IN FIRST PERSON
How to write a novel
AMITAVA KUMAR
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From stringing together incidents to finding a voice and unity, looking back on how a novel came to be.
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I BEGAN writing my novel Home Products in the summer of 2003, a few weeks before my wife gave birth to our first child.
But even before I began work on the book I bought a black hardcover sketchbook. In its pages, I started writing down whatever I liked in what I happened to be reading. Among the earliest journal entries is the opening line of a review that had appeared, in the New York Times, of the film "The Hours". This was also the opening line of a novel by Virginia Woolf. I cut it out and pasted it in my journal. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."
There are no notes around that neatly cut out quote but I can imagine why it had appealed to a first-time novelist. You read Woolf's line and are suddenly aware of the brisk entry into a fully-formed world. No fussing around with irrelevant detail and back-story. And I began to write various opening lines.
In my mind there was an image of a man sitting in a room in a prison near Patna. When he gets out, he would like to make a film. But nothing I wrote promised a swift entry into a fictional world that already existed, and I went over the same lines for at least a fortnight without any success.
Evolving thoughts
Then, my daughter was born. My wife had undergone a long, painful labour. I tried to imagine a birth in a prison, not a human being giving birth, but an animal. Say, a dog. The distance from actual experience, its transformation into something removed from actuality, seemed to me the proper task of the novelist. On July 16, 2003, I made the following entry in my journal: "The bitch had been sullen and sluggish through the long afternoon".
When I sat down at my computer, I saw the man looking down into the dusty yard from his cell-window, watching the dog circling a clump of banana trees in distress. The animal tries to bite and lick a bone. The man stays at the window and realises, the discovery filling him with tenderness, that what the dog is licking is a newborn puppy.
I slept very little after our child came. And my wife and I were always tired. I'd go to a café and drink coffee; while sitting there, I'd try to write. My journal shows that I made little progress. More than a month later, I had only the outline of a plot. In pencil, I have written "Main character", and then, beneath a dividing line, "Father", "Mother", and "Aunt". Under "Father", as if I were drawing a family tree, I have written "2 brothers" and "one sister". The sister is identified as "Bua" and a dotted line extending from her to the far corner of the page says "Politician in Bihar, killed at the end".
Now, looking back at this outline, I am amazed that so much was changed, but I'm equally amazed that so much wasn't. On the opposite page is a note indicating that I had read about the use of Internet cafés as sleaze parlours in Chennai, with the owners providing beds for privacy and, in some cases, filming couples for blackmail. This story made its way into the book I wrote, the cyber café transported to Patna, but if I hadn't just now looked at the journal I had kept I would've assumed that I had produced this scene entirely out of my own imagination.
Awareness of failure
When I began to get more time to write, maybe an hour or two each day, I'd start by reading a few pages of A House for Mr. Biswas. I wanted to be reminded again and again of the comedy that informs V.S. Naipaul's writing about failure. And every time I finished work, I'd be conscious only of the ways in which I had failed. There is very little doubt in my mind that one of the hardest things a serious writer must do is write with humour. It was easy to forget this demand because I was anxious to get the words on the page. I was always afraid that the book would run aground. I'd be stranded in the sand. The journal's pages are full of notes recording scenes and snatches of imagined dialogue. Much of it was never used. But reading those pages now, I can very easily recall the panic and dread that dogged me during that time.
By the following summer, I had a draft of the novel. I know this because in a new journal, in an entry dated June 16, 2004, I find the words "Outline for Draft 2". My notes are all about altering the structure and inserting new details. There is a small printout of a quote, pasted close by. It is probably from the Guardian: "My favourite description was in Louis Dean's Becoming Strangers: `The South African pulled his short shorts back up around his ankles and positioned his genitals gamely inside the fishing-net interior'."
An Eastern European friend of mine, a writer, had told me that he always prints out his first draft and types out each word of his second draft. This way he avoids the temptation to cut and paste; as a result, whatever he writes the second time around has a fresh feel to it. I did the same. Twice.
My goal at this time was just to get a book-length manuscript done. I couldn't worry whether it was good or not. I did worry, of course, but I was determined to put down words on paper. Several days after the outline for the second draft in my journal, I see that I have copied down a quote from James Thurber: "Don't get it right, get it written".
Getting the title
I also find that in October 2004 I had written in black with a red border, "Home Products". I now had my title. Below those two words, I had written down this quote from Mark Twain: "To my mind, one relation or neighbour mixed up in a scandal is more interesting than a whole Sodom and Gomorrah of outlanders gone rotten. Give me the home product every time".
I had been writing often, a few hundred words on a good day, and I usually wrote several days a week. I sent off a copy of my third draft to my agent and to two friends who are editors. The response from them was muted: I had a made a mistake, the book wasn't ready to be shown yet. I had put down an account of events, but a novel relies more on a voice.
Narrative closure
For the next few months, I didn't write anything new. And then I returned to write two quick drafts by the following summer. It must have been around this time that I pasted in my journal a portion of a review by James Wood: the critic had narrated a story by Chekhov about an actress, Katya, who has discovered that she has no talent. She asks an older family friend for help and advice: "Tell me, what am I to do?" The man tells her he doesn't know what to do. And then, he says at last, "Let us have lunch, Katya."
Beneath the pasted note, I have made a note about endings, and how one shouldn't insist on "closure". But isn't it probable that my eye had snagged on the heroine's confession of failure at the only thing she most wants to do?
And yet, I remember being happy every time I wrote a new draft. Each time I would think that the job had been done. But it wasn't. It would never be. It is possible I wouldn't have been able to write the book if I had known this from the beginning. My diligent editor cut out more than twenty thousand words; in the months that followed, I wrote new opening and closing chapters. I felt that things were coming together nicely.
But another year would pass, and I'd go through half a dozen more drafts, before the editor and I were happy with what we had. I had never worked harder on a book before, and still a book as a finished object remains an elusive thing for me. Full of mystery and beauty, and the result of extraordinary luck.
Amitava Kumar's novel, Home Products, has been published this month by Picador.
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