What makes a better writer?
Writers today use two different methods to produce literature. Not having a job is a well-tested method. It helps people produce better works of art. But it is exclusively recommended by people who don’t have jobs. So, there is no telling if it really works. If their opinions really mattered they would have jobs in the first place.
It is also seen that people who have a basic income, if they can muster enough focus, generally produce prose with unmatched polish. And this method is used exclusively by people who have jobs or an inheritance. Think Dickens. The two groups envy each other. Each overestimates the other’s importance. We, writers, are too often too simple minded.
I have a job. I teach at a premier engineering college. I have a Masters in Thermal Science from a reputed Institute. I grappled for close to ten years between an engineering career and a writing career, because I loved both. Why could I not be one of those characters from a Bollywood film (and some Mollywood films), a cliché dysfunctional artistic genius stuck in a dead end job? My job was stimulating. I had a career ahead of me. Fuck. Why am I so fortunate? Why aren’t there any walls for me to jump? The Institute was requesting me to do a PhD which meant a hectic schedule for the next five years. It also meant job security, a good rise in income and an opportunity for my wife and I to build a family in the safety of a campus. It also means a doctor title in front of my name. Why, God, Why?
Sometimes on a Sunday, I look up from my laptop and ask myself, did I just write, “She transfixed him with a stare”? Holy bitch, that is awful. Why the fuck am I alive? Why am I here? And that reminds me if I had been out of a job this misery would have upended my entire mental balance. I would be calling up my friend in Bombay to tell him how worthless I am. I would call up my father and tell him that he was wrong, I have no talent, I am not a writer. I might have even entertained thoughts of walking into a RSS shakha and telling them of my Christian origins. At least it will look like martyrdom. (Maybe then someone will read my blog.) It might push me into making grand gestures to impress the muse. Maybe, in my great distress, I will pack up my tooth brush and my copy of War and Peace and travel all the states of India (I will leave Uttar Pradesh and Bihar for the last, no matter how traumatized I am). I will trade my plasma for five hundred rupees (This is my imagination working overtime. No one is going to pay me five hundred rupees for my blood. I am O positive.). I would sleep with amorous rural women (I don’t have a wife in this alternate reality, as in most alternate realities where I engage in intercourse.) in the fields of corn under starlit skies. I would feel, with pride, my skin ageing to a darker shade of the soil. I will have stories. I will forget that I have a family that is financially dependent on me. There is a surer chance that the free time, the changing landscape, the unfettered traveling would improve my writing.
But today whenever I have periods of self-doubt, I keep typing. If it becomes severe, it never gets there because I have a healthy measure of narcissism, I connect my existential crisis to something other than my writing like my diet. So, take the example of that ayn-randian-pamphlet-fiction line “She transfixed him with a stare.” The night of that horrible incident, I would reward myself with chicken kababs. Because I can afford them. I have a job. Also, who cares about chicken? Its chicken, not beef. I would let the chewed up chicken tell my mouth, my food pipe, my belly, my intestines and my brain, “It’s Ok. Don’t worry. That line is not a statement on your literary skill. You are better than that. Anyone is better than that. We can still walk out of this one. Just go home and delete that line. No one will ever know.”
A job guarantees an incremental improvement in writing. A job necessitates that I stay at one place. Especially a job in the Indian academia, where the interaction between students and teachers is governed by millennia-old rules, while both teachers and students are the most modern layer of the Indian populace. Let it be said that my job is a corset which can burst my ribcage. I agree. You can’t stay at one place and become the best writer in the whole goddamn world. I agree. But I can see all the bars of the cage that I am in. I am hoping that is enough. I believe that the minds of the well-travelled people, the greatest gamblers are imprisoned. Writing something brilliant is as hard for them as for those who have a job. Many of us have been able to nurture obsessions. Only a handful can tap it. I am hoping that reading compensates for not being able to leave. Until it is time to leave.
