Revising the Phelna Story

I started revising a short story after a while. I have had it sitting there for a while, then I turned it in for the Spring workshop, and then felt like revising it based on the feedback I got from the class. Besides, it will also help break my fiction lull. I have very modest aims--to put in 4-6 pages every week of this workshop. That is, roughly a page a day. Right now, other than the teaching philosophy, that's all I can deal with. I am definitely leading a very wordy life.

Show, Don't Tell

One of the first things a student gets told in an American style workshop, whether fiction or poetry, is Show, Don't Tell. That is, exposition is to be avoided. Instead, it is the task of the writer to "show" the concrete reality, through descriptions, narration of actions and settings and what not. It is the specificity of those descriptions that will inform the reader what he or she needs to be "told." For example, don't just tell the reader that a character is angry. Show that anger. Show how the character, for instance, might move her hands, when she is angry. Let your writing go to that place where your descriptions of those gestures will let the reader know that the character is angry, and not your use of the word "angry." But if you're trying to be a fiction writer, and trying to survive within the American scenario, this maxim will come to haunt you. At least, that's what happened to me. Honestly, I have been resistant to the idea somewhat.

Even if I am going to "show" in my writing, it's going to be a form of "telling," since my medium is writing, and not a form of visual art. I argued to myself. This, and the attendant demand that a writer construct a story through scenes and not exposition, is an off-shoot of the American over-dependence on the visuals. The Hollywood script. The mainstream-film mode of narration where tangible action, built in recognizable scenes, that's what is considered to be the foundation of a story. Yes, write the story in scenes, so that it can be easily developed into a Hollywood screenplay, I grumbled. Also, it was fascinating to see how many of my short-fiction instructors actually would use television-soaps and Hollywood films to demonstrate this and that about a successful story or a scene in a story. Often I wanted to scream, but look at Kieslowski's Red, Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali, Ritwick Ghatak's Komal Gandhar, Sembene Ousmane's Borom Seret, Ferdinando Solanas' El Viaje. I mean, what's going on here? It's not that even if we're thinking of films, it's just the Hollywood mode of narration that's out there. There are other forms of storytelling. There are numerous ways of showing. Even within US. I mean, let's just think of Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep or Julie Dash's Daughter of Dust. There's no way we can comprehend these films if we go by action as the smallest unit alone.

In short, what I am trying to say, modes of narration, like the content of the story itself, is cultural. And political. Thus, there is no one way of telling a story. It all depends on who is doing the "telling" and from what location. Yet, inside a standard American short-fiction workshop, this is hardly recognized. The students are also fairly racially and culturally homogenous to never bring it up. But even if one leaves aside the fact that Anglo-America is not the entire planet, one feels like asking, okay so what about Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy or George Eliot or ELizabeth Gaskell or Louisa May Alcott? What makes countless readers go back to them? Or Leo Tolstoy? I mean, whatever other claims one make, there is no way one can suggest that these nineteenth century giants are devoid of "telling." Of course, it's also true that the nineteenth century realisms depended on this idea of an omniscent narrator, who could get inside (penetrate?) inside every character's head and see, feel and suspect things. Omniscent narrators are not in style right now, in American literary fiction market, I've been told. So, another point in my favor. Modes of telling a story are determined by history as they are by culture or geographic and social location.

Then, why should I write trapped by a convention, which seems so nebulous anyway?

But then, at some point, probably because everyone was giving me the same feedback (develop what you're saying here in scenes, Nandini!), that I began to try out the much talked about scenes. Writing things in scenes compelled me to explore the characters' voice, the physical postures and gestures, the way they would interact with other characters. In other words, it's when I got to writing concrete scenes that I had to "penetrate" much more into my characters' lives. In a way, it made me feel strangely close to the methodology of the nineteenth century realists! And in a weird kind of a way, it forced me to move deeper into the realities I was trying to explore. Is it at all plausible for this character to talk and dress and act in this way? If not, then how would this person behave? I had to ask myself again and again. So yes, there's something to this showing business! I had to admit. But at the same time, showing can never satisfy me completely.

What I was doing through my exploration of scenes could have been done by a screenplay writer and a movie-camera. So, where do I stand as a fiction-writer? I kept asking myself! And my answer was, in the capacity of my form to explore the interiority of the characters. The fact that their actions and their thoughts might not always correspond very smoothly to each other! The fact that a certain character can do something, while thinking something very very different during that same precise moment. In a way, "telling" and nothing but telling or exposition, so to say, would give me a chance to explore that dialectics,that weird interaction between the exterior and the interior of a character!

So, now what? Well, I guess, for me the answer is, no fiction writer can throw away the "telling" part. Rather, the most compelling kinds of fiction are written through a combination and synthesis of showing and telling, rather than "show, don't tell!"

And while these are things I have been reflecting on for a while, what gives me the courage to finally write down this post is the fact, that I have finally succeeded to revise a short story that had been sitting on my desktop for a while, and yes, it included writing lots of one-line tellings in scenes!

Autobiography/Fiction

The new story is happening, but very very slowly.I am not pushing myself to produce huge chunks all at once. Rather, I try to write 200-300 words everyday, and reflect on the story outline before and after producing those words. Although yesterday I did end up writing around 500 words. I wonder, if the difficulty is partly because of the fact that my main character is someone who is hugely different from me-- a small-town teenager, whom everyone reads as too shy, too burdened by social norms, and too ordinary. I have never lived in an Indian/Bengali small-town myself, although I have visited them and have friends who have grown up in there. So, it's not something I know directly in the way I knew of things when I wrote some of the stories of the Pipli series. Although, once I began to write, even in the Pipli series, things began to assume their own lives, and pushed me out of that autobiography mode. Or should I say, vulgar autobiography mode?

In that sense, I am beginning to think, that all writings are autobiographical in some way or the other. I mean, there is no way a writer can write about things if it hasn't passed through his experience or existence. I am willing to go for extremely broad definitions of the words "experience" and "existence," but I don't think it is possible to write even a fantasy tale or a historical fiction (things which are by definition beyond realism, and therefore beyond the so-called real world experience), if the writer hasn't experienced history or the fantasy world in some way or the other. So, I am not surprised, when I find myself unconsciously falling back upon my own memories of how I felt as a fifteen year old while writing about this girl who is vastly dissimilar in terms of background. Now, I just need to continue with the narrative and see where it goes.

In other words,have begun to read Rishi Reddy's debut collection Karma and Other Stories. She has a really strong voice, and a lucid way of writing about people and their complexities, which is magnetic. A little bit like Jhumpa Lahiri, but from what I have read so far, there is a bigger space for rebellion, especially young girls' rebellion in her stories. And I cannot help enjoying that!

But Where is the Conflict?

Have started the new short story, written like a page of it. Although I am still not sure where it is going, I have a better sense of the narrative. I am trying to experiment with the kind of voice Faulkner uses for his story A Rose for Emily. I am not sure if it will work fully, the we-voice thing, because already I can see the narrator becoming much more of an involved entity, more so than what becomes of him/her within Faulkner's story. So, that needs to be seen. I don't know fully yet...

In the last one year, I have been consistently told in the workshops that nothing much ever happens in the stories I write. I have also been asked, but, where is the conflict? Part of it, no doubt, is my own bad writing. I mean, I am only beginning to write, think through stories,words, representations as a crafts-woman seriously. Previously, my relationship to literature has been pre-dominantly one of a reader-critic. So, I don't expect instant success. But, I have also begun to wonder, if there isn't something more to that conflict-nothing much happens question than just my bad writing. Coming to think of it, nothing much happens in, say, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhayay's Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) for a good length of time. Nothing much happens in Sandra Cisneros' House on the Mango Street or Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye until one comes to the tail-end.So, is it possible that this question is itself ideological in nature? A question that emerges from a generation of white American readers/writers who are used to the catastrophe model of Hollywood film-narrative? I mean, let's face it, nothing much happens in most people's lives, yet a lot happens too! So how does a writer choose a story? In Bengali, as well as in the entire gamut of post-colonial literature, there is a very rich tradition of character-sketches. Kind of a fictional version of life-writing, where the very writing of a character, reveals a lot about the complexities of history, society, culture, narrative. It is true I have been trained within that tradition, and that training has been primarily sub-conscious and un-conscious. And it is within that tradition that I want to locate myself.

So, in a way, I think, I am more interested in exploring the contradictions and the tensions in a story, rather than exploring the conflict (Thanks to UCLA-Extension Daniel Jaffe for pointing this out in a workshop.)

But I also wonder, to what extent, my readers have been expecting me to satisfy their ethnic curiosities? But then, I also want to hone my craft. So, I don't want to use that as an excuse for not working on my craft. So, my question is, where does a third world/writer of color (insert any other non-dominant identity here) go to develop their story-telling skills while clinging onto the complexities of their experiences both in terms of the forms and the contents they are embracing?

Random Rants and Fears

My productivity always goes down significantly during the months I live in Kolkata. I indulge in it, because this is the time I have ear-marked for myself for getting back to the community of friends and acquaintances whose presence and activities have helped me to be who I am right now. I don't know if there is any "back" in that sense, but the thing is, in the last seven years, I have never felt out of sync with Kolkata or India. No, it's not that I identify with everything that is happening in here. I have a fair amount of ideological/political/aesthetic/personal alienation from spaces and communities here, but it's not really the neither here nor there kind of alienation the so-called diasporic intellectuals seem to be in love with. In my opinion, all places in this planet are equally infested with problematic power relations, problematic ideologies etc. which make living hard. And in all those places, there are individuals and collectivities who are trying to deal with those structures/ideologies in their own ways. Whether I will grow as an individual or not, really depends upon how I negotiate with those individuals and collectivities and how deeply I am reflecting on them or representing those negotiations in my chosen medium.

Speaking of which, have just begun to work on a new short story. It's not coming together yet, but in my experience, some of the stories that I have gotten the biggest satisfaction from are the ones which I found the hardest to write. Probably because in those stories, I have simultaneously allowed and forced myself to go to places within which I am not exactly very comfortable. And I think, one of the biggest understandings that I have come to, through all these exercises in the last two years is that, I am kind of lacking (A LOT) in the Talent Department (Thank God!). Which means, I have to work hard, Hard, HARD, HARRRRRDDDDDD, to produce something that is halfway coherent. I am often worried that I am not putting in that amount of labor, I am slacking off, and some day, I will just get up in the morning and find that all the things I thought I had to say and write about, have vanished over-night, leaving a colorless hole in my head.

That's why, these days, I begin my writing days reading a random page from a book I love. If I can read, and still make sense of what is there in the page, probably it means, that the skin and all those other things in my head haven't eroded so much to form that hole. So, today was Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. So, today, this is the passage I read:

While other children of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it.
History's smell.
Like old roses on a breeze
It would lurk for ever in ordinary things. In coat-hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on the roads. In certain colours. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. And the emptiness in eyes.

This is why, I have always believed that any good art is essentially also good theory. There is no way one can move about it.

Longish Short Story Done!

Not everything is okay in K-town. Lalgarh...I am in no position to undermine or trivialize the violence that has been unleashed in there...but apart from all the co-lateral damage involved,one cannot help recognizing this plain old fact that the states, all over the world, can be extremely funny and idiotic when they are scared. And quite ridiculous too! Not too many years ago, in Kenya, Ngugi wa'Thiongo's novel Matigari was arrested. This is not a typo. I am serious. They issued a fucking arrest warrant against a novel. I wouldn't be surprised if I witness something similar in my home-state!

In terms of my writing, I finally finished the story I had been working on (yay!). It was a painful process--writing this story. For one thing, it took me almost three months to finish it. Granted, in the middle of it all, I took my comprehensive exams, wrote and defended my dissertation proposal, but still, this is the longest short story that I have ever written. And during the entire process, I kept worrying about the plot, the voice, the cris-crossing of voices, point-of-view, characterization etc. But now, I realize that this story had been influenced a lot by the general tone of Jhumpa Lahiri's latest short story collection Unaccustomed Earth, which I was reading during a big chunk of this time that I was writing this story.

I must confess, I am not a great fan of Lahiri's. I do think she is a very competent short story writer, and has a lot to teach in terms of the craft of short fiction. But for most part, she is replicating in a much more sensitive way the kind of assimilationist narrative that was popularized by Bharati Mukherjee and the ilk. No doubt Lahiri is much more sensitive and adept at representing more complex characters, but at the end of the day it is all about the American Dream. But what to do? If you are a Bengali, a writer and a poco-lit-critter, then you will end up bouncing against her. Even if you yourself choose to ignore her, people will ask your opinions about her and her work, and then you suddenly find yourself leafing through her books.

At the same time, I must confess that Unaccustomed Earth is a very important book to me. It has given me the permission to write long, novella-like short stories where nothing much happens. Where I want to deviate from Lahiri is, the whole complex question of how to represent women. My own thesis is that, Lahiri finds it extremely hard to represent feminine rebellion, feminine intellectuality, feminine radicalism. Consequently, her women characters tend to inhabit that space of demure Bengali femininity which does not nettle with either the mainstream South Asian/Bengali perceptions of womanhood, or the American/Western/white perceptions about hapless South Asian women. On the other hand, I like to think that this story is primarily about women resisting. In multiple ways. Across generational lines. And also, the failure to resist. I think the story is also about memory, destruction of memory and the vicious circle of violence within which families are often implicated.

My own sense is that, I still need to work on the concluding section of the story. Also, I know very very well that once I begin to send it out for feedback, there will be lots of things that I will need to revise. But for now, I will sit back for a while and celebrate!

Writing About Violence, Writing About Childhood

Writing regularly has, for me, inadvertently, contributed to something. Well, to be honest, it has contributed to lots of things. But the biggest thing is, I have again gone back to short story as a reader. There isn't a whole lot of place within academic literary criticism to deal with short stories. Most of us work on "narratives", and that too, novels. So, for a long long time, I was caught up within it too.

In the last few days, I have read a really good short story–"Brownie" by an younger African-American writer, ZZ Packer. “Brownie,” is a look into the intersections of race, disability, class and the ways in which these things contribute to a violent childhood. A lot of the work I have produced as a writer in the last one year is about childhood and violence. The violence of growing up in gendered familial spaces, the violence of the school system, the violence of the playground. I am so not a believer in the idea of an “innocent” child. I mean, kids, as I remember from my own days, are violent. And mean. And cruel. They understand things way more than the adults think they can, they are soaking up the norms of this unequal world very very fast, and because they don’t have the adult polish, they express those violences without any inhibition. So, for me, as a writer, it’s hard to write about kids not because they are innocent, but because they process language differently, they articulate things differently. That’s why, I loved Packer’s story “Brownie.” It addresses all these things, without ever losing track of the childish ways of linguistic and conceptual cognition.

When I first began to write, I avoided going into the crazier places. I would try to skirt around the issues of violence, and write these all-too-pleasant stories, which wouldn't make much sense even to me. I realized that what I am really avoiding is going into my own series of childhood trauma. Trauma of growing up as a little girl. Trauma of growing up within broken political dreams. Trauma of going to school. And a lot more. The thing is, once I began to put myself through that self-examination, it became almost impossible to not write about violence, about the crazy shit that's this world. So after a while, I began to feel, that my writing almost automaticallly is going towards examining how my characters are capable of doing violence to others, or are trying to deal with violence done upon them. Although, I am still struggling with this issue, I think, this realization pushed my writing towards a new direction, towards a new kind of pacing, where I at least try to see how the so-called "bad things" (and I don't mean catastrophic here) lend upon a story lots of tension, make a writer look for multi-faceted characters. But, I think, the flip side of it, in my own writing is, this push has also slowed down my writing in a way. I get too involved in little details. And as much as I think the plot-driven, contemporary American short-story scenario erases too many subjectivities, too many stories, I don't think I want to write a novel or a short-story series like Amit Chaudhuri's A Strange and Sublime Address. So, I am really stuck in this place, how does one narrate stories of childhood and systemic violence through the short-story form?