Perhaps writing requires the regularity of work and the inspiration and pleasure of play. But this inspiration and pleasure cannot just be conjured up on demand. Or can it? Children never think of such things. If a toy or game doesn’t give them pleasure they throw it aside and seek something that does. But if you did that as a writer, just went off when you felt like it, nothing would get done. Or would it? A good deal of writing is finding a method that will make the writing happen. And how the writing happens depends on the ideas we already have about ourselves. We shouldn’t forget that we create our creativity, and imagine our imagination.
You have to tackle all this while knowing that these are, really, questions about who you are, and who you will become.
*
I started to write seriously around the age of fourteen or fifteen. At school I felt that what I was expected to learn was irrelevant and tedious. The teachers didn’t conceal their boredom. Like us, they couldn’t wait to get out. I felt I was being stuffed with the unwanted by fools. I couldn’t make the information part of myself; it had to be held at a distance, like unpleasant food. The alternative was compliance. Or there was rebellion.
Then there was writing, which was an active way of taking possession of the world. I could be omnipotent, rather than a victim. Writing became a way of processing, ordering, what seemed like chaos. If I wrote because my father did, I soon learned that writing was the one place where I had dominion, where I was in charge. At a desk in my study, enwombed, warm, concentrated, self-contained, with everything I needed to hand — music, pens, paper, typewriter — I could make a world in which disharmonies could be contained, and perhaps drained of their poison. I wrote to make myself feel better, because often I didn’t feel too good. I wrote to become a writer and get away from the suburbs. But while I was there my father’s storytelling enlivened the half-dead world for me. Stories were an excuse, a reason, a way of being interested in things. Looking for stories was a way of trying to see what was going on within and without. People write because it is crucial to them to put their side of the story without interruption. This is how they see it; this is how it was for them — their version. They need to get things clear in their own minds, and in everyone else’s. To write is to be puzzled a second time by one’s experience; it is also to savour it. In such reflection there is time to taste and engage with your own life in its complexity.
*
Experience keeps coming. If the self is partly formed from the blows, wounds and marks made by the world, then writing is a kind of self-healing. But creativity initiates disturbance too. It is a kind of scepticism which attacks that which is petrified. Perhaps this is a source of the dispute between Rushdie and the mullahs. Art represents freedom of thought — not merely in a political or moral sense — but the freedom of the mind to go where it wishes; to express dangerous wishes. This freedom, of course, is a kind of instability. Wishes conflict with the forbidden, the concealed, with that which cannot or should not be thought, and certainly not said. The creative imagination is usefully aggressive; it undermines authority; it can seem uncontrollable; it is erotic and breaks up that which has become solid. I remember some of my father’s friends complaining to him about my work, particularly My Beautiful Laundrette. For Asians in the West, or for anyone in exile, intellectual and emotional disarray can seem unbearable. The artist may be a conduit for the forbidden, for that which is too dangerous to say, but he isn’t always going to be thanked for his trouble.
*
I wrote, too, because it was absorbing. I was fascinated by how one thing led to another. Once I’d started banging on my typewriter, in my bedroom above Father’s, I wanted to see what might be done, where such creative curiosity might lead me. You’d be in the middle of a story, in some unfamiliar imaginative place, but you’d only got there because you’d been brave enough to start off. I was impatient, which hindered me. As soon as I began something I wanted to get to the end of it. I want to succeed rather than search. I wanted to be the sort of person who had written books, rather than a person who was merely writing them. Probably I inherited Father’s desperation as a kind of impatience. I am still impatient; it isn’t much fun sitting at a desk with nothing happening. But at least I can see the necessity for impatience in writing — the desire to have something done, which must push against the necessity to wait, for the rumination that allows you to see how a piece of writing might develop or need to find its own way over time, without being hurried to a conclusion.
*
When, after my teenage interest in literature, I decided on graduating to do nothing but write, my enthusiasm and indeed my spirit fell away. I found that it is one thing to write for yourself in your bedroom after school, but that it is another to do it eight hours a day for a living. It was tough; the only response I met was silence and indifference. I starved myself of other people’s attention and it is difficult to write in a vacuum, though this is what I did. From the window of my flat I would watch the people going to work in the morning, envying their hurry and purpose. They knew what they were doing; they weren’t floundering.
I made myself sit for hours at the desk feeling nothing but a strong desire to be elsewhere. Eventually I would go elsewhere but would feel nothing but the desire to return to my desk. I’d stare at the paper, wanting it to come, wanting to force it, knowing it cannot be forced. But if you don’t push a little, you feel helpless, as if nothing is being done. Learning to wait is a trial if you don’t know what you’re waiting for. Soon I found it difficult to go out; it was almost impossible for me to communicate; I couldn’t see any reason to continue. Hatred of others and of myself was all I felt; and then despair. I made myself depressed.
I couldn’t see the extent to which pleasure had to be part of the work. Perhaps I had picked this up from my father: writing is unrewarding in the long run. There is much rejection to bear. Mostly it is failure and defeat; a sort of prolonged martyrship. In fact, this wasn’t my experience. As soon as I started to write plays they were produced. But I lived as if it were.
I knew I was a writer but no one else was aware of this important fact. I knew I was a writer but I hadn’t written anything I was pleased with, anything that was any good or any use to anyone. In fact I didn’t know what to write; I didn’t know what my characters should say to one another. I’d write a line, scratch it out, write another, scratch it out, and despise myself for my failure. Writing was an excuse to attack myself. Father had both encouraged and discouraged my efforts. He could be caustic, dismissive, curt. His contempt for himself and his own failed efforts were visited on me.
I was afraid to write because I was ashamed of my feelings and beliefs. The practice of any art can be a good excuse for self-loathing. You require a certain shamelessness to be any kind of artist. But to be shameless you need not to mind who you are.
Sometimes writers like to imagine that the difficulty of becoming a writer resides in convincing others that that is what you are. But really the problem is in convincing yourself. You can become trapped within an odd, Beckettian paradox. There is the internal pressure of what must be said. At the same time you are possessed by the futility of all speaking. The image I have is of an open mouth, saying nothing. It is as if you have translated your words into the language of zero at the moment of their delivery, for fear of how powerful they might be.