The Story of My Writing; The Story of My Books Jerry Pinto
I remember a friend once asking me on a lazy day in a chickoo orchard, “Do you ever worry that, with all the writing you do, you might write yourself away?" I did not know how to answer that because, at one level, it seemed to suggest that here was a mechanistic equation to the whole process of writing. The writer gives, the reader takes. But it does seem as if we talk about giving and taking. If the book 'takes it' out of you, what is ;it'? And where does it go? How does the self re-formulate itself? Even if this is not physical, even if it is not mechanistic, it's a source of worry. Where do the words come from? They well up, I suppose, generated by experience, pushed out by the desire to express something, oneself, another self, whatever. They keep coming or at least they have kept coming so far. If I don't write for a while, I can feel them rushing out when I start again. This is horrible to say, I feel an atavistic fear about saying it. It's as if I might magic the wellspring away. So okay, let's start again. Every book has a cost. Some of the cost is emotional, some is physical, some temporal. Every writer pays a cost and s/he must decide what to do with it. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words. Why? I wonder now. I don't know. I don't think when I am writing I know whether it's going to work or not. I know only that I am doing what I construe as my duty: I am putting the words down so that I will have something to work with. I am putting them down now, today, not tomorrow, not after I've had a cup of coffee and chatted to a friend, but now, because that's who I am and what I do. I work with words. And when they have been written, then comes the sifting, the sorting, the pruning, the culling. This much is true for all writers who take their métier seriously. We all do this. Some material is easy, some of it is adamantine. But once you've chosen your mountain, once you've said to yourself, there's a temple inside this mountain and I will chip away 'not-temple' to release it, you cannot go on complaining about the size of the mountain or the refusal of the rats to leave their homes. I wish I had a method. I don't. I write because I love writing. I write also because I have had some great good luck with publishers and editors. I don't know whether I would still be writing if I had not been published. The great saints of writing are those who write without being published, who keep at it although they have piles of rejection slips. We will never hear of them but that does not make their dedication to the word any less. There is a special place in the Borgesian version of heaven where there will be libraries devoted only to their books, articles, poems and exegesis thereof. So what am I doing here? I suppose the only way I could explain it is to take specific books and to say how they happened and how I made them happen or how they were made to happen. You will see that I am not fudging persons here, I hope. I began my writing career because a friend of mine, Rashmi Palkhivala nee Hegde, pushed me into it. She kept telling me I could write, typed my first attempts, edited some and threw away others, went and met editors so my fledgling ego would not meet with rejection: she got me published in the Times of India and in Mid-Day and I was launched. That was how I began. I had never been told that I should be a writer. I had never been encouraged to be one. Without Rashmi, I would have been a mathematics tutor still. Then an editor called Hutokshi Doctor wrote Rashmi a note saying: Would Jerry Pinto like to write other pieces for us? Soon I was writing food reviews and launched on a career in journalism. My first break as a writer of books came when Shobhaa De wrote a book called *Surviving Men* for Penguin. It did well enough for Penguin to think of someone to write a rejoinder. A young lady whose name I have forgotten wrote to me from Penguin and asked if I might be interested in writing *Surviving Women*. I thought this was a bit dangerous -- I have several powerful women as friends and this kind of book was sure to upset them -- but I thought I could weasel out of it with some skillful retelling of other men's stories. But then she left Penguin India and was replaced by Ravi Singh, who came to Bombay to meet me and other writers from the city. I saw him walking down the aisle of the barn-like fourth floor of The Times of India building and decided I had a friend. I was not wrong. A year later, I sent him *Surviving Women*, written as a series of accounts of the bad times some men had had with some women and got my first rejection. "This is fun," Ravi wrote "but it will be even more fun if you're in there, telling us what you think." And so I fumed and fretted and rewrote it and Nilanjana Roy wrote in the Business Standard that it was guaranteed to raise feminist and chauvinist hackles alike. It's still out there and still selling unless Penguin has slyly put in on print-on-demand without telling me. The first book I wrote for children also fell into my lap in an odd kind of way. It began with a conversation that I was having with a friend whose mother was ill and needed to be hospitalised in England. She and her brother were turning out their mother's home and found a teddy-bear that they used to play with. Her nephew wanted the bear but his father said he thought it might be worth a few quid. It was. They sold it for 6000 pounds which went towards defraying the considerable expenses of institutional care. For me the story resonated clearly and strangely. I had grown up with teddy-bears and they have been among my best friends. I could no more imagine selling one of my teddy-bears than I could imagine buying a personal slave. I began to write what I thought was a short story and found that it turned into a novella. A fine editor, Vatsala Kaul, accepted it for Puffin and *A Bear for Felicia* was born. It's much more difficult to talk about *Em and the Big Hoom*. It was the first book I ever started to write. I must have been around 16 when I started and I had just learned the word 'catharsis'. It seemed like such a beautiful word that it had to be true. (I was also reading the Greek philosophers at the time, half-appreciative and half-disbelieving.) I thought I would write it all out: the grief, the fear, the rage. I would finish with all the unpleasant emotions attendant upon being the son of someone afflicted by mental illness and that would be it. I realised some 15 years later that it wasn't going to be that easy. First, I had started on a career as a writer. In some senses, therefore, I was going to have to serve two masters if I wanted this to be a good book and not just an exercise in catharsis. That's where the notion of craft comes in. With cathartic writing, you pour it all out in the hope that it will be better once you're done. With writing -- because you are a writer -- you're aware that the work begins once you've started committing words to paper, and then some. So when people ask, 'has it worked?' I offer an image. Do you remember when you went to school with a huge bag and the straps cut into your shoulders? There was a moment when you eased your thumbs under them and moved them slightly outwards. There was a moment of incredible relief and then the bag started pressing into a new place. It has been called autobiographical. I don't want you to think I'm hiding behind generalisations here, but what writing is not based on some autobiography? When I wrote *Helen: the Life and Times of an H-Bomb*, I did so because Helen was an intriguing figure who was often presented as a Christian in Hindi cinema. As someone born into a Roman Catholic family, representations of my kind naturally interested me. When I agreed to write *Leela: A Patchwork Life*, it was because I had met Leela Naidu at the very beginning of my career and she had been kind and gracious to a gauche young journalist. A talented friend of mine, Ashima Narain, trusted me enough to ask me to write a script for her documentary about the poaching of sloth bears to make them into dancing animals. And that became a book I wrote for Disney: *Mowgli and the Bear*. So what is not an autobiographical book? This book, perhaps more than the others. Because it draws from what happened to me, to us? Yes, it does. But it is fiction. It is fiction because I call it a novel. If I called it non-fiction, other people would have to agree with me, the facts would bear investigation. If I call it a novel, that's enough to make it fiction. That's part of the process and it may be the most important part. So here in brief is what I do. I write a lot. I write every day. I write 5000 words for every 100 I need. I don't wait for inspiration. I don't need it. I need words, the right words. I know I'll find them but only when I have committed 1000s of wrong words to paper. I write long-hand. I wait. I read what I have written. I vomit. I edit and read and see if I can stop vomiting. I rewrite. I edit and rewrite again. I send it off and try and turn off the anxiety bells that are ringing in my head, the voices that are saying: 'You could have done it better'. I start writing something else. ------------------------------------------ Jerry Pinto writes and edits and translates and works in the child rights space and with the library movement. Jerry Pinto is among the best known writers from Goa and the Goan diaspora today. He recently won an award worth over Rs 1 crore (ten million rupees). His email: jeronimopi...@gmail.com This essay was published as 'My Process' in the book *From Mind to Keyboard*, edited by Sheela Jaywant, which explains the stories of some 30 writers from Goa and beyond and how they worked their way into the writerly life. The book is being launched at the International Centre Goa at Dona Paula on Saturday July 9, 2016 (10.30 am - 12.30 pm). This function is open to all, and those attending will get a chance to meet some of the writers there.