Being bloody stubborn and hammering at something till it works

Second response to An Odd Yellow on writing and what it's like for me

First, some book news: if you’re in Mumbai on 1 Feb I’m on a panel at the Kala Ghoda Arts Fest that I’m excited about! Come!

Venue: David Sassoon Library (garden)

Date: February 1, 5-6 PM

Title: Murder, She Wrote

Panelists: Jane Borges, Kalpana Swaminathan, Meeti Shroff Shah and Unmana

Blurb: Murder mysteries and thrillers have long been dominated by male writers and detectives. Jane Borges leads Kalpana Swaminathan, Meeti Shroff Shah and Unmana in a refreshing conversation on how their recent novels rewrite the rules—and the gaze—of the genre.

And now, on to my actual letter.

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Dear Y,

I’m writing a SECOND response to your lovely newsletter. This time, I’m focusing on the craft aspects, because you raised a bunch of interesting points. But first, a caveat: I don’t think any writing advice is universal (except to do what works for you); I am just sharing my experience.

I feel like I tried very hard in the last post to tell you why you shouldn’t want to be a writer. But if you’re here anyway, because you (like me) can’t help yourself, well, here’s what it’s like for me.

When you have the mindset of someone trying to be as good as your favourites, it is a mindfuck. Because nothing seems good enough.

Uff, I feel this, friend. This is very true. When I finish a draft, I feel a burst of euphoria: yeah, I did it! I’m a genius! And then I give myself a few weeks which usually turns into months (or years) and come back to it and I’m like, this is trash! who said you could do this! you’re not a fucking writer!

Now that I’ve done this a few cycles, I accept it, take a perverse joy in it even. (I mock myself like I’m my own affectionate sibling.) I have learned that many things, if not most, do come with practice (you say “muscle building;” that’s exactly how I feel). So as I kept writing and revising in spite of that voice* saying I was terrible: the voice got smaller. I hope it does for you.

*Another note on that inner critic: I found that that’s not my voice, which is what I’d long assumed. I’m not self-sabotaging, I’m not self-loathing—or if I am, it’s because I was trained to do it. After enough time of being in my protective coccoon and writing and writing, I could separate those voices out as those of parents, teachers, etc. My actual voice: it just wants me to keep writing.

So when those voices do come back, it’s easier now to say: you’re wrong. Or: I don’t believe you. Or, when I’m feeling petty: how many books did you write? (Because the people who tried to stop me were unhappy themselves, and perhaps partly because of thwarted creativity. I learned also that actually successful writers are often generous. I think of Anjum Hasan, who is the most brilliant writer I personally know and have known for seven years now,* and who’s an exacting critic, but also respectful and generous and encouraging.)

*I know her personally because I went to Bangalore to attend her workshop: see last post.

Here’s something I found on the internet (no specific source/lots of sources) that blew my mind:

You’re comparing your rough draft to others’ published books.

Your job isn’t to create a perfect story in one sitting or a perfect novel in three months* (I can’t really comment on poetry, because I’m a bad poet, but Elizabeth Bishop’s example suggests great poets have inadequate first or fourteenth drafts too). Your job for the first draft is to get the thought/idea out from your head onto your document or notebook. Anne Lamott calls them Shitty First Drafts to take the pressure away: they’re meant to be terrible. But my favourite quote about first drafts is this:

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”

―Terry Pratchett

*Stephen King might say otherwise, but we can’t all be Stephen King, and may not want to be, and also, he was just talking about the first draft.

Your job for every subsequent draft is not even necessarily to improve the draft, but to play with it. You made your game in the first draft, now you play. Keep playing until you feel you’ve hit the final level, then send it out (to smart friends, to magazines, to publishers/agents, whatever is applicable). You’ll probably hear/realise there’s more levels to play: you can go back to it then.

Here’s the other thing: you’re comparing your writing to your favourite writers! In the WORLD! Most other jobs/experiences don’t come with that kind of pressure: you’re playing board games with a group of friends, you’re competing with your classmates in college, you’re working in a small team at most jobs—and competing with max a few hundred people for a bigger bonus. Even on The Voice or whatever talent reality show, they’re not competing with everyone who they’ve ever heard sing, just everyone else who entered this year.

But you’re comparing your writing to some of the best writers of the world! I’m not saying you shouldn’t, not at all: I’m congratulating you (us) on your (our) audacity and ambition. I’m using “ambition” here to mean not a hankering for fame or riches, but a wish to do really interesting work, the kind of work no one else is doing, writing that doesn’t exist yet.

Of course you’re falling short! It’s fine to fall short. But if you’re comparing, you’re also striving to make your writing as good. And even in falling short, even in being broken or imperfect or loopy, you might make something unique and wonderful.

And remember: it’s not your job to perfect it right now. All you have to do is finish this draft, or this revision, and then the next, and then the next. This can sound frustrating: but we’ve established that we come to this work accepting a lifetime of practise, not forming an assembly line to turn out the next can of beans.

You said you haven’t submitted in a long time, Y. In a year and a half, even! Well, I didn’t submit much at all for a very long time. Not creative writing, at least: I did freelance pieces for fun and money, but for fifteen years since college I submitted maybe two stories, a couple of half-assed novel or novella ideas/drafts, and a few poems. I had nothing published from 2006 till late 2021, when I had a dream and wrote it down and sent it in to a magazine I had seen someone recommend on Twitter: and soon, it was up and they nominated it for the Best of the Net.

In 2023 I wrote a quick story and was alternately happy and frustrated with it and would revise furiously and submit every few months, and then it got shortlisted for the Deodar Prize and was published in their anthology. (That wasn’t arguably the best version I had of it, but it’s up now, it’s done.)

And in 2024, of course, Chikkamma Tours was published.

Now if you start my story in November 2021, I look prolific and super talented. But that’s not the full story. I’ve been writing since I was a child. While I usually say Chikkamma took seven years, in some ways it took 14, because I took the bones of the plot from an abandoned mystery novel I’d started in 2010. All the stories that are lying in my story graveyard on my laptop helped fertilise the ones that actually got to grow big enough to be visible to others. (Sorry for the morbid metaphor.) You work on the same themes, bending them into different shapes until you find a shape that holds up.

I am writing all this at so much length because I remember being misled and frustrated by popular cultural narratives about writing and talent. I thought since no one was beating down my door i was not good and should therefore give up. But now that I’ve actually worked at this longer and know how hard it is, now that I look around me at other published writers and see the kind of privilege most of us have: financial resources to be able to work on something that requires a lot of time and doesn’t pay much instead of having your nose stuck to the grind just to meet basic expenses; for many writers, parents with both the money and the love to help you study creative writing abroad; kind mentors and supportive family; in most cases a fairly able body and brain. I didn’t have some of these things at various times, which is why it took me longer, but I absolutely would not have made it without them (except the MFA abroad; I did a 10 weekend workshop in Bengaluru instead).

So what I’m saying is: it’s hard. why the heck do you want to do it?

But if you do anyway, because you just do, because what else is there to life than to do things that bring us satisfaction: always remember that it’s hard. Give yourself time and comfort and try to enjoy the process.

I have one last thing to say about “conviction”: because that’s the word I found most jarring in your piece, the feeling I don’t recognise within myself. I am not arguing with you: I understand what you see. My partner talks often of my “perseverance”, which feels more within reach, because it’s about action as much as feeling. My mentor Zac calls it “persistence”, which I like better. You don’t have to feel convinced while you’re doing it; you just have to do it. I literally told myself many times that I would just do the actions even if I don’t have faith (another word you used) that it will work. It worked. When I gave it everything I had, over and over for six years, it worked.

But the word I use to myself (instead of conviction, perseverance, persistence) is: stubbornness. Because that was a word used to demean me as a child, because children’s desires and preferences are often dismissed. Now I wear it like a badge of pride. I’m bloody stubborn. I wanted to see it through till the end.

If you’re bloody stubborn too, sit down. I’ll make you coffee.

Love,

U