“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.”
- Why I Write, George Orwell
There are two pieces of writing that come to mind when I consider this question of why I write.
One is an essay by George Orwell called ‘Why I Write’ written in 1946, and the other is a talk by Joan Didion given at Berkley in 1976 with the same title. The title, which Didion says she ‘stole’ from Orwell’s essay is where the similarities end. These two pieces are very different from each other and I find myself agreeing with different parts of each.
Let me start with why I write: in short, I don’t know. Or I don’t know fully. If I did I would be writing a lot more.
So I arrive conveniently at the first reason why I write, which is why I’m writing this: to understand my own mind. To unravel the darkness of my subconscious - by darkness, I mean literal darkness, not ‘sad’ or ‘bad’ darkness, although there is plenty of that. I write to unpack my opinions, to discover my instincts, to see if there’s anything to my thoughts and ideas about a certain subject, to see if it makes sense.
I was thrilled to recognize this instinct in Didion’s talk. "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” she says. And later she adds, “What I want and what I fear.” She sees the lights of the Bevatron (a particle accelerator in Berkeley where Didion lived) on a hill and then writes, “Why have the night lights in the Bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?” This urge to understand the persistent angels and demons of my own mind is why I suddenly find myself at my laptop, trying to put something down in words.
The earliest memory I have is of a courtyard. There is a leafless tree, branches like a skeleton’s fingers against a dusk sky. Red brick walls and rough granite floors line the edges of this picture. I am walking through this courtyard. How much of this is a real memory and how much I have injected into it over the years, thinking about this first memory, I do not know: but this image persists in my mind. Someday I will write a story about it.
I started my novel ‘Ib’s Endless Search for Satisfaction’ with an image. It was an image of a young man standing against the skyline of a big, cruel city, his shoulders drooping. He is thin and weak. The book became about this young man. The young man was me.
An image was enough to fuel the creation of an entire novel. I had no other characters in mind, nor did I have some story to tell or something to say. Some writers find story-telling a powerful motive - I have no stories to tell. Again, I share this with Didion: “I began Play It as It Lays just as I have begun each of my novels, with no notion of “character” or “plot” or even “incident.” I had only two pictures in my mind,…”
But this alone cannot explain why I spent ten years writing a mediocre book, persisting through crippling senses of failure and mediocrity, with nothing to say and no story to tell.
In truth, an image was not enough to fuel an entire novel. Something much more powerful was at work. And this instinct, in the words of Orwell is the ‘desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood…’ I would add, to get back at the grown-ups and other children who snubbed you in childhood, who laughed at you, who always seemed to forget you were around, who with a slight tonal inflection made you feel like a failure (here I go again, trying to get back at people).
This instinct, this insecurity, this lack of confidence is what dictates my style, for better or for worse: I want to be read as a clever writer, a deep writer, a layered writer, a wise writer, not just a story-teller. I want people to know that I am intelligent and smart or more precisely, more intelligent and smarter than them.
Obviously, there are all kinds of things wrong with this attitude (starting with the fact that there is no quality of the mind like ‘intelligence’ - it’s all about the explanatory knowledge one has) and it probably explains why I don’t write more. After all, ‘intelligence’ and wisdom have nothing to do with being a good writer of fiction, and in trying to achieve these abstract goals, I paralyse myself into inaction: ‘What if people think I’m mediocre?’ ‘What if people think I’m stupid?’ I wish I could just sit down and say to myself, “I’m going to write about why I write as simply and clearly as I can.” Alas, if it was that easy.
But shouldn’t it be this easy? If you tell yourself to write in a certain way why can’t you do it?
Here is my theory of serious fiction writing (I will explain what I mean by serious in a later piece): It comes from the subconscious. Which is another way of saying: you cannot control every aspect of the way you write. It comes from somewhere you cannot readily access and is shaped by things you don’t remember and don’t know that you know.
Two things made me want to be a writer: one was the thought of wild financial and critical success. The second was the excitement I felt when I thought of creating new worlds. I have achieved neither of these two things. So why I do keep writing?
Perhaps it has something to do with trying to make others feel what you felt when you read a certain thing. In college, when I was first introduced to literature, I remember reading this line in The Wasteland and feeling a shiver run through my entire being. The line was ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’ What does this even mean? I had no idea then and I have no idea now. I’m sure Eliot had some esoteric philosophy to explain this and I’m sure a thousand books have been written trying to make sense of it, but that was what I found so amazing: I didn’t need to ‘understand’ it to be affected by it. Something was stirred deep within me, too deep for the clear light of reason, too opaque for the bright light of consciousness.
Orwell describes a similar reaction to these lines from Paradise Lost:
So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee,
which he found was the first time he ‘discovered the joy of mere words…’
I wish someone would read a line from my book and say, ‘Wow, what a line. This guy is a real genius’ That is all I want. And this is what keeps me writing. (This newsletter is in part an effort to get away from this stultifying attitude and to just write without worrying about what others think of my writing).
For example, I’m trying to write a new novel. I don’t know what the plot is, or who the characters are - but I know exactly what kind of novel it is going to be. It’s going to be a first-person novel, darkly humorous, dense, garrulous, spontaneous, formally untidy and uncontrolled, like a piece of art created by throwing things at a canvas. It’s not going to say anything, or have a political overtone, or a moral message. So by elimination, I know that the book is not going to win any prizes - certainly not in India.
Every book is a failure, Orwell says in this same essay, and this book is already looking like it’s going to drive me crazy, but I cannot battle the very thing that makes me a writer. To do so would take away the spark that makes writing good.
(Now that I’ve written down what this next novel is going to be and seen it in words I cringe and shudder and I already find I have begun to undo the stubborn ideas of what it is going to be. This is what I mean by understanding my own mind and unravelling my subconscious.)
Despite not having any conscious agenda, I do recognise that invariably my writing becomes about bullies and the damage they cause. Perhaps it is because I was a bully in the 4th and 5th grade and at some level, my entire artistic impulse is to make up for the pain and suffering I caused. This dislike of bullies and authority also translates into a political distaste for authoritarians and totalitarians. So this new novel will certainly have a few bullies and a few victims but not as a centre - rather these pet peeves of mine - dislike for religion is another - will become peripheral skits to an otherwise seemingly aimless and meaningless central, personal, inward drama.
But it would be dishonest to say that these strong opinions I hold do not motivate me to produce words and string them to one another.
Why does anyone do anything? Why does Ramu go to the store? Why does Shamu paint portraits of strangers for 100 rupees? Why does Waheeda work 9 hours a day at an NGO cleaning floors and bathrooms? Why does Anjum go to college instead of helping her parents run their pharmacy? Why does Chetan write novel after novel? There are only four reasons anyone does anything: to survive, to thrive, for revenge or to leave a stamp of attendance upon this world. I write out of a combination of all four but mostly for the fourth. ‘Look at me,’ I say, ‘I lived and this is what I thought of life.’
Why I Write
Hi Roshan, loved this essay of yours!!! However I do feel that there is some kind of sadness when you start talking about you being a mediocre writer. I mean you've already written a good book which got nominated for the jcb lit prize. Already a big achievement which many of us are not able to achieve!! May be you may not think it as a big achievement. Like they say " If you're top of your class, you are in the wrong class !" . I wish you all the best for your journey and eagerly waiting for your next essays!!