Hello, and welcome to a little ramble.
A few days ago I read this Zadie Smith lecture on craft from 2008. It makes me happy when I read about other writers’ processes and find points of similarity. I had a couple of people message me about how I have a moment of clarity or something clicks when I’m interviewing. They have the same thing! It feels wonderful. A community of weirdos with these quirks, these habits and approaches to essentially the same job (i.e. storytelling). I love knowing how other writers go about their work, the things they do when procrastinating, how they plan their projects.
Parul Sehgal researches to put off writing (PS could write the instructions to setting up a fax machine and I would read that), George Saunders imagines a “meter mounted in (his) forehead with “P” on this side (“Positive”) and “N” on this side (“Negative”)… then edit(s), so as to move the needle into the “P” zone”. Jhumpa Lahiri writes in Italian because “in English those words would never have come out of me”. John Cheever would put on a suit and tie and head to the basement to write. Arundhati Roy had publishers audition for her by writing a letter about “how they understood” her book and she then “consulted” with the characters in the book to determine who they wanted to go with. Mohsin Hamid walks, because that worked for Haruki Murakami. Geetanjali Shree seeks extreme isolation and once ended up at a guesthouse with snakes for company. Someone on Twitter said they have a longform piece they’re working on read out loud to them several times by Word or whatever program while they do the dishes as it helps them catch errors or changes. Lauren Groff writes longhand and puts the work away, and then begins all over again, writing the same thing from memory - the idea being that only the vital bits remain. I could keep going. (And if you have a favourite process or you’ve read of one, do share)
I’ve been thinking about this bit in Zadie Smith’s lecture, about different approaches to the actual writing:
“I want to offer you a pair of somewhat ugly terms for two breeds of novelist: The Macro Planner and The Micro Manager. A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot, and creates a structure—all before he writes the title page… Personally, I’m a Micro Manager. I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. I haven’t the slightest idea what the ending is until I get to it… Macro Planners have their houses basically built from day one and so their obsession is internal—they’re forever moving the furniture. They’ll put a chair in the bedroom, the lounge, the kitchen and then back in the bedroom again. Micro Managers like me build a house floor by floor, discreetly and in its entirety. Each floor needs to be sturdy and fully decorated with all the furniture in place before the next is built on top of it. There’s wallpaper in the hall even if the stairs lead nowhere at all.”
I imagined my work as a home. Which camp would I fall in and can you be both kinds of planners? I am, to a degree a macro planner, in that I make notes, organise research with tabs and colours and Excel sheets, and I handwrite a writing plan that includes quotes from interviewees that I want to start or end with. I make notes on my phone - ideas to work around, full paras, things I shouldn’t forget to mention. But I can’t start, however, until I have a good first sentence nailed down and often the ending and route I have mapped out in my plan is a decoy - I know that I will go off course and in fact, hope that I do. If I have it all figured out, its not very fun. I like surprising myself. I was very surprised for e.g. by the ending that seemed to urgently and very certainly appear with this piece, ‘The Badshahs of Karachi’, about the snow-white Zuljinnahs of Karachi, these beautiful prized stallions, that I wrote in 2015 and someone recently reminded me of. I am not writing fiction, so I need to have my materials in place before I start writing or I hit a wall aka writer’s block - which to me is really the same as procrastination in that I’m either unprepared or scared and need to take a step back. I move room by room, as it were, and I cannot turn my attention onto the next before one is finished, furnished, decorated.
I thought of another metaphor in the same vein, one that Ariel Levy used in ‘The Rules do not Apply’. She talks about her nerves before a reporting trip to South Africa.
“The night before I left, Africa was golden and pulsating in my mind. I imagined myself with pad in hand, furiously taking notes under a red sun. I would be fearless, in love with my work and the wide world. I would fall into bed at night exhilarated, my mind zooming with thought. I was 35 years old and flying to Johannesburg to report the most ambitious story of my career…
When I boarded the plane in New York, I did not have a single contact in Africa. That had seemed like a mere detail the night before I left. But somewhere over the Atlantic, it became a crisis. What had I been thinking? … I tried to calm myself: We’ll just figure it out; this isn’t quantum physics. But I found myself unconvincing.
I had finally pushed it too far. I would be punished for my hubris with failure. Africa, so glorious and promising the night before, grew menacing in my mind.”
She then returns to herself and remembers
“But somehow, if you want to badly enough, you can always report a story. It feels like magic but it works like carpentry. You build a frame, and then you build on that, and pretty soon you have something to stand on so you can hammer away at a height that was initially out of reach…”
I think of this so often, whenever I lose my nerve with a story or I just don’t want to call someone up and wheedle out an interview. I see that foundation, the scaffolding, the materials that come together, I would continue with this but I literally know nothing about building materials. You get it.
If I keep stretching Zadie’s metaphor, I treated my work far more secretively than I do now. I worked away on that house quietly, quickly and only shared it once it was done and habitable. Look what I made! I can’t do that anymore. I need a community. Now its more, look at what I’m trying to make. I wonder why that change came about. Do I trust my circle more now and don’t feel as self-conscious getting it not-quite-right-yet in front of them?
I know Zadie was talking about the writing, which of course, is solitary work [side note: when I was working on the first book and had given myself a tight deadline to get it all finished within a year, my father suggested, ‘It sounds like a lot. Can’t you ask your sister to write some of it for you?’] But I started thinking of it a bit differently: the ‘house’ for me includes the conception of an idea, the research, the finessing of that idea, editing, all of it. I get the writing done when scaffolding is well in place. I have learned that the people who help me put that house together, whether they know they are participating or not, are crucial. Some are more obvious than others as they are good at bits that I am not and they are in the industry for e.g. editors. I trust their eye and they understand how my mind works, my preoccupations and curiosities, so they help me separate the spaghetti from the meatballs and sauce (it makes sense) so its not all one gloopy albeit delicious mess. There’s my friend Dini who is so gentle but my god, she has this fierce intelligence. She sent me the text below when I was worrying one day - this is beauty in my house, lights turned on when I’m fumbling in the dark.
There are the friends I spit-ball with and I have started recording our chats because they ask questions that takes the work in directions I didn’t think of. The thing I miss the most in Karachi is the ability to wander and people-watch. I think thats an important part of building work. This screenshot below, from a chat with three Irish writers - I feel this so deeply and since so many of my closest friends live outside Pakistan or have moved, I’ve lost this.
There’s the unexpected influences. I work with a trainer at a women-only gym and I’ve found a shift slowly come in because of my experience there and her attitude. In that space, I’m humbled a lot by what I don’t get right, I notice how competitive I can be, how I unfavourably compare myself with others gains, how I expect to get it right the first time, how I’m surprised by what I can do with repetition, how I can be looser and more free when I’m in a certain space. It sounds so simple but these are lessons I’m bringing into my work. Then there’s the nemeses. They’re in the house too. People whose work I’m envious of or they’re getting bylines and opportunities I want. It spurs you on, I think, as long as you’re not getting sour about the whole thing or have a little pin-stuffed doll in a drawer. Think of it as looking at other people’s homes on Pinterest and trying to catch up. [Roxane Gay is ofc the queen of nemeses. Read this or this on the subject] A person who should never be in your home: a first reader who is too critical or tries to make the work something its not or just wants to mansplain how they would do it.
Who helps you build your home? I’m still thinking about mine. BTW if you’re a writer and you want a community + mentors to be part of your crew, check out South Asia Speaks, a mentorship I’m part of. Applications for the next round of fellowships are open until Sept 30.
Thinking about this house metaphor, I went down a rabbit hole searching for writers’ homes. Join me as I procrastinate, won’t you? Hanya Yanagihara has a “highly mould-resistant cedar” hinoki soaking tub (sadly no photo). It makes perfect sense to me that people with the names Rhiannon, Tree and Devon live in Anaïs Nin’s home in Silver Lake. Ian McEwan’s home makes the one in Atonement look like the family was slumming it, it has an infinity pool where you feel “you can reach out and touch the oxeye daisies growing in the new wildflower meadow” beyond (crie). From there, I learned that Charles Darwin’s home had something called a ‘sandwalk’ - “a path that took perhaps five minutes to stroll around — perfect walking-thinking time”. I think thats what we poors call desk-to-kitchen walk. Hilary Mantel once lived in a former asylum. If you ever wanted a how-to-live-like-Joan-Didion shopping guide, here you go, and while you’re at it, read this on the estate sale of her possessions. Did you know people paid $11,000 a pop for her blank notebooks? And $60,000 for her desk. If you owned it, would you use it?
Something great happened this week. Leslie Jamison is teaching a course called ‘Archive Fever’, and when lots of people asked her to share the reading list, she did! So thats what I’m making my way through. See the list here .
Kamila Shamsie has a short story, Churail, shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award, and from Sept 11 onwards you can listen to hers + the other stories up for the prize.