Writ of the Moving Hand

What is it about fiction that sends us recoiling towards poetry?

I have great admiration for people who can think up and write stories. Short stories, novels, trilogies, and heavy blunt instruments like War and Peace. Though I have been making a livelihood out of writing for the last two decades, I have never been able to write fiction. My only published story was a science fiction one in a science magazine during my college days. The magazine closed down soon after.

Not that I have never tried since. Some years ago, I had this grand vision of a novel set in a dystopic future with unexplained rumours going around that the coming of Kalki the cleanser, the last avatar of Vishnu, was imminent. I even studied the Puranas for details on Kalki. Every night, after work, I would write in a frenzy.

After some time, I found I had too many characters, so I went back and merged seven characters into three. I wrote without stop for nearly a year, creating that dystopic world in great detail, layering it and sub-layering it, texting it and sub-texting it. It was only after 60,000 words were down that I had a rather alarming realisation. The story hadn’t yet started! I had fallen in love with my characters so much that all I had done in 60,000 words was get to know them more and more intimately by writing about them. And I had made their environment so dense, so deeply detailed and weird that any reader would flee after 100 pages with a “C’mon man, get on with it!”

I also realised that I knew the beginning of the story and the end, but had no idea of the road in between. I had no clue about what would happen in the middle. In short, I had no talent—none at all—for plotting. I had decided on the locations in which I would set various scenes, but did not know what would happen in those places, and how and why my characters would reach there. Having been enriched by this new insight into myself, I gave up, and have never tried again.

That’s why I admire people who can actually think up a story, in a proper structure, create plot twists, bung in subplots, surprise the reader with unexpected manoeuvres. For instance, the crime novel. Does a good detective story writer have to have a mathematical bent of mind? Because doesn’t the plot have to be like an algorithm? Yet, the algorithm must also be hidden from the reader, since the essential quality of the relationship between detective story writer and reader is deception. If the author has not been able to blindside the reader so that at the denouement, he says, “That was clever!” or “I should have spotted that one!”, then he has failed. The satisfaction of reading a detective story is in the admiration of the author’s smarts.

So there goes that genre for me. Another type of novel, which does not depend on plotting per se as its essential component, is that thick 1,200-page epic, a Gone With The Wind, say. Here, I am left goggle-eyed by the sheer patience and stamina of these writers. What sort of man would embark on a trilogy which will take up six years of his life? What sort of mad drive are we talking about here? I haven’t met any tome writer, but I would surely like to spend some time with one or two of them. How organised do you have to be to do that sort of thing? And suppose you are into the third part of the trilogy with the other two already published, and you suddenly feel you’ve made a big plot mistake in the first book, what do you do? Or maybe you think that the storyline would have been much better if you had killed off someone in the first book. But you can do nothing about it now. He stands there right before you, grinning, mocking you. How depressing can that be? And I think it’s quite possible. Dickens changed the ending of Great Expectations when it was published in book form. When the novel was serialised in a magazine, it had a sad ending. The current ending is much more hopeful.

No, I don’t think I can be a fiction writer. Fraught with peril, is what I feel. But wait, maybe I can try my hand at poetry. Doesn’t take patience, stamina, doesn’t need plotting, and doesn’t necessarily have to make any sense. That sounds like a good move. Better than journalistic fiction.

About The Author

Sandipan Deb

Sandipan Deb is an IIT-IIM graduate who wandered into journalism after reading a quote from filmmaker George Lucas — “Everyone cage door is open” — and has stayed there (in journalism, not a cage) for the past 19 years. He has written a book on the IITs.