‘I create my own space’
Scribbling notes on a Barista tissue stained with a cup’s bottom, I was mindless of the chatter and lost to the cacophony of “Anita, please take your order.” Working on the third chapter of my book, sentences just flew across the woven lint of soft tissue, the only pleasant thought was “gosh, this pen runs so smooth on this.” Was that the reason I wrote so much so fast? Why are we confined to rigid ideas about where and how writers can or must write? Fixed in the world’s literary consciousness is the image of the isolated writer in a spartan shed, extracting poetry from solitude. Call them cabins, huts, sheds, studios — they have become icons of writing life and the unique demands the craft places on those who pursue it. Common to all ‘sheds’, is isolation.
One can expect quirky answers from most writers. Talking to Namita Gokhale dispelled all such thoughts. Simple and unaffected, she felt, “In one sense I don’t need space. I create the space. When I want to write, I can be private even in an airport and among a crowd of people. My bedroom is very important to me because I’m a religious person and it has all my devi devtas, including the kuldevi from my husband’s family for the last five generations. All the books that I’m currently referring to, are in my room, otherwise they get lost in book shelves.”
Her room is her sanctuary, it had books she loved and cared for, some that she’s forgotten to put away, books that she was reviewing. Along with the deities on the walls was a poster of her play, Gods, Graves and Grandmother. “The screen saver on her computer screen has Shakuntala, her book’s cover jacket. Ambrish Satvik’s Perenium, Arundhati Roy, Iravati Karve’s Yugantar and Mahabharata lay piled up on a stool and on the shelves just above her bed.
Very fond of pens and pencils, she shows them off with child-like glee, placing them carefully on a stool that she designed herself, for me to photograph. Her energetic enthusing on the process of creativity was infectious.
“A deadline is one of the greatest motivators. Every book has a voice and a rhythm. I’m quite fatalistic, I let it take its own course. Sometimes I write a lot, sometimes, not at all. But I’m always taking notes, physically or in my head. A lot of idle time, laziness….”
She carries a novel “in her head for a long time, it’s difficult to cope with daily life when you are living with two realities — the lives of my characters and my own life. They clash and it’s a huge weight on the head.” Opposed to this is the “magical period of having finished a novel. A strange sense of normalcy and emptiness seeps in.”
The novel Namita is working on presently is “on a large scale. It’s been a long time. It’s important to think about it for a long time. I’ve been carrying it like old ladies carry their knitting bags, been circling around the centre of the novel’s structure. It’s like a weaver’s graph. Now that I think I know the structure, I need physical space to write it in. it may be the mountains, my sister’s house or on the bench in the verandah of my house. I think I grew up on a bench in Nainital,” she laughed.
“Once I was in the line for a security check at an airport, I left the line to write a line that came to my head — that is the urgency of writing. Like going to the toilet. That was a line, the only one I wanted to use and I had to write it before I forgot it. My first draft is always by hand. Once it is typed out, it becomes easier to edit.”
I can’t recall the author but hearing Namita speak on spaces within the writer’s mind and outside of it reminded me of what I’d read a little while ago, “If I fall asleep with a pen in my hand, don’t remove it, I might be writing in my dreams.”
In the world within
Annie Dillard thinks a writer’s desk should face a wall, not a window, and finds “putting a book together” both “interesting and exhilarating.”
In pursuit of her craft she has filled up countless journals, taken lots of walks, communed at length with nature and holed up in: a cinder block room overlooking a parking lot; the second floor of an empty student library in Virginia; a cabin on an island in Puget Sound; and a paint-filled pine shed on Cape Cod.
She asks — and asks and asks — in The Writing Life. “Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatise our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?”
Hmm, a little too verbose for my liking which made me go back to my conversation with Rushdie, where once again he spoke of how “a few writers who become very grand. Most writers aren’t like that. Writing a novel is a very vulgar form — from the Latin word vulgous, for people.
“The novel is about how real people’s lives are really led, what moves, inspires, damages them, what they fall in love with. It’s about people and the real world as it really is, outside this absurd palace (gesturing at the grand surroundings of the Rambagh Palace in Jaipur). You can’t write novels in palaces like this one. If you’re a serious writer, you can’t withhold yourself from the world, you’ve got to plunge into it, to get into as many corners as you can and see what’s it like, into lives that are very different from your own.”
‘I like setting up the right environment’
Aman Nath, author and historian approaches his desire to write simply, at the basics. He looks for “vacuum, for a subject that hasn’t been written about. I start with a notion, find oxygen to breathe and find a language, and the courage to jump in. I found it strange that no one had written about 900 years of the Kachwaha family here, even in Hindi. I structured the book precisely. It had nine chapters because of the Nine Square theory.
“I like setting up an environment because I write about the past. I don’t need a study table or a computer. A fountain pen and I could be sitting on the floor, or the bed but certainly not in a posture of a writer writing, sitting on the edge of a chair.”
Aman’s books on Jaipur, the palaces of Rajasthan, on Pushkar, and the others delve into historical spaces, rummaging through what had existed and thrived then, the beauty of it all and the implications of living with and without walking the paths of ages gone by are subtly layered. “I am a very spatial person, I carry the book in my head, where I sit doesn’t really matter.” He doesn’t use a dictionary or a thesaurus, “I work with the wealth of stuff that I know. I need blank papers and no irrelevant stuff. His books are hand written and he has no special leanings towards software that is used, save that “I get irritated with American spellings.”
His simplicity in creating his work inked in with what Jane Smith, a novelist and historian, said, “Completing your writing is a way of integrating yourself back to the world.” It can be any room, any space, it does not have to have a view, just something about it so that imagination can meet with memory.” I can almost imagine Aman with a Tolstoy feather.
‘I think every writer needs a picture of Kate Moss’
(Hanif Kureishi is a Pakistani-British playwright, screenwriter and filmmaker, novelist and short story writer. )
The garden gnome with his bottom showing on the desk was given to me by my son. I’ve got three sons — 13-year-old twins and an eight year old — and almost all the objects you see on the shelves are to do with them: they are of no intrinsic value but they remind me in some way of my boys.
The photographs are also mainly of my kids. And above the desk there’s a very sexy picture of Kate Moss. I think every writer needs a picture of Kate Moss in their room as an inspiration. Kate is from South London like me, and, indeed, like my girlfriend, also a Croydon girl.
I’ve got thousands of CDs because I always listen to music when I’m writing. I’ve done it since I was a teenager, when I first started writing in my bedroom in Bromley. Silence makes me feel rather uncomfortable, nervous.
The flock wallpaper was in the house when I got here, I’ve kept it, and indeed fought to keep it, because it is like being in an Indian restaurant, and I always wanted to spend all of my life in an Indian restaurant.
The picture at the bottom of the wall of the girl sitting down is a drawing of my mother, done by a friend of hers in 1943. Next to that, on the right, is a portrait of my father by my mother drawn in 1954, the year I was born. Above that is my Oscar nomination for My Beautiful Laundrette. I don’t read very much. I don’t have time, but I certainly accumulate books and they are sort of piled up everywhere. I hate to throw books away.
I usually work in the morning, I try to start around seven and work until around midday and then I do other things. I’ve got several typewriters but you can’t get the ribbons. Computers are a mercy for writers, but they do encourage books that are too long. I write by hand first and then type it up. Writing with a fountain pen is a real pleasure and many writers are pen queens — you’d be surprised at how some of the toughest guys can’t wait to tell you about their new Mont Blanc.
The Guardian
Mapping the mind
(Sarah Waters is a British novelist. She is best known for her first novel, Tipping the Velvet. Her The Night Watch was a frontrunner to 2006 Man Booker Prize.)
I spend more or less all day at my desk, so I’m always resolving to lavish loads of money to make it the absolutely perfect work-station. But the truth is, I think all I need in a study is a flat surface, a computer, and a closable door; a large wardrobe would probably do. So my desk is a bit of a mish-mash. The glass-topped table looked sexy in the shop, but is only really interesting when you’re underneath, gazing up at the wonderful Rachel Whiteread-style silhouettes of everything that’s on it. The phone’s a bit nasty, but has a panel showing who’s calling, so I can choose when to pick up. The chair is a proper ergonomic one: I don’t really like it — it’s so big, it feels like an extra person in the room — but it’s keeping at bay some awful back problems I developed last year. When aspiring writers ask me for advice, I always want to say: “Make sure your desk and chair are set up properly! Don’t get RSI!”
The map of the world is to improve my sense of geography; The map of London I could pore over for hours, and it was especially useful when I was writing The Night Watch, when I needed to plot my characters’ movements through the city during the war.
At the moment I’m working on a book set in 1940s Warwickshire, and I’ve got some old Ordnance Survey maps of the Midlands which I frequently spread out on the floor. Really I’d like a room full of maps, preferably with little pins and movable flags — something like the Cabinet War Rooms.
I’m rather a fretful writer — there’s a bottle of Rescue Remedy under the pile of papers on the right — and the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster is something I focus on in moments of crisis. They’re such wise words, and so soothing. I’m thinking of having them done as a tattoo.
The Guardian
