Saturday, May 30, 2009

inspiration expression

Recently someone asked a group of writers of which I was a part, what it was that inspired them to write. At the time I left it to the others to comment. They spoke of particular instances: discovering a lost item that took on iconic proportions of nostalgia, for example. There were the ever relevant references to motherhood and the amazing qualities of children’s voices.

I could have answered that the particular story that was in focus on the occasion was, among other things, a tribute to a Bangalore I grew up in. But that seemed too simple, too one dimensional a response. I left it to the others to comment.

I reflect once again on the question, in the context of my own creative experience of course. Ultimately, it is the entire complex subtlety of human behaviour that catalyses the need to express in a bid to understand the relationships, the sociology and the interactions that propagate individual destinies.


It is fascinating how nuances reflect on the face. For instance, a certain sub-cutaneous sheen, almost palpably dense under the skin often signals ill-health. I’ve seen it time and time again, often learning later that the person in question was indeed ill. The other thing it has unfortunately taken me long to hone is my empirical ability to read that particular stillness, a closed, guarded intensity that I now recognise as a sign of depression. Shuttered eyes!

I find I can work misery and discontent into a story, and am learning to incorporate them with the fine-ness they are due. Love, however, is impossibly difficult to write about. The whole ghastly caricaturing in popular cinema, of the secret communication between potential lovers, the lifted eyelid and lowered brow, the infatuated coyness and sentimentality, is a serious deterrent. I have to find a way to acieve some measure of the sophistication of An Equal Music.

In any event, catching passing glimpses of human expression invariably triggers stories. Capturing their elusive delicacy is the challenge.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

short fiction

As I discover more and more short fiction, creative, experimental, classical, brilliant, bold, honest, two things strike me: If I had read much of this before I ventured into exploring writing, I doubt I would have had the courage to start. And now that I’ve started, will I ever reach a comparable level of craft or inventiveness or emotional depth.

I am driven to use lighting, transitions between tungsten and neon and natural light to set tone. In Stretch, Open Up, Stretch, the solitary shadow and neon light hint at the cold, aseptic world the protagonist is in. In another story, Rosy, a prime suspect in one of the Sonali Naag detective series, is a paying guest in a room lit by ‘grim neon lighting’ that she attempts to turn into a home. The ‘signs flashing across the street’ in Where’s my Baby Gone ‘make patterns’ whose jaggedness signals what is to come. But then, I read, ‘In place of its (the moon’s) luminosity there were only the streetlights, shrill and small, and the irritating flicker of the neons...’1. I am humbled.


Similarly, I recognise that I fail the grimy, gritty reality of the city because I do not have the courage to say something like, ‘under the city’s icy winter, there is a street where the trash builds up and drunks vomit, where the fight dogs shit and everything freezes fast.’2.

One of the themes that fascinates me, that I return to periodically is that of conception, birth and the relationships across generations. The profound single-mindedness of purpose that drive humanity to procreate, and love are beautifully dealt with in Procreate, Generate 3, a lesson in story-telling.

I close this stream of thought with the lasting imagery of the mobile, cohesive ‘rubbish island’ – ‘The whole sad flotilla, a peculiar combination of the once cared-for and the utterly irrelevant’ 4.


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1. Paul Bower, Big Head, Cadenza 19, September 2008, pp: 27
2. Antonio Ungar, Hypothetically, Zoetrope: All Story 13 (1), Spring 2009, pp: 54
3. Anthony Doerr, Procreate, Generate, Granta 97, Spring 2007, pp: 71
4. Rebecca Lloyd, The River, Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, 2008, pp: 13