On Writing | Part 1
How are you, writers?
I thought prologues or forewords signs of works and thoughts that did not have sufficient foundation on themselves, but what does that even mean? To have sufficient foundation for a thought? We mean, perhaps, experiences or studies or some authority which gives the thought some weight. A retired army writing on the army life becomes an insider’s insight, and the same done by a fiction writer, a narrative simply. Now I find myself going on a long forethought to the point I wish to make on the duty of a writer, but bear with my attempt to found my thoughts through a preamble of a sort.
I have for the longest held it in me that inquiring into possibilities over expressing one’s opinions and defending them to test their limits and really to alter them and find new refined opinions a task unfitting to an educated soul. I have held it that the sign of cultivation lay ultimately in seeing more sides of a question than in answering them to the extent one can. It has only come to my attention recently, owing to this other irritation I have with a near disappearance of passionate and good deliberative political speeches, that I too have been the perpetrator of the culture of secrecy and reduced oracular advices, resembling those streamlined presentation slides with optimized bullet points and without a fuller account (or an attempt of a developed thought) on matters of importance to us. In other words, I have been a surveyor more than a defender on any matter and somehow I had come to convincing myself — it is fitting for those who become aware of the ignorance within of how other humans perceive and live, with an eye to this condition we find ourselves in, to not set rigid opinions and accept openly the fluidity that thoughts and their expressions drift with in many minds.
Such a position too is a prejudiced position, an effect we body bound creatures are prone to naturally, though we may wish otherwise. Our thoughts then are our prejudices necessarily and the thought that asks not to account for itself becomes the most prejudiced thought of all, groundless and rejoicing in being so. Though it rejoices, I have lived through it long enough to report it not a happy state. I have therefore taken upon myself to defend a certain opinion I privately held on the aesthetic and the moral purpose of writing.
The tension between perpetual inquiry and responsible assertion is a real one, and people that have aged naturally find themselves in assertions, responsible or otherwise. Since I am clearly heading to the same direction and want my assertions to become responsible that I have undertaken this Herculean task.
In recent years, I have studied crafts and mechanisms of writing — all with a view to write beautiful sentences — and I have now developed some sense of what fail to become beautiful and elegant sentences. I stand far from able to compose them. My indulgences with “techniques and advices and craft” of writing over the years have put substance in the background and I am beginning to ponder a lot on the substance of stories recently. Here I will try to build a case for how I now find substance the most important duty of the writing life.
Now of course nothing I say applies to what resembles diary writing: the writing that aims not to be circulated in public, be scrutinized by it, and be remembered as a literary piece of any importance or relevance in the history and in the contemporary thought. I have for the longest been such a writer and naturally I have more idea-drafts than executed-drafts of those ideas than the works of literary value than those polished and ready to serve the public. The count of the last, in my case, is null.
(Nothing looks ultimately ready and fully polished and you make a call, either after a low effort accepting all the blames in the writing or after certain effort to “one’s capacity” for polish, and willing still to receive blames on the rest. The writer who defends all of his work, in finest of details, is rarer still and it appears magical and often gifted when someone has done a “near-perfect” work. The writer who does not defend his work, of course knows, he has not given all the attention he can to his work.)
When we speak of writers, we must speak of the other side. Writers have audiences and, if one is to live off of one’s writing, it has now to become a commodity that competes with other commodified writings of other writers and most of all with the storytellers in the world of bits. Nearly all of the defense for the quality and completeness of the work comes then from the reception of that audience. For us South Asian Gen Z English writers, our audience is near absent. We haven’t built a following for decades as the older writers have and not everyone in the country finds the language accessible or enjoyable. We write then, for each other’s sake; our friends become our audience and our works, neither successes nor failures.
How are we writers? We have a grasp of translating thoughts or experiences into words that communicate and — to the degree that we are not hesitant to put in words, assisted largely by our education that made us write and show to us that we were somewhat capable of putting in words what we experience or learn, we are writers. Now, just as we demand from politicians a certain corrective vision of the nation, a certain “leading through persuasion”, than through force and a good ethical history and behavior to inspire the nation into similar habits, why shall we not make the same demands from storytellers, who too work nowhere else than in the public sphere?
What is then the duty of a storyteller, what his armaments, and what stories would arise if he made serving the public with a sense of duty his motivation?
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Anurag Upadhyaya is feeling sick, thanks to the cold! Do not expect a bio from him at this state. Maybe in the next part? Stay tuned, loony tunes ;)
