On Why I Write

This is the 100th post I'm making on Quaestiones Quaedam Philosophicae.

It is appropriate, therefore, that I make this a long, rambling one (brace yourself!), and that it be a statement on why I post here. Then I'll move on to the larger question - why I write in general... Along the way, let me also make it a retrospective of all the writing I've done to date...

So where is my writing coming from?

I remember a set of four hardcover "Rambo" comic books that my Dad had got me from someplace, and in particular a sentence in one of them about a villian with a ponytail wearing "translucent" dark green spectacles. The year is somewhere between 1990 and 95 (damned if I know!) and I'm fascinated by the word. As it happens, I am also working on a great novel - the first of many such projects, abortive and otherwise. It was about a kid (whose dad has a flying scooter) who meets extra-terrestrials and gets to visit their home planet. For some reason, a lot of my early work featured kids that met aliens ;)

Anyway... the kid ended up living in a tall building with "translucent" green walls because I looked up the word in a dictionary and liked it. The "novel" ended up being a story written in pencil on 4 foolscap sheets. I even read it to an appreciative aunt! That's the first bit of fiction I vividly remember writing...

In school, I and Nirat used to tell stories to each other and to poor Sohail (who was building character at the time by cornering the Archie comic-book market - he had a collection of about 400, most of which I read!) Mostly our stories were sci-fi, and its a shame we never wrote them down. The protagonist was mostly Doctor Who, except for those rare times when we had had a fight and got each other doing gross things as lead men. (Nirat once had me miniaturized and injected in the body of a man with a bad stomach, a-la Inner Space the movie. No prizes for guessing how I got out!)

And with Doctor Who, we did stuff the BBC couldn't imagine! Each of our stories featured the Master (the arch-nemesis, of course), AND the Daleks (Exterminate!), AND the Cybermen, AND the Mandragora Helix and so on. The point was to pack as many villians into a single story as humanly possible, and then put in a time paradox. (Still love those!) If I recall correctly, Nirat's tales were always far out, set in a galaxy he labelled... NEZ04 (can't believe I remembered that!) Mine were a little more down to earth (meaning limited to time machines and plots to take-over/ destroy the world).

I had also become something of an insincere poet in this time - starting with three poems I wrote purely for showing off in the school magazine (8th standard). One was called "History", which I still have archived. Another was called "Sally the Cat" and was about how Sally the Cat always chases a Rat. I'm sorry I've lost it now... was cute! The third I just can't remember.

By the time I left school, I was working on another novel. This time Chapter 1 had the Nicobar islands as a backdrop, and I had planned out a sweeping saga about an alien invasion of Earth (War of the Worlds, anyone?). It went through three drafts, each over a hundred pages, before I abandoned it. It was my last tentative piece of fiction.

The reason all that early writing was abortive became clear to me only in the second year in engineering, at the end of a dark philosophical phase, and the birth of the writer that I am.

My writing habit had left me facing a strange dichotomy. I wrote serious poetry by the time I hit Engineering - my portfolio consisted of some ten poems by that time, the first of which was "The Firefly". I had also attempted philosophical treatises on a philosophy all my own (the first and second sets of Lifeism essays), which was not bad - I can still look at those essays proudly. And my fiction was absolute B grade junk (maybe it still is!), and written mostly because I was trying to show off. Or because I was writing in an "inspired" fashion. It is astounding how I can be a total dweeb and a grown up person at the same time, sometimes. (Stop sniggering!)

A breakthrough came with the Tale of the Dark Warrior. On a lark, sometime in 2003, I had written a short story eventually called "A Question of Choice". Originally a dialogue - in the style of Plato's work - it was never meant to be a story. It was instead to be a dialogue about two questions - Is the world a place run by free will or "fate"? and Does true love include dying for the one you love?. Seemingly unrelated? Well, yeah... that's how this mind works. Before I knew it, I had written a short story with a pretty twist at the end.

Nearly a year later, I picked up the story from a folder on my PC called "Projects" where it had lain. For some reason, I had always thought of it as incomplete. Then, in a sudden "flight on the tail of a comet" (love that phrase from Patricia McKillip) I perceived possible sequels to it of a fashion... and an overall story arc that made up a single unit. In a furious three days' writing (while, curiously, we were hosts to a distinguished author) I modified the original a little, and belted out four more stories.

These made up the Tale of the Dark Warrior, and were my first coherent, respectable works of fiction. The stories live up to their legacy of originating in a philosophical dialogue. Most of the "action" in them is incidental or atmospheric. Their center-pieces are always philosophical pondering and dialogue.

I tried to write a couple more short stories after the high of having finished a novella (finally). Couldn't get it published because a) I was somehow reluctant/ lazy about it, b) I didn't (and don't) think it is good enough, and c) The one publisher I showed it to was a bum. But I still love that book - that was where I found my voice, my way. I had reconciled my philosophical meanderings and my urge to tell stories.

A couple of years down the road (four years actually) and I come to my last standalone piece of fiction. The Saga of Epicurus Sybariticus - Much larger in scope and ambition than the Tale of the Dark Warrior, and much more coherent in that it started out and ended up as originally planned, a novella.

This is the work where finally I was confident of the fiction I was writing, and about how I would go about writing it. I call it "philosophical fiction", driven by hypothetical conditions - mostly "boundary conditions" for philosophical dilemmas, with a core of good melodramatic plotting bordering on the pulp stuff I have grown up on - it is homage to all those genres and authors I have read, and it satisfied my twin ambitions of being a story-teller and a philosopher.

Enough said about that one - if you have the patience, go through the announcement of completion, and some reviews.

Which brings us full circle to this blog. Perhaps the most elaborate and most sustainedly disciplined writing I have ever done. After I stumbled on to Ganesh's blog sometime in July 04, I knew I had discovered something extraordinary. And the ninety-nine other posts I have up here represent the bulk of the writing I have done in the past year, thus bringing to a close my retrospective.

Now, in spite of rambling on, I haven't really covered the why of my writing. As the Merovingian from the Matrix: Reloaded would say "this is not an answer... it is not a why..."

So why do I blog?

As I've said before, to me, a blog is a place to store thoughts - my pensieve. I have so many thoughts running through my mind sometimes, I am afraid I'll forget them! It affords me the ROM to back up my RAM. The blog is also a place to dare myself to be in public what I am in private. But this is old territory that I've already covered in two posts; One was called Privacy, dated Dec '04, and another called Half Time in Feb '05. ) There are other reasons.

I love the life I have lived thus far/ am living now. For some reason I feel the urge to document how I am living, what I am thinking - call it the diary instinct; To me this is a snapshot of who I am now - lest I forget tomorrow.

At the same time, blogging lets me flex my writing muscle. It keeps my mind agile and my vocabulary current. It is like going to a literary gym! (the Olympics are in sight...)

The blog allows me to keep in touch with friends in ways that are not possible in other media - even talking on phone or meeting face to face cannot achieve some things a blog can. (I'm not saying I'd rather blog than meet people... just that it has unique benefits.)

I also have this enormous love of the English language and vocabulary that may have something with wanting to learn it and write it. And the blog is the easiest way to do that.

Freudistically speaking, blogging is perhaps a plea for company. A lonely call for empathy (hearkening back to my Empathy, Excellence, Expression idea). I have this love-hate relationship with my loneliness which fuels the blog.

Perhaps I also write as what Adi calls a "thrill seeker". I love when I pen something smart, something tongue in cheek, something that sends a shiver down my spine. I feel pride in giving someone else the same experience. And in getting their comments and kudos...

But the blog's practical benefits aside, I think it also brings out clearly why I write in general.... let me try and sum it up here - I write fiction because I am a story-teller, non-fiction because I'm a thinker, poetry because I'm a cynical romantic (don't bother to define that) and blogs because I'm a quasi-deprived social animal!

I say! That was succinct, old chap! Couldn't have written just those last few lines, eh? All right then... Here's to another hundred posts ... clink!