Taylormade

by Mandira Pattnaik

Andre Sebastian

Imagine you won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and, after all the brouhaha, you realize you don’t really want it. Imagine you were chosen for the International Booker, toasted in fancy ballrooms and filled-to-capacity auditoriums, and still have no writing room to call your own. These are the paradoxes of writing life — let’s face it — with all the glorious peaks, and dungeon-like abysses. I’m tempted to write a poem just about this!

French writer Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize 2022 winner, is quoted to have said, “So I’m going to be brutal and say that I obtained a prize I never wanted. The Nobel Prize fell upon me. It fell into my life like a bomb. It was an enormous disruption; since winning it, I cannot write and the act of writing was always my future. And so, to not be able to look forward to writing, is actually really, painful to me” — per a report dated May 30, 2023. Annie however added, “What touches me is not the prize itself, but my conversations with people — when they say to me that they see themselves when they read my work.”

As a writer, I know the feeling. It is not unusual to hope for something to happen like the sum of your art depended on it, and then having nothing to do with it. I have wished for things so badly, that sometimes when that hasn’t happened, I have been driven to think that I can’t possibly put two coherent sentences together. Simultaneously, when recognition has come, the achievement itself has seemed meaningless, except for the realization that it will result in more reads of the piece in question and therefore reaching more hearts and minds as was my primary objective of writing itself. I know how it plays out.

Just as I know the feeling of not having a writing room of my own, and the exact comfort of writing in the afternoons. Glad a Booker Winner shares my predicament. Georgi Gospodinov, who won the International Booker Prize 2023 for his novel Time Shelter, and the first-ever Bulgarian to win the prestigious award, says “At the very beginning, when I’m writing in my notebook, I can be anywhere. It might seem strange to see someone using a notebook and surreptitiously jotting down thoughts in some random place, in the afternoon. I love afternoons,” adding, almost as though it was a footnote, “I never managed to get a ‘room of my own,’ so I write in the living room when my family isn’t there.”

What about you? Do you think a study or a comfy room of one’s own is too much to ask for, for a working-class writer? Maybe it is. Michael Pollan, author of six New York Times bestsellers, wrote an entire book, titled, A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams, on how he built a tiny writing hut for himself in the woods behind his Conneticut house.

Building a gazebo worked for Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman, because, Neil says, “I love walking to the bottom of the garden, and settling down to write. Nothing ever happens down there. I can look out of the window and some wildlife will occasionally look back, but mostly it’s just trees, and they are only so interesting for so long, so I get back to writing, very happily.”

Brings us to how the act of writing is at best an amalgamation. A recipe with multiple complicated ingredients and condiments. The delight of finding the right balance is unmatched. The perfect time of the day, place, mood, idea, and a hundred other things, must be divinely set in place before any art can happen. At the same time, it’d be sheer stupidity to assume that one method suits all. Or that any such formula regarding writing life that is tailormade for an individual exists at all. Each must find their own rhythm and balance, often achieved after years of trial-and-error. That is exactly why, sometimes, interview questions that ask how many revisions one makes, or how many words one puts down in a day, seem inane to me, because the answers are only of comic interest and won’t help listeners.

On a lighter note, one formula seems to click with many writers. I’m surprised by how many stories I’ve been reading that were obviously written after being greatly impressed by celebrities, especially actors and singers. Stories loosely based on their lives and characters modelled on them are undoubtedly interesting, but are not, in any way, original. One such celebrity who has an obvious stranglehold on writers of fiction is Taylor Swift. I think the ‘Taylormade revolution’ began after this story attained recognition and critical acclaim. Meanwhile, ‘Beyond The Story’ based on K-pop boyband BTS, arguably an addition in the ‘Taylormade revolution,’ is set to release on July 9.

I hope somebody wrote a book that explores that weird feeling French writer Annie Ernaux had after winning the Nobel, or perhaps about how Maya Angelou rents a hotel room to write, where her “elbow is absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses.” That’d be really interesting and original.