Kissing the Demon: The Creative Writer's Handbook

INTRODUCTION

Most of the people I’ve known who wanted to become writers, knowing what it meant, did become writers. About all that is required is that the would-be writer understand clearly what it is that he wants to become and what he must do to become it.

—John Gardner, The Art of Fiction

Among all the miseries heaped upon my generation was a fat squat book with a shiny red faux leather cover titled High School English Grammar and Composition. It was the stuff of nightmares and it was authored by two men, Wren and Martin, who for some inexplicable reason I imagined as Laurel and Hardy with bowler hats and walking sticks. These two worthies were responsible for my growing up with a dislike for rules. Many years later, the writer in me continues to avoid rules but the editor in me has developed a sneaky admiration for those two men. Just like one of my daughters has for me—she recently presented me with a pop art coaster of a girl with raised eyebrows exclaiming: Oh my god! My mother was right about everything!

There’s a funny thing about rules. You force them on people in a high-handed manner and you can be sure they will spend their lives breaking them with a vengeance, to their own detriment sometimes. Now after four decades in book publishing, I can’t help dividing the writers I read into two groups: those who have suffered Wren and Martin (or the likes of them) and those who haven’t. The first two or three paragraphs of anybody’s writing are enough to tell me which group he or she belongs to. Ironically, if it’s the former, I heave a sigh of relief because it makes my task of editing so much easier.

Writing is, however, quite apart from editing—the rules of the game are so different—and my sigh of relief shouldn’t indicate that I think only the former can be writers. Nor do Wren and Martin pose a threat to you today. The only reason I’ve mentioned them, and mentioned my own opinion of rules, is to put across to you that Kissing the Demon is not designed to put your creative nose out of joint, only to turn it gently in a certain direction.

I’ve based the title of the book on what George Orwell said about writing being a horrible, exhausting experience for him, like a long bout of some painful illness, and that he wouldn’t have written a single book were he not driven by some demon that he could neither resist nor understand. I hope this book will make your journey as a writer a little less painful, make you look upon the demon with a little more love. At the very least, it should make you a better reader by opening your eyes to the creative process, and an enhanced reading experience can be rewarding in so many ways. To quote James Wood, author of How Fiction Works: ‘Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practise on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.’

Kissing the Demon would help book reviewers too. Just as a writer needs to get out of the way of his story, so does the reviewer need to get past personal opinion. I am often bewildered by reviewers who comment that such-and-such book is ‘too dark and complex’ or ‘too light and superficial’. Such a verdict makes no sense if that is precisely what the writer intended or that’s the genre he’s writing in. The reviewer needs to understand the scope of narrative elements and all it takes to write a book before unthinkingly trashing a writer’s years and years of hard work.

You can use this book in two ways: either before or after you’ve written something. If you feel too much advice might interfere with the flow of your thoughts, avoid reading it till you have a first draft ready. So when you go through it, you will recognize your mistakes and you can rectify them in your second draft. It’s also designed to allow you to skip parts you don’t want to read at a certain point but may want to return to later.

Though Kissing the Demon is addressed primarily to the fiction writer and the illustrative examples within are drawn mostly from fiction, the writer of narrative non-fiction (biography, autobiography, literary journalism, travel writing) would benefit too. Literary devices are not ends in themselves—they are a way of seeing. It was in 1966 that Truman Capote coined the term ‘non-fiction novel’ to describe his In Cold Blood. The increasing tendency for non-fiction to follow the narrative arc of a novel is evident in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, Pico Iyer’s Sun after Dark and Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night. Validating the merging of the two streams was the awarding of the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature for the first time in half a century to a non-fiction writer, Svetlana Alexievich. In her book on the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, she blends research with the texture, drama and emotional punch of a novel masterfully, her ports of call very similar to those of fiction, in which the writer plays a role much larger than that of the objective observer.

We see a similar merging of boundaries in the world of cinema. The documentary film Amy made on singer Amy Winehouse by Asif Kapadia employs certain feature film techniques. The exploitation of Amy, her descent into addiction and her death at the age of twenty-seven could have been the stuff of a hackneyed portrait of yet another talented junkie. Instead, Kapadia delivers a telling image of a woman who is funny, sharp, brash, as crude as she is elegant and not in the least bit fragile, at least not initially. Like her music, she emerges as both ordinary and special. This film carries a great lesson in characterization for writers of both fiction and non-fiction.

Kissing the Demon is based on the premise that writers are born and made, that talent can be innate and developed. Today, few would argue with this theory, unlike yesteryear, when people believed writing to be a mystical act, to be indulged in by the genius alone. Over the last decade this myth has blown, the veil has lifted. This doesn’t mean I’m in favour of spreading the art thin to the level of mediocrity but neither does the recent proliferation of writers in India necessarily indicate an intellectual decline. If the number of books being written has skyrocketed, so has the number of books being rejected. And those rejected have most often been written by someone who couldn’t be bothered with rules. Contempt of technique, an arrogant attitude, doesn’t pay.

While it’s true that depth of vision and originality cannot be taught, craft can, and an understanding of craft could in turn spur you to develop a vision and a voice of your own. To stretch the argument a bit, I would even say that writers like Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky could have benefited from a couple of raps on their knuckles. One of the reasons people got away without learning earlier was that so few were writing; today millions are, making it all the more important to learn if you want to stand out from the crowd rather than end up in a publisher’s slush pile.

Yes, competition has intensified, yet writers today are luckier than their predecessors of a generation or two ago who had to grapple with accusations of being Macaulay’s bastards and other such insults flung at the post-colonial Indian-English writer. Today, writing in Hinglish is perfectly legitimate; words like chapatti and kurta-pyjama needn’t be italicized; dialogue can be penned just the way it is spoken in India and not the way the British told us to do it. The number of English-es available to us is astounding, and this can be seen as both delightful and disturbing depending on how much of a purist one is.

At what point is talent allowed autonomy over rules and techniques? Should you fear your writing will lose its energy if you pay too much attention to the dos and don’ts? The good news is, there are no dos and don’ts. Then why read this book at all? Because eventually, you have to fit your creation between a front and a back cover if you want someone to sell it for you. There’s a long and winding path to be traversed between your eureka moment and seeing your work on someone’s bookshelf. You could well turn the dos and don’ts on their head while writing, but at some point in your journey, you would do well to refer to them. If you’re writing ‘pure’ literary fiction, you might see things like structure and plot as childish. You might think you need pay no attention to them. But while it’s true that literary fiction has greater licence to break the rules, a literary writer needs to understand the rules just as much because his writing is, by its very nature, always in danger of too much shapelessness. Writing a book takes many, many years and it makes sense to have some sort of strategy, unless you enjoy the idea of losing your way mid-book.

How does a writer start writing? Does he pick on a plot at random and then build a story around it? Does he invent a bunch of characters or base them on people he knows? If he’s clever with words, could it simply mean indulging in wordplay, hoping some magical quality in the words themselves will move them forward? Writing has its own laws. It depends so much on intuition. Most writers develop haphazardly. They work in countless directions. There are no absolute solutions to the problems they face. There is no wrong or right, no frozen framework. This is why no book can teach you the art of writing, but what it can do is make the art more manageable for you. It can throw the rules at you, though what you really need is not a set of rules but mastery of the art of breaking those rules because as much as strategies and rules can give you freedom, they can also take it away. So pick and choose the rules that suit you and discard the ones that don’t, as long as you understand that total anarchy doesn’t work. Even a genius like Picasso learnt to create perfect life drawings before he dared to fracture the human image. So learn, understand, and then break free because eventually, there are as many ways of writing a book as there are people and voices on this planet.

I can share with you my own experience of writing a novel. Given the fact that I was no lover of rules to begin with, plus the fact that I had mentored hundreds of writers myself, I wasn’t about to listen to anyone tell me how to write. A year after my novel was published, I turned to it one winter afternoon to recapture a sense of achievement, only to be horrified. By page 50, I slammed the book shut and decided it was in my past. If you ask me what was wrong, I could list the points for you but I’m not doing a critique of my novel here; I’m trying to get across to you that if only I had been less arrogant, if only someone had told me when I began writing that I might benefit from the rule book (even if I chose to discard some of the rules), I might have been spared much agony.

Mine isn’t an unusual experience. A new book, begun with enthusiasm, often grows shameful to its author later. Lewis Carroll once wrote to his sister: ‘I feel at present very like a child with a new toy, but I daresay I shall be tired of it soon, and wish to be the Pope of Rome next.’ This isn’t altogether a bad thing. What is bad is losing the desire to improve one’s craft. In Zadie Smith’s words: ‘There is a weird, inverse confidence to be had from feeling destroyed, because being destroyed, having to start again, means you have space in front of you, somewhere to go. Fictionally speaking, the nightmare is losing the desire to move.’ I do also believe that I wasted some very precious years; had I paid attention to a few basic rules, I would have written that book in half the time it actually took me.

Talking of wasted years, what if you’ve spent the larger part of your life on a career or raising a family and feel it’s too late for you to start writing now? You should take heart from the fact that Frank McCourt was sixty-six when he wrote Angela’s Ashes, Raymond Chandler was fifty-one when he wrote The Big Sleep and Richard Adams was fifty-four when he wrote Watership Down. Among writers who began earlier but didn’t achieve recognition till a later age are Jean Rhys who wrote Wide Sargasso Sea at seventy-six, Nirad Chaudhuri who wrote The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian at fifty-four, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! at ninety and Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse at 100! It doesn’t matter if it’s too late for you to come out with a string of books either. Quantity never proved anybody’s worth. After To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee never wrote again. It was at the age of eighty-eight that Go Set a Watchman (thought to have been a first draft of Mockingbird) was published.

What if you’re not particularly well read or your education didn’t include Yeats or Chaucer or you haven’t a clue what, for instance, postmodernist or post-colonial writing or deconstruction means? Does it mean you’re not fit to be a writer? While it’s true that reading benefits writing, the study of literature and styles is of greater importance to the academic. Understanding these might broaden your horizons but they won’t help you write a better book. I hadn’t heard of ‘hysterical realism’ until a critic referred to Zadie Smith’s writing as such. And though the term ‘magical realism’ was first used way back in the 1920s by a German art critic to describe altered reality, very few had heard of it till Marquez and Rushdie and Kundera came on the scene.

One of the most valuable chapters in this book that you won’t find in any other book anywhere talks about how to get published in India. The Indian scenario is quite different from that in the West and poses its own unique problems for the writer here. For the uninitiated, it is a world shrouded in mystery. This section unravels that mystery, takes you through the bhool bhulaiyya of publishers, contracts, agents, editors and so on—that exclusive club of people who have the power to make you or break you by simply instructing their secretaries to say they will get back to you in six months. (Most don’t even do that, by the way, and you need to know why.) It addresses the most common problems faced by writers in a direct, honest and practical fashion. It tells you what you can expect from a publisher and what you cannot. It tells you how to revise and finalize your work, how to get your manuscript ready for a publisher, how to write a synopsis, how to submit your work, the rules of the game, what gets a publisher to open his door or answer his phone and what makes him go into hiding. All you need are a few guidelines and you’re home and dry without having been humiliated in the process. You should understand that, in a way, you have greater power than a publisher. If the publisher wasn’t around, you would still be a writer; if you’re not around, the publisher ceases to exist. There is a reason I have placed this section right at the end of the book. Because, important though it may be eventually, the best results are got from forgetting about the whole publishing process, writing for yourself alone, for the sheer pleasure of it, or otherwise with a specific reader in mind whom you either know or have conjured up. Once you turn ambitious, something else becomes your goal.

In this book, you will also find solutions to the vexing issue of balancing everyday life with writing. So many talented people keep dreaming about being writers but they never get down to it because they simply cannot find the time. How do you fit writing into your daily schedule? There’s no easy way around the dilemma nor am I really qualified to tell you how to run your life because I scarcely muddle through my own; but in my decades of working with writers, I have on and off gained insight into some of their lives and seen first-hand certain habits working or not working. I’ve encapsulated these for you in a section titled ‘Ten Commandments for the writerly life’. They expose the fault lines that invariably exist between writing and that little thing on the side called life that doesn’t always support the writer. On the other hand are certain romantic myths about writers’