Kill the Critic

They say in order to write, you must kill the critic. You know, that little voice in your head that watches every word you write and hisses into your ear how awful it all is, forcing you to second-guess yourself till every last ounce of self-confidence is depleted and you slap shut the laptop and slump before the TV. That's the inner critic, a writer's worst enemy. 

I told this to a friend who was saying her writing's crap and she described her inner critic to me (in a way that proves how un-crap her writing is). Inspired, I thought about mine.

My inner critic is a prissy Parsi girl who sits atop my shoulder twirling the end of one of her perfect plaits and, squinting at my writing, sucks in her breath sharply. "Really? You think that's how Parsis are?" she asks incredulously. "That's not how it would happen in Karachi," she laughs.

I'm from Karachi, I insist. Offering me a simpering smile, she crosses her legs daintily and lists my offenses: I was a mere child when I left, I know nothing of its politics, its history, its day to day occurrences. My Gujarati comes out a bastardized hybrid of Gujrati and Urdu and the Hinglish I've picked up from Bollywood, every other sentence caught in a downward spiral of confused tenses and misplaced pronouns till I give up and finish off in English. 

I continue to type. She goes in for the kill. Didn't I attended... the Convent of Jesus and Mary, she asks, patting the emblem of her Mama Parsi Girls High School uniform. 

People will see you for the fraud you are, she preens, plumping the ribbon at the end of her braid. You may as well give up now before everyone finds out, she smiles, revealing for an instant the flicker of a pronged tongue.

I wait for her to slink off to do her sadra kasti- being a good Parsi girl, she does her prayer ritual five times a day- and then, while her eyes are closed in prayer, I push her into a closet and get back to work.

Boss is a Five Letter Word

My boss is a stone cold B-I-T-C-H.

She has ridiculous expectations, constantly forcing me to edit and re-edit till I go cross-eyed from staring at the computer screen and my wrists burn with tendinitis. The only way I get time off is by buying a plane ticket somewhere far away. And the pay- well, I made more when I babysat the Daruwala brothers at the age of eleven, splitting the five dollars an hour with my sister.

How do I survive? The same way all those who live under an oppressive regime do: I seek out the silver lining. I wake up at 7:50, an hour and a half later than when I was a teacher. At lunch sometimes, I sneak in a rerun of the Gilmore Girls. She does allow me to leave home early, beat traffic, and work from my car till my 6 o'clock Bollywood Cardio class- bitch don't care where the work gets done so long as it does.

I know what you're thinking: what a slacker. Phi is the real five letter word.

Luckily the nausea (when will this book ever finish), the anxiety (am I piddling away my life on this whim I once had?), the self doubt (it's been two years, oughtn't I get a real job?) still reign strong so clearly I'm doing something right.


My boss, you see, is also my PR agent, and she works hard to maintain my tortured artist-ness.

Creative Constipation

Yesterday I began a new painting. What should have been a pleasant afternoon lost in brush strokes and classical music in my sun-drenched living room was instead a nail-biting, inner-lip-chewing sweating-behind-the-knees afternoon spent sketching and measuring and colour-coordinating till I was sick to my stomach. All I had to show at the end of two hours was a 2x2 (that's inches) royal purple diamond . 

I've done the same thing with this blog as well. I wondered what witty, snappy entry I could entertain you with and before I knew it, months had gone by. 

What is this thing I do, this strife for perfection which leads instead to a kind of creative constipation? Why can't I just grab a canvas and splatter it with paint like I once did? Why can't I just write whatever comes to my head like I once did? Those were the good old days. If  growing up means getting anal, then no thank you. 

So in the interest of going back to to the way things once were, I shall attempt to write this simple straightforward blog entry whose simple goal shall be to update you on the progress of my novel.

I "finished" my novel in February. That means I got it out of my head and onto the page. Then I sent it off to a few select suckers, angelic souls who were writers or avid readers or both, whose daunting task was to a) get through it and b) tell me their thoughts (which is hard for some people to do as they don't want to hurt my feelings). And these people, these poor schmucks who never dreamed when they offered to help that I'd promptly send them 400+ pages of mush, stepped up. Not only did they read all 432 pages, but they let me pick their brains after. For hours. And hours. More on them later.

The good news was the feedback was consistent: melodramatic in places but overall passable (my words not theirs). After a couple of days of stroking and mending my bruised ego (hey, it happens no matter how sweetly and politically correctly you're told your weaknesses), I got back on the proverbial horse.

Since I'm learning and doing at the same time, it took me a while to figure out the next step: how to incorporate friends' feedback and my own, how to cut out the extraneous and deepen the good stuff, and how to do it all while maintaining the spontaneity and initial integrity of the work. So basically how to change everything and nothing all at once. 

Easy peasy.

After several days- or was it weeks or maybe months- of chewing my nails to the quick, staring dejectedly into my latte (while contemplating how I really couldn't afford it as I approached my third year of unemployment) and eyeing several alternate vocations (barista, pizza dough flipper, grocery bagger at Wolfe India Bazaar where I could enjoy delightful Telegu/Hindi melodies and the soft scent of samosas that arises every time someone opens the door), I came up with a plan, a system, a way of maintaining the spontaneity of the piece but in a planned and precise manner. I made...a graphic organizer. Hey, if it helped my 6th grade students plan their stories, why couldn't it help me?

That's what I've been up to for the past days- or weeks or months. I've taken all the aspects I want to include, maintain, highlight, lowlight and made a handy dandy chart. The chart (which is freaking ingenious if I do say so myself) has allowed me to work on the novel with a birds eye view without getting caught up in the  minutiae of the text.

Filling it in has been akin to having a colonoscopy while getting a root canal but, having resorted to charts in the past, I know that the next step, the writing/fixing/whatever you want to call it, will be smooth(ish) because everything is now accounted for.

There. My own personal hell in 500 words or less.

Not Now, SRK, I'm Married

I first fell in love with Shah Rukh Khan as he- and his hair- bounced around the Swiss Alps falling in love with Kajol. His devotion to her as he followed her all the way to India, miraculously finding her in an undisclosed marigold field, his attempt to win over this man 

I'm sure he's a big softie underneath

 

by spending morning after morning caw-cawing to the pigeons alongside the bug-eyed, deep-voiced patriarch, which 16 year old wouldn't fall in love, I ask you?

I loved the King of Bollywood through his kitschy early years filled with neon colored Gap hoodies, his dramatic years playing a steady stream of NRIs, and his melodramatic years which some say includes everything he's ever done but of course they're just jealous.

Like this clip, (begin at 1.07), pure, understated drama, subtle as a Vancouver rainfall:

My love for him caused many a domestic dispute in my personal life. My then boyfriend was not a fan of my phone's screensaver, a picture of King Khan I had begged my sister to take at a London tube station. The night before my wedding, I got an email from the Mona Khan Dance Company saying they would be dancing with SR in San Jose the next night. Fortunately, we were wed in Vancouver; it might not have made for an auspicious beginning to my marriage to be found missing at my own wedding reception.

Sadly, my undying love wavered after one too many single-syllable action movies.

But like the 30 minute conclusion of Devdas, it's a slow death, not quite there, just hovering at the haveli door, crying, dying.

And now, in a plot twist even more surprising than when his reincarnated character crosses paths with a carbon copy of the woman he loved a lifetime ago, ladies and gentlemen, Shah Rukh Khan is chasing me. Like when you're five and the boy you love doesn't love you back till you stop paying attention and then he chases you around the playground incessantly, SR is everywhere. Begging me to come back.

How else do you explain me being mid-agent-hunt, on the website of a hard core New York agent and seeing she represents this book:

You see what he's trying to do, don't you? He obviously wants me back. He's arranging it so that we'll both be represented by the same agency and then meet in Bombay or New York or his next video shoot in front of the Golden Gate Bridge or the pyramids or the Swiss Alps.

Well, Bollywood Ki Jaan, I'm married now. So the answer is obviously an unequivocal, resounding 'we'll see'.

Progress: Slow but Sweet

Perusing the daily email I get from Publisher's Market Place over my morning coffee, I noticed something.

Like Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering when Eliza finally masters her vowels, I sat up, observing carefully to make sure it was real. I read some more of the newsletter. It was. It was real.

I was understanding what I was reading.

I understood that the first section was talking about book deals made the previous week, I understood their various breakdowns into foreign rights, film rights, etc. 

More exciting, I recognized the names of the big shots making these deals. Mostly from my research but also because I've been hobnobbing with some of them at the Squaw Valley Writer's Conference I've attended the last couple of years.

I found myself chuckling like an old timer:  Donald Maass scored a deal, he's on my list of agents to approach. Al Zuckerman is retiring from Writers House? But he's the founder; that's huge. Reagan Arthur scored another deal? She's so powerful; I wish I'd have known that when she drove me to the conference hall last summer at Squaw Valley. I would have talked about something much more enlightened than the quality of the Chunky Monkey smoothies at the Mountain Market in the main village.

I am now off to do a celebratory dance much like minute two below:

Ole.

On the Prowl

For the past thirteen days, I've had an exquisite headache that moves around from the space between my eyes to the space behind my earlobes. I can't fall asleep at night and I have even more road rage than usual (close family shudder at the thought here). All this is due to the new phase in my writing life: the hunt for an agent.

I read some wonderful books on how the heck to find an agent (my faves were The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published, which was actually laugh out loud funny, and Noah Lukeman's How to Find- and Keep- A Literary Agent which kept me from jumping off any bridges with a clearly defined plan of action).

I'm starting with agents of writers I love, as per the advice in the above books. As with every other step along this journey, it's a roller coaster.

Yesterday, I found Sandra Dijkstra, who represented not one but two of my all time favorite authors, Amy Tan and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (whose name makes mine sound like Sandy Smith). After an hour of gleefully cross referencing her across various sites, reading her interviews in literary journals, and imagining our instant bond based on difficult to pronounce names, I came upon the sentence that I didn't read so much as cover my ears as it jumped off the page and shrieked: Ms. Dijkstra will no longer be accepting unsolicited queries after March 16, 2012. Yesterday was March 13.

By dinnertime, I came up with about five plans to get over this obstacle but you can imagine the toll on my nerves.

Today has been just plain bad.

I spent an hour this morning researching an agent who no longer represents one of my role models, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

                                         Chimimanda Adichie's inspiring TED Talk


This afternoon, I hit more walls as I discovered that many of the set-in-India books I love have authors who are British. Which of course means so are their agents.

The first book I ever read that was set in Karachi. It did for me exactly what the above TED talk is about. 

Some books I've enjoyed are by one time authors whose agents happened to choose them but the rest of their roster is completely different.

Such as the agency I just read/disqualified whose current releases page featured those bodice-ripping covers you see tucked into the back of drugstores, the ones you, as a lofty literary, walk right by with a mental scoff.

I've been doing this long enough now to know that every step along the way is a learning curve. I'll get there, I know.

In the meantime, the extra large bottle of Tylenol is moving from the medicine cabinet to my bedside.

Ann Patchett Gives Stephen Colbert Smack Down

This is hilarious. Two of my favorite people go head to head as author Ann Patchett tells Stephen Colbert why independent bookstores are making a come back. And for once, Stephen is stumped.

Watch the interview here.

Or go to: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/408775/february-20-2012/ann-patchett