In Conversation with the Author Chandrahas Choudhury

Chandrahas Choudhury is a well known book critic and author. His story "Dnyaneshwar Kulkarni Changes His Name" was featured in the anthology First Proof 2(Penguin) and he is a regular contributor to the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, Mint and Pratilipi. 

Here, he talks about the writing of his first novel - Arzee the Dwarf.

How and when did you begin writing?

I’ve been writing since I was a child (though I think I’ve become a decent writer only fairly recently!). As far as I can remember, except for a brief period in my late teens when I was entranced by film and wanted to work in the making of films, I’ve always wanted to be a writer.

You specialized in English literature in college. Do you think that helped you as a writer?

Of course it did. A training in the history and traditions of a field can only be a help if you want to work in that field. Of course, there is a gap – both in terms of language and culture – between “English literature” and the work of an Indian novelist. Becoming a novelist is about learning how to find one’s own language and style; yet English literature is a help even in this.

I read somewhere that for every writer there is a moment/ person that sets them free to write. Do you think that applies to you?

I don’t think there is. If there is indeed such a moment, perhaps it was my decision to leave journalism after two years of my working life. The only other thing that sets one free in a similar way is the love of someone, and how that opens out your world and imagination.

Where and how did you get the inspiration for “Arzee the Dwarf”?

In 2004, I saw on a street, a very short but good-looking man for whom I immediately began to imagine a voice. That was the beginning. But I think that in novel-writing, inspiration counts for very little; what one requires, or learns to cultivate, is a passion that can stay good and strong for months and years - a more persistent and stable energy. Arzee the dwarf only really became Arzee the dwarf in the later drafts of the book, several years after I first thought of him and began to work him into life.

Arzee is a fairly un-hero like protagonist…he is a dwarf and not very action oriented. Your comments.

What is action and what is not action in a novel is a very fluid thing. Even a thought that is expressed in a properly dramatic form is registered by the reader as an action, because it means something is moving or changing within the field of the story.. Since what I wanted to get into myself, and what I wanted my readers to get into, was the mind of Arzee, the book necessarily had to shuttle between a world of happenings and a world of dreaming and imagining, and there had to be some moments without “action’. Every story has its own requirements and its own narrative mood, so it’s best, while working, not to try to think of some universal requirements of a story, because anything can be changed around as long as there’s a good reason for it.

How did you do go about researching Arzee’s life?

I didn’t. I just imagined him into life.

How did the name Arzee come about? Was it your initial choice or did you go through some kind of process before arriving at the name?

The name was just one of those things that arrived in my head out of nowhere, and seemed exactly right. As far as I can remember the book, was always Arzee the Dwarf, and the title of the work came before everything else and was a spur for all that followed because it focused the point of the book. Many times, when work wasn’t going too well, I would murmur “Arzee the Dwarf” three or four times to myself like a little mantra, and tell myself that, no matter how the novel turned out, I’d at least managed to write a simple, striking, and intriguing title!

You took time off from work to write Arzee’s story. Was that a difficult choice? How did it feel?

It wasn’t a difficult choice. I was weary of the boredom and the intellectual inertia of the day job that I was doing, and knew enough by then about the world and about my own nature to be sure I wouldn’t be much happier anywhere else. Also, it’s much easier to risk everything in one’s twenties than it is later in life. Once I’d achieved the discipline of writing every day, life actually became very well-ordered, productive, and fulfilling. Even though writers usually complain a lot, I don’t think there are many things more satisfying than the constant engagement with first principles, abundant leisure and time for reflection, and rich human interactions and relationships of a writing life.

Did you know at the beginning itself what genre you would write? Or is it something that evolved along the way? (Was prose a natural choice for telling Arzee’s story? Or did you consider, perhaps, writing a poem? If yes, then was the choice between prose and poetry difficult? How did your final choice emerge?)

No, it was never a poem (although I have now written a poem called “Song of Arzee the Dwarf” which you will find if you Google it). And I always knew the book would be a kind of dark comedy, shuttling between laughter and sadness on the wings of the protagonist’s mind. It was the working out of the actual details that would realise this tone that proved complicated and time-taking.

What is the writing process like for you? (Do you work with an outline? Know where you are going?)

For Arzee I worked in a very unstructured way, and mostly by instinct, because I’d never done work on such a large scale before. This made it is a very labor-intensive book. Often I didn’t know where the story was going but went ahead all the same just to see what came of it. Once I’d gone all the way to the end (even if it wasn’t a very good end), I kept going back over and over, cutting, changing, and reworking, till slowly the hues and the structure of the story became clear. For future books I hope to work in a more organized manner. But no matter how organized you are, a story always seems to discover its own structure and tone in the actual process of composition. Writing is always full of surprises even for the most methodical and organized writer.

You express yourself through a lot of unique similes in your writing. At one point in the book you write of the mist - “A light mist, like that seen when sugar is poured into jars….” Is the process of writing these largely spontaneous? Or did you sometime deliberately set out to evolve unique comparisons/similes?

Thank you for paying such close attention to my exact words. I’m particularly pleased that you picked out this particular sentence. In my view similes and metaphors are one of the great joys of language. But of course in a novel they must appear in a disciplined way, in a way that enhances the pleasure of the story and of a particular moment in that story. If you think about it, language itself is spontaneously metaphorical. When you say “I’m feeling down” or “feeling blue”, you’re not actually standing lower or turning a different color, but everyone knows what you mean. Metaphors are mind-expanding; they can make a sentence seem like it grasps the whole world. I would say they are one of the many weapons in a writer’s arsenal, and every now and then he finds a moment to shoot.

As copywriters, we are often told - “Murder your darlings.” Do you think that holds true for fiction writers as well, applies or do you have a little more scope for indulging your writing in fiction?

It depends on whether those darlings are helping the book, or whether they are just things that sit there and look cute. It is every writer’s duty to the reader to make his book as precise and as disciplined as possible (although there is a certain kind of story that gives pleasure precisely because it digresses and rambles). In any case, the book has a certain intent, a motive, behind it, and this is what is expressed in the style, the structure, and the details. Anything outside this should be cut. For the 64,000 words that are there in the published version of Arzee the Dwarf, I must have cut about a 120,000.

Writing is to a certain extent an autobiographical process as much as it is a process of discovery. Did you after the initial writing, find yourself making changes to the text to remove what might be called personal references? Was that a difficult process?

I don’t think personal references are much of a problem if the only person to whom this is obvious is you yourself, and to every other reader it looks like that is what the character is going through. As writers we have only our own experience to fund our books, although of course it’s our work too to imagine fully and deeply the lives of others. The difficulty in revision (though this is also the pleasure of revision) is to make the writing as polished as possible, and to eliminate all superfluities, clumsy connections, stuttering paragraphs, so that in the end the story looks like it’s just been tossed off in a week’s time by someone who was having a ball writing it.

How helpful was your experience as a book critic while editing of your book? Was it easier for you to stand back and be a critic vis-à-vis other writers or did you find that a struggle because it was your own book?

Any kind of experience in close reading is of great help to a writer. If one manages to flick on a mental switch that allows you to look at your own book just as if it was any other, then one can achieve a balanced sense of its strengths and weaknesses just as one would for another person’s book. I must say that the comments and opinions of some friends of mine who are very good readers also helped greatly with ironing out the flaws in Arzee. I think that, just as I’ve become a better writer by writing, I’ve also learnt to become a better reader and editor of my own work through practice.

How long did you take to write the book? What were your experiences like during that stage?

I took four years if you include the planning, and just under three years of actual writing. I think I became a whole new person from the time I began Arzee to the time I was finished. I feel much, much stronger mentally and much more confident as a writer now that I’ve actually finished a book to my complete satisfaction, and I know that all the good things in it arrived in spurts and dribbles, so it’s good to be patient. My book-reviewing work for Mint Lounge was an enormous help along the way, both because it gave me something to do other than work on my own book, and because of the discipline that resulted from writing a book review every week. In brief, once you’ve gone through all the stresses and agonies of writing a book and broken through to the other side, you know that you can always do it again.

Arzee’s is a story of self discovery. Would you agree?

It is. It is a story of a process of illusion, loss, and discovery, none of which are entirely stable states in the book.

Was it difficult finding a publisher?

Not too difficult! At least two houses liked the draft of the book that we submitted. But after it was bought I worked on the manuscript a couple more times because it was clear that more could be done with it. HarperCollins was a very very good influence on Arzee the Dwarf.

What advice would you give to first time writers?

Read as widely and as closely as you can, make notes in the books you read so that you force yourself to think about matters like structure and style and theme, learn to love language intensely, read a good literary review every week (such as the Guardian Review), engage closely with the lives of as many people can you can (because literature is half about words and half about life), and try and write a book that only you could write.

To read more from Chandrahas Choudhury log on to his literary blog, The Middle Stage (http://middlestage.blogspot.com/), an archive of four and a half years worth of essays and book reviews, and the odd poem.