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 reformulate itself? Even if this is not physical, even if it is not mechanistic, it is 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 of it is physical, and some of it is temporal. Every writer pays a cost and s/he must decide what she wants 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 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 the sifting, the sorting, the pruning, the culling begins.
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.
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