A few evenings ago, I attended a bookreading and a literary dinner in the city. I was introduced to a few names in the publishing industry. I have written, co-written, and edited a number of academic papers. I am a perpetual reader and often feel that I should have been a writer.
Every summer my emotional energy kicks up a notch and parallel to that is the inertia that makes me look for excuses after excuses for not writing. Then, there is my intense relationship with people in my life, and I don’t want it to trifle because that is the efficacy that I will need when I decide to write.
Then there are my own apperceives, my encounters, my experiences with out-of-context lives of migrants, expatriates, others. I have a million stories in me wanting me to write, be direct, translucent. I know stories about brief relationships – with lovers, family, friends, those I met in travels.
Then there is my own little family, with relationship that is delicate, deceptively simple, yet it charts the depth of alienation, regeneration, and cross-cultural fertilization in New York City’s immigrant community.
Then there is the unpredictability of translating life onto a page. Would it take the essence of reality out of ink and pad, or would it add to that? My relationship with my own culture is in many layers. Each layer full of concentration, intensity, emotion, hatefulness, passion, and strength.
What to do?
I have decided to get into deep contemplative mood. Yes, it is the summer fever. I can’t wait for my kids to growup, be in college. Leave my job; pack a supply of writing-pads and Bics and head towards a sequestered place, preferably my ancestral home in our village in the Punjab. Be as far away from reality and yet close to it mentally. A shaded place under a pipal tree would do the trick just fine.
I can’t wait for all of that to happen.
To make it come a reality, I have decided to enroll in creative writing courses. I hope this flame not to die.
If any of you have had any experience with writing or editing a book, or short stories, I would like to hear from you. Economists by nature are boring writers, but I think with some courses in writing, I can hone my skills. Regardless of the debonairness of how a story is written, in the end it is the story and not the storyteller.