Ernest Hemingway is said to have often written standing-up by his typewriter from dawn to noon, and then drunk himself silly soon after; Maya Angelou wrote only in motel rooms with over have nurtured odd and obscure writing rituals. On the day of the announcement of The Hindu Prize for 2014, five of the short-listed novelists tell us what makes their words flow.
Anita Nair
Idris: Keeper of the Light
It took six-and-a-half years for Idris: Keeper of the Light to see the light of day. 2005 had run half its course when Anita Nair first heard of Mamangam, an ancient Kerala cultural festival celebrated by the banks of the Bharathapuzha, its history steeped as much in folklore as in bloodshed. “The idea to write a novel set in 17th Century Malabar sat in my head, gently growing, germinating, until it acquired a form in the latter half of 2008,” she says. Until then a writer of only contemporary novels, Anita took her first steps into historical fiction in Kerala’s archival libraries, photocopying and translating Malayalam academic journals and research papers on the food, clothing, justice system and living styles of the Malabar, besides scouring whole books and PDFs on the same in English. She let the information distil within her over two years, and in 2010, wrote Idris’ opening scene. “When I began, I only had a vague structure in my head, a flexible boundary of ropes that I could move any which way as I wrote. It isn’t like building solid brick walls. With the ropes, I can step out, come back in, stretch or shrink them as my characters develop and the story progresses.” As with most of her characters, Idris dropped into Anita’s head fully formed, down to his quirks and mannerisms; and as with all her novels, Anita wrote Idris’ story, from start to finish, in her long cursive hand, on fat, five-subject, lined notebooks, with the Parker fountain pen her husband gifted her before her first novel. “It’s been to the workshop and back a few times in all these years,” she laughs, “but I love its grasp, and the glide it gives me, despite my entire body finding the focal point of its weight at my fingertips when I write. One cartridge gets me through 1,200 words, which is as much as I can get out of me before I’m exhausted.” For her crime fiction, Anita first began writing with a Waterman fountain pen, for she felt this was a “different Anita Nair, with a different personality”, and for her children’s fiction, she reserves a black-inked Montblanc. Idris made it to a computer only after its second rewrite by hand and by 2012, Anita had a final draft for her publishers.
Deepti Kapoor
A Bad Character
Cut away from the world, in the monsoon-soaked climes of Goa, with quaint books and European cinema for company, Deepti Kapoor sat by the river that wound past her house, and wrote A Bad Character for three years. Centred around the life of a 20-year-old discovering herself and the darker shades of Delhi, the novel stemmed from Deepti’s life, brewed in her brain for long and made it to paper when she left her journalist life in Delhi to teach ashtanga yoga in Goa. “It was the space I got in my head once I quit, the time I then had in my hands, and the physical strength and discipline of yoga that got me writing,” she says. Her days began long before the sun rose, with a glass of hot lemon water, followed by coffee, and she wrote until dawn, with her cat by her side. In the early days, new to novel writing, Deepti structured A Bad Character like a tradition novel — with a chronological narrative and well-defined chapters. “It took me six months to realise this wasn’t working, to shed the skins of what a novel was supposed to be like, of what Indian women’s writing was expected to be, and just take my shot in the dark and do something daring, provocative.” Told from different points of view, with shifts between the past and present, A Bad Character , thus flows like “the interior logic of a nightmare or a hallucination”, like “being inside someone’s head”. Deepti wrote largely from her memories of Delhi, from her acute journalistic observations of Delhi’s many strange details, with notes frequently scribbled in a Moleskine diary. Typing always on a laptop in Baskerville font, 20 point, with the page at 75 per cent magnification, Deepti’s early drafts touched a lakh of words. With each new draft, re-written entirely from the start, except for the first page, Deepti sliced away at her text until after the sixth draft, she had her final 44,000 words — that “short burst of a novel” she’d desired.
Shashi Deshpande
Shadow Play
Shashi Deshpande wrote Shadow Play just as she has her 12 other novels over decades now — at her crowded table facing a blank wall, on reams and reams of loose, white sheets, with the Montblanc fountain pen she’s always held dear. Its nib broke recently, and ink is harder to come by these days, and it has all grown frightfully expensive to frequently replace in the years she’s been writing. “I’m probably one of the last old-timers left around,” she laughs. Shadow Play was born because the people from Shashi’s 1996 novel, A Matter of Time , walked back into her head again and made themselves at home there. “I wasn’t planning a sequel at all, so I didn’t write for a year after the idea came to me. But in that time their world created itself in my head; I grew familiar with those characters again — their past, desires, and dreams.” When Shashi did begin writing, she wrote in fits and starts, with no beginnings or endings, “at random”, until she had a “terrible, terrible first draft”. “It was awful language, with lots of unrelated stuff, but just like a sculptor needs his stone first to chisel from, here was the raw material with which I could carve a story.” Shadow Play was rewritten by hand from first scene to last thrice, before Shashi began editing it on a computer. “I don’t plot beforehand,” she says, “I just need to get a hold of the hinges of the story, and then the rest flows.” As a rookie novelist, in the shadow of her father Sriranga’s greatness, Shashi recalls first trying to smoke like him, hoping she’d write as well. “Of course, that didn’t quite work for me. A cup of tea at 5 every morning does the trick these days!”
Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar
The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey
Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar wrote The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey in the dead of the night, from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m, between May and October 2011, while his family was fast asleep, for they had no clue he was writing a book. In his hometown Ghatsila, in Jharkhand, his parents would wake up at 4.30 every morning, as the first siren of the copper factory where they worked sounded, and Hansda would curl back into bed just in time to keep their suspicions at bay. Back then, a doctor at Jamshedpur’s medical college, Hansda spent his time writing all night, mentally taking notes while he observed patients all day, saving stray sentences and ideas in the SMS drafts folder of his mobile phone during his 40-km commute to Jamshedpur each day, only to come home and revise his draft by midnight. Rupi Baskey is broadly a story Hansda had heard spoken of often by his parents and relatives in his village among the Santhal community in Jharkhand. “Before I even began telling this story, I knew it through and through, down to the chapters I would write, for the retellings had fictionalised the tale in my head over a long time,” says Hansda. Each night, he strove to write a thousand words, and often went to sleep “guilty and defeated” if he didn’t, but all along Hansda had one aim — to not write of the Santhals as other novels occasionally had — as backdrops to greater events. “I was reading Alice Walker’s A Colour Purple while writing Rupi Baskey , and that’s the tone I wanted for the Santhals — an in-your-face telling of their tale.”
Shovon Chowdhury
The Competent Authority
Shovon Chowdhury first thought of The Competent Authority 11 years ago. With every Government circular that came signed “By the Order of the Competent Authority”, Shovon wondered what it would be like if the Competent Authority was a real person, “like the phantom”, who was actually a different person each time, except the nation never knew. “Given the state of the country he’d have to be an absolute lunatic!” It took Shovon five years to write his first draft, building chronologically, chapter by chapter. “Unless I finish something completely, I can’t built further; it’s like moving on to the first floor when the ground floor is shaky.” “Frantically anal” about his writing, Shovon built The Competent Authority first in flow charts, diagrams and pencil sketches that detailed his entire structure before putting words to paper. Even so, the first version of his book ran to over 1,000 pages. And then began the process of snipping off the excess to its present slimness. “And that’s when it helps to be from advertising. When your client and his security guard too have the right to butcher your body text, you lose all illusions about your writing being God’s gift to mankind,” he laughs. Advertising also gave Shovon the ability to “switch it on” any minute, thus writing in the backseat of cars, and at receptions, on his mobile phone. All along, he also kept up his humour blog India Update, where he “field-tested” the jokes that went into the book. “One of my objectives was to have three jokes per page, so if you didn’t like the story or the opinions, at least the jokes would keep you going. I calculated that at 500 bucks for the book, you’d get 15,000 jokes, and if one in three goes home, that’s a rupee per joke, and what do you get for a rupee these days!”
