A Year Down The Line ...
Dedicated to the memory of Kurien Mathews - my boss, mentor, guide, and friend - in that order.
Of all the congratulatory messages I got when I went ‘live’ 25 posts ago, this was the one that stayed with me. In a style so typical of the man (those who know him from among my subscribers will attest to it), it was a short, simple message that was at once encouraging, and also made me aware of the task that lay ahead. Thank you, Kurien! For being the strong, silent guiding force behind The Introspective Introvert. Words can never express what I feel as I sit down to write my 26th post, as I am still to come to terms with the fact that you are not around anymore to read this mini-accomplishment of mine. But I am damn sure that, wherever you are in the celestial world, you are feeling as proud of it for me, as I am for myself.
It hasn’t been just one year of The Introspective Introvert. It has been, including this one, 26 posts that have been exhilarating, challenging, fun, daunting, easy, and always fulfilling for me as their author. And hopefully the same for you as a reader. If there was one over-arching emotion that I went through consistently during the year, it is best exemplified by this highly bastardised version of an otherwise legendary dialogue from the film, Damini:
“Har pandhra dinn mein kuch likhne ka saamna karogey toh writer honay ki saari galatfaimi duur ho jayegi”.
(With due apologies to Sutanu Gupta and Dilip Shukla to whom go the writing credits of Damini.)
When I took on this initiative of publishing my newsletter fortnightly, I thought, ambitiously, that two weeks is enough amount of time to gather my thoughts together on what the next post is going to be. Little did I know that I would be scrambling around till the very last minute to meet my alternate Wednesday deadline every time. However much I feel that I am ready to ship out my post, it never feels that way. There are jitters - of having got my facts right, of typos, of grammatical and punctuation errors, of the hyperlinks working, and just generally about how the post would be received.
Is the pressure more because all you subscribers share not more than two degrees of separation from me? Would it be any different if I didn’t know most of you guys really well? I wouldn’t know as I have never been so indulgent as to peddle my thoughts in the wider world. Sometimes I wonder if I have taken on more than I could chew? Was I being delusional in thinking that stringing together a few hundred words (that mostly tip over into the early thousands) every now and then would be a cakewalk? The biggest realisation for me has been that:
Considering the ambit of the newsletter, which is pretty broad based, I thought I would be able to rely on my astute, sharp and deductive powers of observation to come up with interesting stuff to post. How greatly mistaken I was in over estimating myself. It’s almost a year and I am yet to get into the habit of penning down certain observations as they happen. My dependence on my memory to revisit me when I sit down to write is paying reducing dividends. With access to everything at the click of a mouse, there is also the apprehension of whether I will end up regurgitating what has already been read about by many of you – there is nothing worse than being seen as a plagiarist (of themes/subject matter) while you think that what you are coming up with is something original. And if a fortnightly dispatch is becoming a gargantuan task, then I can’t imagine what I would be going through were I to go ahead with my original plan of making The Introspective Introvert a weekly!
What this recent bout of self-realisation has done is that it has made me even more appreciative of the significance of what someone like Seth Godin does every day. He invariably comes up with something every day that makes readers/subscribers like me pause for a moment to think, to reflect and to internalise. And he does that while he is conducting workshops, giving lectures, teaching at various institutes, and hosting podcasts. And oh, did I mention that he has also authored about 20 books! What an incredibly fertile mind he must be having. Or take the case of another one of my favourites, Scott Galloway. A weekly newsletter, 4-5 books, lectures at NYU Stern College, podcast host, active (not activist) investor, predictor of epochal moments that will happen in a year and, as he keeps mentioning every now and then, taking care of his young kids, their pet dog and yes, relocating from the U.S. of A. to the U.K.
I don’t think I need to elaborate on the busyness of Mr. Bachchan. He is a living embodiment of the title of the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once! But every day before calling it a day/night/dawn he is there penning down something on his blog.
It’s a different kind of discipline. And it is not as if these are people who don’t have too many things occupying their mind. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Illustrious examples like these bring the adage “Those who don’t have the time always seem to have all the time” to life.
Besides the aspect of prolificity of output, let me now add the angle of uniqueness to the mix. I am a huge fan of crime fiction. And have read a fair number of books by many of them. Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Stephen King, Louise Penny and many others who have each written a minimum of 20-25 books of their lead detective character – each with a unique theme, story, case, crime. Never has it happened to me that while I am reading a book of any author, I am able to smell the whiff of something similar that has been dealt with by some other author in her/his series of crime fiction books. How incredible is that! And crime fiction is just one genre. There are authors who have straddled children’s literature as well as crime fiction (J.K. Rowling), or magic realism as well as reportage (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Haruki Murakami), multiple brilliant fictional books on life in rural America (John Steinbeck), or writing really funny wartime memoirs as well as write TV shows that they starred in (Spike Milligan). How the f*** do they manage these literary acrobatics, only soaring higher and higher … never once falling?
Now let me add the aspects of age and profession. While many of the authors I have mentioned above started pretty early in their literary pursuits, one also gets to read about the likes of James Grant, aka Lee Child, and Andrea Camilleri. James Grant was a lawyer by education, but had no intention to practice law. He always wanted to tell stories, and so he went into the world of media as Presentation Director at Granada Television in charge of trailers, commercials and press releases before he was fired at the age of 40. Six dollars for some paper and pencils, a pseudonym that didn’t cost him anything, and a year later he churned out an international bestseller (The Killing Floor). He hasn’t looked back since, maintaining the discipline of writing one Jack Reacher book every year since - last count 27, with the last 3 written by his brother to whom he handed over the baton to take the franchise forward. Andrea Camilleri goes one up on Lee Child. The Italian author of the Inspector Montalbano series, started writing at the ripe old age of 70! And in the next 23 years till his death he wrote 60 books, 30 of which were the Montalbano series. Closer home, Amish and Chetan Bhagat were bankers before they pivoted to becoming authors. (I know … I know … the purists will berate me for mentioning their names in the same breath as the more illustrious literary giants … but the point is that they are bestselling authors and one must be appreciative of that!)
All the online research I did made writing and getting your book published sound so easy. Like those Instagram videos of fat burning exercises. They just seem so easy to do, till you attempt them yourself. But then writing must probably be easy, considering there were close to 4 million books published in 2022 across the world. And this doesn’t count the thousands of newsletters (like the one that you are reading right now) or blogs.
What has led to this surge in democratisation of writing as a profession? Has writing also become a process? Like a scientific formula or the recipe of a popular dish? Follow some steps, have the right ingredients, wait for the right chemistry to happen for all the elements to come together … and voila … we have a book! There are dime a dozen sites spouting steps to writing a book. Gives a Buzzfeed kind of a feel. 22 steps to becoming a bestselling author … 10 easy ways to crack the next bestseller … and what not!
I was under the impression that courses in creative writing are a fairly recent phenomenon. I got to know of the existence of such a course when a friend’s niece decided to apply for one, a degree course no less, about a decade ago. Turns out that the creative writing courses have been around since the 1880’s! So then what explains the exponential rise in the number of writers only over the last few decades?
What exactly made writing so approachable or doable that the numbers of those having published a book keep burgeoning with every passing day? Is it the fact that writing now is actually keying in words, and not writing with a paper and pen? (An interesting aside here - Jack Kerouac wrote his seminal ‘On The Road’ book on paper that was in a roll form (as against individual sheets) that he inserted in his typewriter so that the changing of sheets wouldn’t disturb his flow of thought! Genius idea.)
Is it that the advent of computers has made writing something to dabble in while going about other jobs, your professional duties, etc? Because it is fairly simple to keep the window of your text doc open in the background, while you work. Is that the reason that we also have a whole bunch of super-achieving public figures, who already have a CV that is bursting-at-its-seams-with-accomplishments finding the time, inclination and the skills to write books that are not just their own memoirs? The memoirs bit one can still understand since there is a whole parallel stream of writers called ghost writers who do this for a living. (Why write someone else’s story when you have so much skill in writing stories is something I will never understand.) But we also have elaborate fiction being churned out by authors who do not profess any formal training in writing. How, and when, is it that these nouveau authors realise that they have it in them to write?
I was recently watching a series on Netflix titled You in which there is a young would-be/want-to-be authoress who is doing a course in creative writing. That is the first time I got to know of something called a Writers Retreat. It was quite serendipitous that a friend happened to mention her son went off to a similar retreat around the same time I happened to be watching the series. These retreats are like how corporates have offsites to brainstorm and come up with pathbreaking ideas to cause paradigm shifts, or at least come up with five implementable ideas to jack up the balance sheets. The thing with corporate offsites is that the output is a collective one. Brainstorming is a group activity. Ideas are bounced off each other – some dumped, some shortlisted. But writing is a solitary pursuit. How is it that by merely retreating to a conducive environment one’s storytelling juices start flowing? And I know these retreats work for a fact because my friend’s son had been struggling to get his first book completed for close to a year – but a week at a retreat and he said he made giant strides in the plotline, and had never written as much as he had in those seven days. Are these retreats happening everywhere all the time that one is witnessing the newer highs being reached in book publishing? Is that how more and more authors are being birthed?
Or is it the fact that pure discipline works? Seems that 2000 words a day is a good benchmark – Stephen King does that. Every day! That is like writing 6 pages, or a short story, every day. That is an altogether different level of discipline. The outcome in the case of King - 78 books and short stories, and counting. Yes, a word count is a good measure to discipline yourself if you are a professional writer. Like journalists, feature writers, etc for whom writing is a full time job. But how can one explain the fertility of the mind of part-time novelists where writing a book is not even like a regular day job that they have to report to. How is it that they are able to come up ideas in succession to be able to write so many books – each one with a different plot line, sometimes to do with the same lead characters, maintain a level of consistency in their tonality and yet make each book equally, if not more, interesting?
I found it kind of funny when a few of you have told me that I should write a book. My only response has been a wry smile. Here I am, grappling with the task of coming up with a couple of thousand words every fortnight, and here are well-wishers expecting me to write a whole book! How do I even begin to tell them that I don’t have as fertile an imagination to conjure up a plot that will see me through a couple of hundred pages. Or that I don’t possess the talent, uniqueness of thinking, prolificity, a degree in creative writing or the discipline to qualify as a writer. Worse still, as an introvert I retreat from the very idea of a writer’s retreat. So I wondered what it was that made me write these 26 posts? And as it always has been, a quote came to my rescue in helping me unearth the word that I was looking for to explain why I write - the word being COMMITMENT.
Getting your shoes on is about commitment. About showing up. As a 76 year old, 41 time marathoner (and counting), and the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon way back in 1967, Kathrine Switzer sure knows a thing, or 41, about commitment. And showing up. In my case the ‘getting my shoes on’ is the commitment I made a year ago to penning down my thoughts on a consistent basis at least for a year. To show up in your inboxes twice a month.
It is this commitment that has helped me overcome some hang-ups that I mentioned above. It helped me realise how a germ of a thought can be woven into a narrative. It made me realise the power of research. It taught me new tricks of the trade - like making my own gifs! It increased my knowledge on several subjects that I would have otherwise not paid too much attention to. It improved my language, my grammar, my syntax. It made me appreciate the creative process of working on, and towards, a deadline. It certainly gave wings to my (limited) powers of imagination. It put an extremely positive pressure on me to write something that would hold up to those indefinable and indeterminate standards I had set for myself. On a lighter note, it also made me realise the true meaning of Salman Khan’s dialogue from Wanted - “Ek baar jo maine commitment kar di, toh phir main khud ki bhi nahi sunta!” There was no way I would have listened to any inner voice that would have dissuaded me from keeping my fortnightly date with The Introspective Introvert.
And more than all of these, what has certainly helped in heaps have been the statistics on my dashboard that tell me that I have equally committed readers who take the pains to at least open my posts. The icing on the cake have been the comments on the posts (there are a few regulars there and I eagerly look forward to their take on what I post), the likes, the WhatsApp texts, the replies to the mails, and the occasional phone calls to discuss my posts. Please keep them coming. You have no idea how much I value them, and how much of an influence they have been in making me get my shoes on and show up, fortnight after fortnight. They play the same role of egging me on, the way Kurien’s text to me did a year ago.
It feels woefully inadequate when I say it, but the only way to keep it simple, and yet meaningful, in conveying what I feel is just a heartfelt Thank You to all of you. For showing up every time I show up. For your commitment to my commitment.
Because as Jean-Paul Sartre so aptly put it:
Be braver. Be kinder.
For Keep Watching this time I am posting the review of a limited series on Netflix called Unbelievable. Inspired by true events, I chose this series for today’s post as I found it to be a fitting representation of commitment - the perpetrator would never been caught were it not for the unrelenting approach of the detectives joining hands and ‘getting their shoes on’.
What starts off as a rape on a troubled teenager who then goes on to deny it due to police apathy, quickly moves forward a few years where two lady detectives chance upon similarities in two rape cases they’re investigating in their respective counties. They join forces and we get to see some stellar and painstaking detective work to track a serial rapist who takes utmost care to not leave behind any traces of his DNA. Superbly paced, brilliantly scripted, and with outstanding performances by the two lady detectives - Toni Collette and Merritt Wever - this series will stay with you.
Inspiring one Shantanu . It's very insightful to know about the trials and tribulations which you go through, to eventually give the wonderful output . And surely Kurien Mathews must have been a gem of person. We should speak more about this when we meet next .
Super stuff Shantanu. Indeed, it takes a lot of commitment to get this done. At one of my many employers, a fellow employee used to share a `Thought for the Day' every day. After he left the organisation, another employee took up the assignment of sending the same every day. Unfortunately, it did not last for more than two days. Your achievement is much more commendable since you write on varied topics with lots of research and thought. Now you can compile them all in a book. All the best