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Notes

Literature Festival Survivor

Nighat Gandhi
I'M a lit fest survivor. After attending my last lit fest I emerged intact but psychologically bruised. When my ten minutes of self-promotion were over, I came away confused and jaded: is it the business of a writer to systematically advertise herself and her books? To refer to a book as a product offends literary sensibilities, but it's undeniable that we live and write in a global marketplace where books are products and writers are brand names. The more marketable the brand name, longer the shelf life of the product and higher the chances of the brand name's survival in the literary marketplace.
Tricks of the trade:
What do profit-driven pressures do to writers who are not likely to write bestsellers? Other than turn them into self-deprecating narcissists. Not everybody is a Shobhaa De with metres of bookshop wall space devoted to her. I attended a session on bestsellers at the lit fest with Shobhaa De presiding, resplendent in a flowing red and white outfit and looking perennially 40. She pronounced: 'Times have changed. Writers are expected to get much more involved in the marketing of their own books.' Another best-selling author who shared the stage with Ms De shared precious tricks of the trade: the writer should visit bookshops, personally meet the managers to make sure they display
your book prominently. When your book does well, revisit the same bookshops with boxes of sweets for employees who did display your book prominently. Buy your own books online from different sellers to push up the sales figures in the first few crucial weeks after publication. Tweet endlessly about your book on Twitter and constantly update your FB page. Beg your friends or pay people to write favourable customer reviews on online booksellers' sites. Hire ad agencies to prepare video clips of your book for multiplexes: the target audience that goes to watch movies in malls is also the one to buy your book. And, this last tip I added for myself: enroll yourself in an evening MBA programme in marketing.
I came away from the lit fest and particularly that session on bestsellers feeling fretful and anxious, yet strangely liberated. Since my books are not likely to become best sellers, I consoled myself, I need not panic. Nevertheless, having traces of the self-deprecating narcissist in me, I took a walk through the airport bookshop. I recalled the best-selling writer's warning: jo dikhta hai, wo bikta hai. That which is seen, sells. To be sold, a product must be seen! Where would they display my products? I didn't find any of my books in the bookshop. I couldn't muster courage to walk up to the salesperson and ask if they had any books by Nighat Gandhi. What if he said No?
A friend had forwarded a summary by Maria Popova of a 1956 Paris Review interview with American novelist, William Faulkner. Faulkner's observations on what it takes to be a good writer resuscitated me. "Ninety-nine percent talent... ninety-nine percent discipline . . . ninety-nine percent work" is how he described the writing process. I suppose he might have attributed the remaining one percent to luck. And what about worrying about the success of one's book? Could lack of security, happiness, and honour be an important factor in the artist's creativity?" Faulkner: "No. They are important only to [her] peace and contentment, and art has no concern with peace and contentment. The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure |she] can get at not too high a cost."
Thanks, Faulkner, for reminding me that my job as a writer is to seek peace and
solitude and the pleasures of writing. My job is to impregnate myself with the idea of a book, let it gestate, and having given birth to the book, release it to live an independent life according to its destiny.
That mysterious relationship a book develops with its reader, that person who accidentally discovers the book, stares at the cover, flips some pages, pauses at some sentence, and in that pause something clicks, and she decides to buy the book.... I like to imagine that person, and to me the mystery of what impels a reader to buy my book is a mystery I would rather not manipulate. The relation-ship that develops between a reader and a book is a bond that matures over time. A word, a sentence, an image, a character tugs at your inwardness and meets you and helps you transcend yourself. It's a healing moment, a transformative moment, a moment of self-knowledge, and it comes about in the dynamic interaction between the reader and the writing.
So it's the writing, not the writer who produces those magic moments? Or that's how it used to be when a writer was not a brand name. When a writer didn't feel compelled to build brand loyalty to ensure that the next time you, the potential book buyer, comes across that brand name, you buy the book. Brand loyalty means if it's written by XYZ, it must be worth buying. If your friends are liking it on FB (never mind if they're reading it), shouldn't you do the same?
Faulkner summed up his own and all writers' worth thus:
"If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn't have needed anyone since."
A humbling truth: No writer's literary output is indispensable to civilization's progress. As I was leaving the lit fest, a woman approached me. She said she really
William Faulkner
liked what I read of my work. And another young man said: "You know, I could really relate to your pain in the passage you read." This was the magic moment! It didn't matter if they were going to buy my book. I was grateful they had connected with my words.
Chipping Rocks
In that session on bestsellers, Ian Jack, a seasoned editor and columnist who has lived through many seasons of writing and editing, described writing as something hard, slow and painful. "It's chipping rocks and it's not often a joyous experience. Nobody wants to get up and do it first thing in the morning," he said. How right he was! I can seldom think with great joy about writing first thing in the morning though it's the one thing that I enjoy doing the most. And the thing I dread the most.
When the hurly-burly of the lit fest was over, I returned to the solitariness, to the loneliness of my calling and the everlooming laziness of writing. To the silent terror of writing and, worse, the terror of not writing, all of which confronts a writer each time she sits down and stares at the blankness of the page or the screen. Just showing up to write requires plenty of cajoling self-talk. The creative anxiety each writer must live with is bad enough. Do we need to add to it marketing and sales woes? A book may or may not become a best seller, but Ian Jack laid bare the truth about a book's longevity when he said: 'We won't know if [a book] is good literature until 50 yearslater.'
On the way to the airport from the lit fest, I asked the taxi driver to pull up. I was feeling very nauseous. A soft, wedge-like moon gazed at me gloomily as I crouched by the roadside. Each painful spasm was
followed by a sense of relief as my sumptuous, acid-tinged dinner was hauled up. Hummus, pesto, Thai curry, chocolate mousse, wine. Spicy-sweet and laced with stomach acid. It was a strange reversal of reality to taste food first at the back of my throat and then in my mouth. The throwing up was symbolic: I was disgorging myself of the negativity, the constant sizing up, are-you-worth-my-time kind of scrutiny a writer squirms under from other writers, editors, publishers, literary agents, and all of this while sharing the most genial dinner cocktails.
It was drizzling when I entered my room. I wanted to curl up on my bed with the faded green bedcover and soak in the soft, spongy, rainy silence. My desk and chair looked forlorn without me. I took a long nap, comforted by the whirring of the fan and the soft prattling of rain. Never before have I been so grateful for windows. In the plush hotel where the lit fest authors were housed, the ceiling to floor glass windows were unopenable. I couldn't hear the birds or lean out into the city air. As the afternoon wore on, I sat with my cup of tea and watched the honeyed light fade behind the gnarled branches of motherly trees. The lame stray dog I feed came and slumped outside my door. Stroking her back, I apologized for being away.
Slowly, thoughts about this essay started to trickle in. I was on my path to a slow recovery as a lit fest survivor!
NIGHAT GANDHI'S RECENTLY PUBLISHED BOOK IS: ALTERNATIVE REALITIES: LOVE IN THE LIVES OF MUSLIM WOMEN