Miscellanea/ Shashi Warrier

Labour Pains

This is more confession than column.

On a recent television chat show, a best-selling Indian writer in English, a lady - yes, that's the one - told her hostess that she finds a blank page exciting.

Lucky her !

Like the average mortal, I cringe from blank pages that I have to fill up. A letter to a friend is enough to give me the heebie-jeebies. A column like this one is worse, because as I write I know that in the future lurks an editor with a coldly critical eye and a pointed blue pencil that he will use to much good effect.

And a book, believe me, is far more frightening. My reaction to the thought of writing a hundred thousand coherent words on one single theme is that of an unusually puny field mouse to a large and hungry cobra: a tiny squeak followed by utter paralysis... Perhaps an explanation is in order.

It starts one morning when you think you have an idea worthy of a book. When you try to write it down, it slips away, leaving you with a vague but pervasive sense of unease. You bumble around, often making a fool of yourself, until a workable idea stands up and hits you in the face. You gather your wits together, and write a three- page outline of your story. Then, carried away by your success so far, you write a sample chapter or two.

Your manuscript troubles you, just like a scab begging to be peeled off and flicked away. And so, one day when you have rather less to do than usual, you put it in a brown paper envelope and send it off to a publisher, secure in the knowledge that there's no way you - YOU!-- could write a book.

Your security blows up four weeks later, when the publisher writes back saying that your story idea has promise, and why don't you write the book. You take the letter to the toilet and there you read it fifteen times, all the while pinching yourself to make sure you are not dreaming. At the end of it you are still not sure but your thigh is bruised purple.

Then you make your first big mistake. You sign a fifteen-page contract with the publisher. Now you HAVE to write the book.

The torture has begun. That little flirting surge of joy that accompanied the signing of the contract is followed in short order by a grey dismay as you run into corollary 194 of Murphy's Law: The signing of a contract with a publisher will be followed immediately by the disappearance of coherent thought from a writer's mind.

The vacuum left behind by the aforesaid disappearance is filled quickly by the dreadful thought , "Omigod! Now what?"

After weeks of more bumbling, the fear recedes slightly, and in the space left behind a few ideas and words begin to appear. Sometimes the trickle dries up very soon. Other times it swells into a flood of words that on later inspection turn out to be quite unpublishable, if not unprintable. But as time passes, the pile of sheets by your typewriter (or the size of your file on your word-processor) grows, from fifty pages to a hundred and then two hundred. Only another fifty to go, you tell yourself complacently, we're almost there.

Big mistake, for just around the corner is a disaster waiting to happen. Disaster is like a faint silver lining attached to which is a black, frowning thundercloud. The silver lining is a terrific idea, the best you've had since the contract. The thundercloud is a combination of two facts: one, that if you throw away this idea your book will be lousy, and two, that if you don't, you'll have to throw away four-fifths of what you've already written.

Close on the heels of disaster comes Hindsight. To my mind, Hindsight is a skinny, effete bloke with bifocals, a dry cough, and a strong disapproval of anything remotely resembling fun. His favourite words are, "You should have thought of that before!"

"You should have thought of that before!" coughs Hindsight, and is gone, leaving you to rewrite your book under the supervision of his identical twin, Conscience. Conscience peers over your shoulder and breathes down your neck in silence, while you try to comfort yourself with the clammy thought that your writing is so poor Conscience can't find the words to describe it.

You sweat it out. You ignore social obligations and the wolf howling at the door. You set your teeth and at last finish the book. You pack your precious manuscript into an envelope, and floating on a cloud of euphoria, send it off to your publisher, thinking it is done.

Big mistake.

You learn this when your editor responds with a letter saying your book is great but he wants a few minor changes. Enclosed are fourteen sheets of single-spaced text describing the changes he wants. To you, it looks like a brain transplant.

Deep down, though, you know that the changes asked for make sense. Once again, you grit your teeth, wipe away your tears, and get down to it. Three months later, the changes are done. You've rewritten it twice, you've been through hell, the wolf is almost through the door, but all you can think about is the book. YOUR BOOK!

Three weeks later, your publishers tell you that your book will be out in nine months. "Nine months!" you exclaim, "I could make a baby in that much time!" But you wait, much like an impatient, anxious father-to-be outside a maternity ward.

Finally, a month or two late, the book arrives. You get your free copies and sit fingering the bright cover for all of fifteen minutes. You open it at random and the first thing your eye lights on is a typo. You dig up your photocopy of the proofs, and, sure enough, you find that same mistake. After the first wave of panic, you calm down and tell yourself, "Just one little type! No one's gonna find it!"

At the risk of repeating this too often, big mistake.

Everyone you send a free copy to catches it. Everyone also catches at least one fresh mistake as well.

The complaints begin to pour in. There are those who think they rate a mention in the acknowledgments but didn't get one. There are the others who want nothing to do with the book but figure prominently in the acknowledgments. And so on.

Then there are the reviews. You open the Sunday papers with the kind of mixture of trepidation and anticipation with which you might open a package that could contain a gold medal, a bomb, or nothing at all. But very soon you discover that the fear of a bad review is bad enough to blot out all the good that a terrific review can do.

Worthwhile? Offhand, no.

Last week there was a letter in the mail, addressed in a childish, almost, indecipherable hand. I slit it open and out fell a sheet covered in more of the same childish, almost indecipherable scrawl. "Dear Mr Warrier," it said, "I am ten years old. I read your book Suzy's Gift. It was good. Please write more stories like it."

Worthwhile? Most certainly YES.

Shashi Warrier's first thriller Night of the Kraithas just been published to rave reviews. He will contribute a monthly column to Rediff On The NeT.

Illustrations: Dominic Xavier