwant Singh did that religious fervour is growing in India and according to many it is quite meaningless. There is no devotion, no dedication, and shows an absolute lack of discipline. Two families in our cluster of houses had Ganeshas in their homes and the noise through the day and night was tremendous. Is this a sign of saffronisation of India? A hard-core Hindutva friend once told me that he thought such fervour was misplaced, misguided. 

The two families I mentioned must have spent one lakh each on the idol, the food, the priest, and other miscellaneous expenses. Can they afford it? Did they take a loan to celebrate the festival? Lokmanya Tilak "popularized Ganesh Chaturthi as a national festival in order to bridge the gap between Brahmins and non-Brahmins and find a context in which to build a new grassroots unity between them, and generate nationalistic fervour among people in Maharashtra against the British colonial rule." Are these principles being observed?

Well, questions will remain. 

Today's Maid: a Case of Reverse Exploitation

This is something I am writing with great reluctance. Cases of people abusing/overworking their maids are many. But our maid has been abusing us and taking advantage of our, well, erm, good nature. Today, we live in a smart world: a world without principles, loyalties, old-world bon homie. Therefore the concept of the household maid who comes, talks politely, does work, and leaves is no longer applicable. Or, so we feel.

We pay her the prevailing rate for sweeping and swabbing (floor only) and a bonus on festivals. The beginning, a few years ago, was encouraging. Then, insidiously, from coming every day she started coming every second day. We said okay because every time there was a valid excuse. Then it became every third day. The work also started deteriorating. She wouldn't sweep or swab the balcony and only passes the wipe perfunctorily over the floor. Some room she doesn't sweep, only swabs, assuming it will take care of the dust and fallen hair. (We are people in our fifties and a lot of shedding happens.) The whole job hardly takes ten minutes and she is out of the door after that.

Then, horror of horrors, she started coming once a week. The stories were the same: fever, chills, cough, back pain, and long wait at the local doctor's clinic. We realise we were being exploited. Cheated. In a month she comes only four times and takes full pay. Imagine!

We hold consultations - wife and I - about what to do. She is an old hand, and, being sentimentally attached, we don't want to be rude and ask her to leave. God forbid who comes as replacement. Stories abound about maids stealing gold, giving information about valuables to boyfriends, even killing house owners.

We are not decided about the exploiting maid, well, not so far. But she will have to go for the way she has been taking advantage of our leniency. I didn't know exploitation happens both way. Duh!

Some Progress! A Brief Note on the Magazines of the Seventies and Eighties.

There's some progress on the novel's side, at last. I am to glad to tell you that the painful sub-editing, copy editing (call it what you will) has finally reached the half-way mark. It has been slow progress because I could do hardly four pages a day, that too, not on all days. Some days, football came in the way. Yes, football. Other days, a lot of things: sundry maintenance work at home (e.g. protecting against the rain), poetry submissions (that don't bear fruit), Sangam House submission (a mystery), a short story submission to New Yorker (which they said would automatically not qualify for a reply). So that's understandable. With so many submission they must be tired. There are so many people writing, especially short stories, and all the markets have died out.

I remember those days - Illustrated Weekly, Youth Times, Mirror, Imprint, Eves Weekly, Sunday Review, Debonair, Beautiful - all had space for short stories. Illustrated weekly and Youth Times had two pages for poems. My God! Those were golden days for short fiction. None of these magazines exist today. I would send out short stories and poems to all these publications and keep a watch if they appeared, while waiting in the barber shop. Yes, barber shops then had quite a few of those magazines in their racks. Some of them were published. But, then I was a poor documenter of my successes. All of them got lost in the movings I have done.

Today these magazines have been gobbled up by bigger media. The big newspapers shut down their smaller magazines, as they made no profit. These magazines were the hotbed of intellectual discourse in those days. People actually wrote letters to editors, bereting them for bad issues, congratulating them for good issues.

Where are those magazines? Where are those heated discussions? Football, anyone?

On Reading Jeet Thayil's Novel "Narcopolis"

After a long time spent in prevaricating, I have gotten down to reading Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis. No, this isn't a case of hero-worship (Jeet is actually younger than me) for a person from my community, but a frank appreciation of a novel which is set in my urbs prima, Bombay. I know Jeet Thayil as an essayer of fine prose and poetry, and even our native places in Kerala aren't far from each other.

Narcopolis is a many-layered piece about a man castrated to be a eunuch. I guess this is a system that is prevalent in India, only in India, that is. Here we have the eunuchs come to our home and if the child is born with inadequate sexual organs he is castrated to be an eunuch. A eunuch thus castrated can only become a beggar or a sex slave. Nothing could be sadder than a story of an eunuch (nowadays called transgender) in the class- and community-conscious Indian society. The transgender Dimple also works in an opium den set in the seventies when Thayil came of age and what is interesting is his re-creation of those days.

Through his exquisitely crafted prose – having the ring of poetry – Thayil recreates an era that has been forgotten. Those days in Bombay opium was easily available. There was marijuana in every street corner; there were the dons of Dongri who managed the narcotics business with diligence. Today the dons are on the run and drugs aren't easily available. The opium dens of those days have closed down; the curtains have come down on an era of hedonistic excesses. Commissioner JRF Ribeiro the supercop and his brave men have seen to that.

The author moves easily across boundaries and time lines as is seen from Lee's – a top-ranking Chinese official – story. Lee is marking his days in Bombay and is Dimple's customer. Dimple is employed by Rashid in his opium den and Thayil reels out a stream of slang terms which stands for the use and abuse of the narcotic. Rashid is a man damaged by the profession and indulges in excesses of sex and gluttony. He seems like a man beyond redemption.

And, of course, there is the six-page opening sentence which as Thayil says "is a good sentence." I find nothing wrong in that since Joyce has a page full of outdated degrees and qualifications in Ulysses.

The famous Malayalam writer MT Vasudevan Nair has said that every novel puts across a novel concept, a novel idea, something for the society to ruminate on. I can't fish out the original Malayalam words, but he said as much. True Thayil has presented the unrecorded past of Bombay as a novel idea of which we may be unaware, but in which surely have played a part.

My only complaint with Narcopolis is that it ends too soon. I would have liked to see some more resolution and closures. I would have liked to read more about Dimple's life and about Ramesh, Rumi, as he is called. He has some interesting quotes ascribed to him: "This chooth country, this cunt country, how the fuck are you supposed to live here without drugs?" But then a novel has to end somewhere doesn't it?

Working Hardly on the Novel - Love Writing; Hate Editing

Sorry for not being in this space for some time. It's that I am reading the novel on my Kindle and have noticed a lot of printer's devils - hm, the abominable creature's guts - in them, which I wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

I love writing. But it's the editing that I hate, no, detest with all my being. While writing keeps you entertained and innovating, it's the editing that kills. I have edited the novel four (repeat four) times and I guess there is one more editing to go. 

So there goes me, a doddering old idiot, a tottering fool, a cranky and bankrupt writer back to another editing. I should have gone back to painting which would have been more lucrative. Ho, hm. 

Wish me luck, because, sorry folks, it's going to take a while.

Not Been Blogging for a Long Time. Now I Know How to Upload My Writing to Kindle

Yeah, I know, I have been so involved with my Kindle that I have not been blogging these past days. After all, it's a brilliant invention and I have been reading loads of stuff.

I carry it wherever I go and am a bit smitten by its dark and pretty looks.

Now what I have done is upload my novel to my Kindle and, there it is, as if it (read I) have already been published. The formatting is as of a published book and everything is so presentable, it makes me wonder why I didn't buy a Kindle earlier.

Of course, during the reading I am watching for bloopers in the plot and the language,

"

little, little inconsistencies here and there, no,

"

as Catherine, Dinshaw's mother would say. It helps that the novel is one big file and not many small files, so that I can browse whichever portion I would like to edit.

Also, a printout wouldn't give you the feel a book, the font for instance, as the Kindle can.

How I went about it is as follows:

When you buy Kindle you get a Kindle email address, something like you@kindle.com. This is just a concept email and don't try to open it on your Outlook or elsewhere. When you mail your documents to you@free.kindle.com you

r

documents will be transferred to your Kindle device for free [Advise: you should be logged in to Amazon and should have a wi-fi connection.]. If you want it transferred without wi-fi you will have to pay a fee for their document transfer network, Whispernet.

Simple? Do let me know if it works for you. Just imagine the joy of having hundreds of boring documents in a free-flowing Kindle format for you to read in trains, in cars, in monrail, in metro,

doctor's waiting room,

well, whatever!

I think Amazon and kindle should pay me for this recommendation. Yeah they should.