A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A WRITER

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A WRITER

Dr. Xenia Kisselincheva

“The idea is to get to a safe place where you can find your own voice, your own tune”

These words referred to the creative writing course, Atima Srivastava was doing with third year students from Sofia University. Because, as I dared to argue, you don’t turn into a writer, a Mr Salmon Rushdie, by taking a crash course.   “No,certainly you don’t”, her mysterous Indian eyes twinkled in an expressive way, “but, at least, you can get to a safe place where you can read your writing out to others, get an immediate response from them, get a bit of confidence which you need to go on.”

At first, you are like a kid fumbling at the keyboard, scrambling through the miandering notes of a new music score which seems to give no guiding signs as to which way it is going. Then, slowly and painstakingly, you start extricating, out of the welter of words, something close to a melody ... Finally you can hear your distinctive individual voice, soaring and chiming throughout the enchanted silence of the room. Packed with your “fellow-writers”, sitting there,  listless and absorbed by your performance. When your voice dies down, there is an another instant of enchanted silence, before Atima, the leader of the writing class, bursts out into a flutter of artistic and articulate comment, kindling the discussion... Each and every person of the group is quite keen on voicing his views and feelings about the piece of writing, just read out.

So, writing, which is universally known to be a very solitary activity, where it’s just you and the blank page, turns into a healthy experience of sharing, where you can use each other as a resource, as an yardstick, you can stimulate each other through constructive criticism. For instance, one of the exercises they were doing, when I popped into the room, was learning how to build a narrative around an object on a picture card they picked out among a stack of cards. The idea of Ms Srivastava was to guide them to choose the one which especially stirred up their imagination and spin a story round it, tapping on memories or weaving patterns of associations.  This was the first ever creative writing course in this country, put together by the British Council and, mind you, when I spoke to the students in the break, I realized it was a real success, they all enjoyed it immensely and found it very useful. “What were the impressions of my new friend Atima, the budding star of  British fiction who was conducting the course? Were they intimidated by having to do writing in a foreign language?”

 “As a matter of fact,I would say no, they show no signs of intimidation whatsoever. I find them very responsive and truly inventive. They are quite willing to read out their writing, to take part in the discussion and to explain their reasons for using one device or another. When I asked them to write about a memory, some of them came up with strikingly vivid accounts of experiences they have not shared with anybody - like,for example, a childhood memory of being afraid...They found the whole process most interesting - calling a memory back, focusing on it, articulating it into words. What you can do next is to put it into a character or into a plot.” However, Atima makes sure that it is clear that the course has nothing to do with psychotherapy or the assumption that you can magically turn into a James Joyce or a Julian Barnes. The point is to give you a chance to find your own voice and to learn how to articulate it. From that you may either go on to writing professionally or you may go on writing for sheer pleasure. After this course you have learnt something about self-expression and you have gained more self-confidence about exposing your writing to public scrutiny. “How about talent, inspiration, the impact of your individual fate?” Atima wrinkled her nose and snapped: “This is highbrow rubbish, you know, I never discuss it in my classes. Writing is like any other activity, the more you do it, the better you get. Talent and inspiration do matter, but they are not enough.”

“How will creative writing be affected by the new technologies? Will publishing or the book form disappear?”

“Books on the Internet are not the same as a book in your hand. For me, personally, this is a unique thing. More natural, more personal, more sacred. I won’t have it substituted with surfing through the net.”

Though, Atima appears cautious or a bit reserved about the impact of some innovations and discoveries of life in the 21st century, she loves to keep in pace with fast changing lifestyle on the brink of the new millenium. She is passionately convinced that writers have to bear in mind they are competing with CD ROM, video and Internet. Apart from this, Ms Srivastava does not think that there is a strict barrier between popular culture and highbrow culture, she rather thinks they interact and influence each other. Furthermore, she believes that the family in its various versions will evolve and change but it will ultimately survive. Because the family makes society viable and self-procreative. However, she is reserved about the possibilities of genetic engineering, she thinks things might easily get out of control and we might be threatened by Frankensteins of our own making. She is a blithe spirit, she loves and enjoys life every minute of it, she enjoys life as a fast flowing river, where each day is new and different, where she sometimes loves sailing without previous planning. But, all the same, as soon as she gulps down her espresso in the morning, she immediately takes to writing, which is very much like sailing, only you must know which way you are going...

Atima is a generous and dynamic person, she has a sharp eye for telling detail, she displays an exuberant inventivenes when it comes to recreating the tragicomedy of modern life or the ambiguity of her double identity. Her creative talent feeds off the soil of modern multicultural Britain, it gets empowered by the richness of both cultural traditions which she blend charmingly both in her personality and the best of her writing. She taps on the ambiguous love-and-hate relationship with her Indian heritage as an unending source of humour, irony and farce. At the same time, she is unmistakeably British both in small and big ways, she is infatuated with the fast tempo and cultural diversity of cosmopolitan London, her shrewd insider knowledge of the world of media, TV and film making. It is a tough and ruthless world, straining human relations to the utmost by the schizophrenic tensions between living in both the actual reality and virtual reality, between the public demands and the private commitments. As the Indian poet Kabir says

“The body dies again and again

 The mind does not

Nor does Maya

Illusion lives on

mind lives on

Kabir says, hopes and desires don’t die”                                                                    

Sofia Western News monthly, 1999