What Triggers My Writing Is Never an Idea

by Mandira Pattnaik

Samuel Regan-Asante

Funny what can trigger my writing on a particular day — an image; a news item; a debate on a public platform on whether arranged marriages are a fair deal; a puppy I routinely see on the road but haven’t seen in three days (Is it ill? Or was it squashed under one of the rashly-driven cars?). For example, I started the week by pausing my mindless scrolling on three lamentation posts that appeared on my timeline. In one, a poet rued the poor sales of their book because “only poets bought poetry books.” In the second one, a press was promoting merchandise to stay afloat — t-shirts, caps, stickers. And in the third widely shared post, a writer said he’d decided to quit writing after decades selling books because not one copy sold all of last year. Though seemingly unconnected, they pointed to an issue that has been spoken about begrudgingly for some time now — that writing (and therefore, literature) is losing out to screens in this war of capturing eyeballs. But, surprisingly, none of the three activated an urge to write about. When it truly rears its head, the writing itch is difficult to ignore. I’ve said this before — I do not force myself to write everyday, which makes the “waiting for the urge to write” really thrilling, and the time spent on my laptop much-rewarding. I have often been asked this question in interviews “What idea sparked off this story?” and been baffled to answer it. This made me wonder if my writing was ever inspired by an “idea”? After some pondering, I’ve realized that, for me, it is never an idea that triggered the writing of a fiction piece/novella/poem. Unlike some who confess in forums that they were compelled to write something when an “idea struck” them, I do not think that the same is the case for me — although I’ve been under that impression in my early days. When an “idea” is credited for a story, I understand it is a social issue they are referring to, or a situation that they think needs highlighting, or just a popular perception, or, sometimes, even a trope. In my stories and essays or poems, I am sure it is not an idea — it might have been, at best, a thought, but a thought is just a manifestation of a feeling you cannot name, and the feeling must have originated from what I listed at the opening of this column: an image, a person at my door, a news item, a cousin on the phone, a street-vendor bickering with another. Radically speaking, writing originating from an idea sounds impersonal, even dishonest. It might seem like you are in hold of a tool (prompt) or a machine and you are going to sculpt a figure. Of course, the figure is a work of art, your own, a piece of creativity, but the tool did not inspire you to create it. I suspect writing that just begins forth from an idea is like a formula, and, as a writer, one might be guiding the reader through an existing work of art, like a monument, or like an academic lesson, and not showing them something new and untouched. Conversely, in writing from an experience you’ve felt within yourself, you’re encouraging the reader to experience the same and thus find their way through something that has universal resonance.

Unfortunately, this method of drawing from one’s experiences requires a high-level of surrender to the process and is almost always both intimidating and exhausting. On the other side is the reader who, in my personal experience, always recognizes what is written from a position of true account and what was triggered merely by an idea. Hernan Diaz, author of the novel Trust, in a 2022 interview, says: Reading is always an act of trust. Whenever we read anything, from a novel to the label on a prescription bottle, trust is involved. That trust is based on tacit contracts whose clauses I wanted to encourage the reader to reconsider… Genres are a great example of trust in literature — we feel a great sense of betrayal when conventions are violated for no good reason. Point of view is another clear example of trust in fiction — I foam at the mouth whenever a narrator suddenly becomes omniscient just to present us with some cheap reveal.

When this enchanting and illuminating bartering between the reader and writer is based on trust, I feel sad that writers would simply use an idea, instead of a feeling or an experience, to prove their point through a piece of writing.

Hanif Kureishi, in an interview this January, says: When I was in hospital in Rome, having the experience of being a paralyzed man nearly dead, my only excitement was in the thought that I could write some of this shit down.

Kureishi’s words above relating to transference of experience into literature may be somewhat extreme, but definitely points to what I am trying to say: Do we, as writers, trust our readers enough to bring out what we experience?

It is fairly accurate to assume that reading adults have had a lifetime experiencing things, places, emotions, and relationships. We’ve seen, read about, heard; we know how stories go, anticipate and expect. But still we read more, and want to learn what others experience. It is that rare connect that a writer builds with their readership that is truly aspired to, and I assume it needs a lot of honesty.