How I don’t write.
Always in the news, according to Salman (aged 61), nothing gets in the way, when asked recently by a reporter how he kept it up last year while his marriage to Padma Lakshmi was falling apart, You would’nt expect a carpenter to give up working, would you, he replied, so why would I stop. His latest novel, The Enchantress Of Florence, explores unguiculation, which is to say the art of using the nails to enhance the
act of love, the Hindu Times is now linking Salman with a new Bollywood star.
How I write.
Here is a rewriting after:
Time out London, July 10 —
16 2008, Mohammed Hanif, How I Write
Mostly
I don’t. Sometimes I pretend I am
writing. Sometimes I pretend really hard I am writing. I have notebooks full of furious scribbles
which even I can’t decipher. Because if
you pretend that you are writing, you can avoid household chores, smoke in
places where you shouldn’t, leave tea stains on your table.
When I get tired of
pretending, I do write occasionally but I have never done it for more than 10 minutes
at a stretch. I usually write in
unusual places, in short bursts. For
the last couple of years I’ve had to travel frequently for my journalistic work
so airport lounges have been good. That
little gap after you’ve surfed the opening credits of all the in-flight movies,
finished your little bottle of wine and before your meal is served is a good
creative writing window. London pubs
are great too because nobody really thinks you are a freak if you are hunched
over a notebook with a pint in one hand and a pen in the other.
For a year I commuted to
Norwich for my masters in creative writing. The teachers were lovely, the fellow students generous, but in the end
it was the two-hour-long commute each way where I occasionally wrote. If I got a paragraph right between Liverpool
Street and Reading, I knew that I could stop pretending for the rest of the
day. Sometimes people ask if
creating-writing programs help, and I can tell you they do — but only if they
involve two hours’ commute in a no-mobile-phones compartment.
Since all writing is
essentially re-writing, one should be able to do it anywhere, anytime. Like most writers, I talk about claiming my
own space, whining about not having any solitude, dream of 4 a.m. starts. But the truth is that most of the rewriting
happens in the middle of a chaotic living room.
If you are a writer with a
day job, meetings are the ultimate creative-writing workshops. I plotted one third of ‘A Case of Exploding
Mangos’ during a ‘Hostile Environment’ course, in between learning how to dodge
a rubber bullet and how to give first aid to a burns victim.
A Case of Exploding Mangos is published by Cape, 2008. Mohammed Hanif has recently surprised his friends by announcing that he is returning with his family to Karachi after living in London for the last 10 years, and mostly I dont too, but when I get tired of pretending, sometimes I do some rewriting, for about ten minutes or so, after a meeting, on the way somewhere, or in between as Mohammed says.