Write on

Here are some tips to keep distraction -- and boredom -- at bay

I guess by now the whole world knows that J.K. Rowling was a single mother on benefits when she wrote the first Harry Potter book, the series that would later turn her into a billionaire. But did you know that in those early days she would bundle up her daughter into a stroller and settle down at a cafe, Nicolson's in Edinburgh, to write all day long? And over endless cups of espresso and glasses of water -- all that she could afford at the time -- with her daughter asleep beside her, she would write the words that would resound across the world in the years to come.

Sounds amazing, doesn't it? But if you are writing a book, or even an article or a blog, this approach may not work for you. How do I know? Because when I turn a bit stir-crazy sitting and writing at home, I have tried this whole working-out-of-a-cafe malarkey and take it from me, it does not work for anyone who is not called J.K. Rowling.

First off, this is India. So, there is the noise factor. There will be people bellowing away into their phones. There will be a couple breaking up or making up noisily at the next table. There will be children running around madly, playing some mysterious game of chase. So, it will be impossible to concentrate on the words you are writing given that you will not be able to tune out the word soup sloshing around you.

And then, there is the fact that no self-respecting barista in India will allow you linger all day long if all you order is expresso and water.

So, what is the best way to settle down and write, write, write?

Well, some would say, set off for some scenic location. Hire a place that has a room with a view and get started. But that would never work for me. I would just end up getting distracted by all that beauty.

But there are some writing tips that have worked for me. And here are some of them, in the hope that they help some of you as well.

* Sensory deprivation. Choose a place that has no view. Where there are no books arranged seductively on shelves, tempting you to delve in. And no paintings to distract you with their power. Ideally, position your desk so that it faces a blank wall. You need your imagination to focus on the blank page in front of you to the exclusion of all else.

* No distractions. Make sure that there is no TV in the room. Turn off the wifi on your laptop. Disable social media apps on your phone when you work. Or better still keep your phone in a different room. You can check in on your mail every hour or so. But that's it.

* Don't keep going back to reread and edit what you have already written. Once a chapter is written, print it out and put it in a folder. Only go back to it if you need to double check something as you are writing. Otherwise onwards and forward.

* Put your thoughts down on paper as they occur. Because often, when you pause to rephrase them in a more felicitous manner, you lose your chain of thought altogether. Just write it all down; you can always dress it up later.

* Inspiration can strike any time. Always keep a notebook handy so that you can scribble down your ideas as they pop up. If a notebook isn't your style, then just jot down notes on your phone and mail them to yourself. Save them in a special folder which you can consult at a moment's notice.

* Don't give in to writer's block. There will be days when words simply don't come. Don't get up and walk away from the desk. Get your word count in even if you end up deleting it all the next day.

* Keep to a realistic word count limit per day. Many authors keep themselves down to 500 words, which seems rather paltry when you think about it. But as anyone who has wrestled with a book will tell you, it can be struggle getting 1000 words down every day. So don't get too ambitious because you will only get depressed when you don't meet your unrealistic target. It's better to aim low and hit your target than aim high and end up feeling like a failure.

* Set up a writing routine, depending on what time of day you feel at your best. There are some writers who like to wake up at dawn when the rest of the world is asleep so that they can write in peace. There are others on the opposite side of the spectrum who stay up late when the rest of the family had retired and do their finest work then. And then, there are those who like to carve out chunks within the day when they can work undisturbed.

* Devise a ritual to separate your writing time from the rest of the day. Go to the gym, take the dog for a walk, meet a friend for coffee, leaf through a magazine or just watch a TV show. You can do anything so long as it is not connected to your book. Your brain needs that respite so that you can come back refreshed to your work.

* And most importantly, set aside some time for reading a book that is completely different from what you are writing. Reading a good author is not just inspirational, but aspirational as well.

Who dunnit?

Cormoran Strike is the latest in a long line of damaged detectives in fiction

I know it is probably blasphemy to admit this, but the first J.K. Rowling book I ever read was not written by J.K. Rowling. Sadly, The entire Harry Potter hoopla passed me by entirely, but as a dedicated fan of detective fiction, I downloaded a novel by a certain Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo’s Calling, the moment it became available on Kindle. So, I was among the fortunate few who came to the conclusion that this was a cracking good read, long before the world discovered that Robert Galbraith was, in fact, J.K. Rowling by another name.

Since then, I have devoured the entire Galbraith oeuvre, racing through The Silkworm at record speed and then devouring the latest, Career of Evil, in one greedy gulp, even though it left me a little cold.

I have been wondering ever since why this should be so. Career of Evil was just as good a story as the other Galbraiths, there were all the requisite plot twists we look for in detective fiction, and the writing was vintage Rowling. So, why didn’t the book work for me?

Well, there is a simple, two-word answer to that: Cormoran Strike. Or rather, the lack of Cormoran Strike.

Unlike the first two books in which the strong, surly, glowering and occasionally growling presence of Strike – the private detective with a prosthetic leg and a tortured personal history – was the focal point of the story, Career of Evil shifts the focus to his female assistant, Robin Ellacott. Her backstory is compelling enough (I won’t say more for fear of spoilers!) but I struggled to care about her romantic life in quite the same way I had cared about Strike’s dysfunctional personal relationships.

I guess, what made the Galbraith series work for me was the character of Strike, the damaged but undaunted survivor of a life that only J.K. Rowling could have made up. And the fact that he was only a pale shadow of his former self in Career of Evil, left me disappointed with the book as a whole.

In a sense, of course, Strike is only the latest in a long list of tortured, damaged fictional detectives, whose shambolic personal lives serve as a counterpoint to their sharp analytical skills while investigating a crime. And whose personal failings and foibles make for the most compelling reading.

The original of the genre is, of course, the most famous of them all: Sherlock Holmes. His character has been suitably toned down recently for television and movie audiences, but Holmes, as written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was an anti-social recluse who dabbled in such drugs as cocaine, had difficulty negotiating real life, coming alive only when an insoluble problem presented itself.

Ever since Holmes established his hold on our imagination, our appetite for the damaged and tortured detective has only grown. We fell in love with P.D. James’ creation, Adam Dalgliesh, the quiet and reflective poet-detective who lost his wife and his only son in childbirth, and seemed destined to go through life alone. We couldn’t get enough of Ian Rankin’s Inspector John Rebus, the rumpled policeman teetering on the verge of alcoholism as he tried to make sense of his tangled personal life. Elizabeth George’s Thomas Lynley (the Earl of Asherton to give him his full title) tugged at our heartstrings with his doomed love life, which was blown apart just when it seemed to be coming together nicely.

One reason why Scandinavian detective fiction has established such a hold over the market is because of its damaged, off-kilter heroes. There’s Henning Mankell’s Inspector Kurt Wallander, who drinks too much, eats too much, exercises very little, has anger issues, struggles with his relationships with both his father and his daughter, but brings an incisive eye and intuitive brilliance to his job as investigator. Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole has the same sort of problems with alcohol and people, but makes up for it with his formidable analytical skills.

When it comes to dysfunctional heroes, however, there is no beating Val McDermid’s creation: Dr Tony Hill, a clinical psychologist who works as a profiler for the police and helps them hunt down serial killers. He brings his experiences of an abused childhood to the cases he deals with, which gives him a sort of special insight into the psycopaths and sociopaths that he deals with. The danger, of course, is that the line between the observer and the observed often gets very blurred indeed.

It is in this context of damaged heroes, that we have to see Cormoran Strike. Here is a man who grew up in the squalor of squats with his super-groupie mother, Leda, whose rock star father refused to have anything to do with him. He pulled himself out of poverty by his bootstraps and made a career for himself in the army. But an explosion blew up his leg and his military prospects, and Strike found himself ejected into civilian life, complete with a prosthetic leg. His career as private investigator progresses only by fits and starts, and his love life is a bit of a shambles.

Is it any wonder then that we want to hear more about Strike? That we want to see him come into his own, to cheer him on as he fights crime and finds love with equal felicity?

We like our detectives to be brilliant. But we identify with them a little more when they are also a bit damaged. 

The End

Do you always get there? Or are you the kind who has no problems abandoning a book half-way through?

So, to which author falls the distinction of having written a book that heads the list of the top five most abandoned – as in left unread till the end – titles? I am sure it will come as a shock for you to learn that it is none other than J.K. Rowling. But before you keel over, let me tell it is not for her Harry Potter series, but for the first ‘grown-up’ book she wrote. And the top reason people gave for abandoning The Casual Vacancy? Well, it wasn’t exactly Harry Potter, was it?

Well, as someone who has never read a single word that Rowling ever wrote (I am sorry but all that magic-Muggles stuff is just lost on me), I am really not qualified to comment. But the next book on the list of top five most abandoned titles makes perfect sense to me. It is Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, but more on that later.

After that, the list gets a bit mystifying. The next title that most people gave up on is Eat Pray Love (which I loved from the word go; and long before it became something of a cult book) on the grounds that the heroine was too ‘whiny’ and ‘self-obsessed’ followed by The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which many found too much of a slow starter to persist with.

Well, I don’t know about you but I firmly believe that when it comes to books, the world is divided into two kinds of people. The first group believes in the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ line and ploughs through to the (sometimes bitter) end while the second just wearily intones ‘Life is too short…” and gives up the moment boredom sets in.

Sadly, I happen to belong to the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ school so I have wasted years of my life battling through to the last page of books that were best left unfinished. But somehow, as far as I am concerned, to give up in the middle seems to smack of failure. And while at a rational level, I know that the failure is that of the writer and not mine, the reader’s, I am still reluctant to put the book away. So, there it lies, languishing on my bedside table, so that I can administer a sop to my uneasy conscience by reading a few pages every night before turning in. That way, at least, it serves a purpose: it puts me to sleep like no page-turner would.

Of late, though, I have begun to wonder if boring, unreadable books are really worth all that effort (not to mention the self-flagellation involved). The thought first crossed my mind when I tried to read Fifty Shades of Grey. Sado-masochistic bondage or Deviant Romances are not really my cup of coffee (I am more of a Regency Romance-Georgette Heyer kind of girl) but given that everyone was talking about it and that it behoves a columnist to be au fait with popular culture, I tried to give it a shot.

Honest to God, I tried. In fact, I tried three times to get beyond page 150 before throwing the book down in disgust and flouncing off to read something – anything! – else. No, it wasn’t the erotica that put me off (frankly, I didn’t find it the least bit erotic) but the sheer banality of it all. Not to mention the utterly execrable writing. (Though what really made me weep was the thought that this book had topped the best-selling charts and made its author a millionaire many times over.)

But I treated Fifty Shades of Grey as a one-off. It was just one of those freak books that you either loved or loathed; and I just happened to be one of those who loathed it.

That was before I downloaded Dan Brown’s Inferno on my Ipad before setting off on holiday. Now, I am the kind of person who loves long-haul flights for exactly one reason: you can read a nice, fat, fast-paced thriller uninterrupted for eight hours and, with a bit of luck, finish it in one greedy mouthful. And I had loved Dan Brown’s last page-turners, The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol, so I thought I was all set for the flight.

Not quite. About ten minutes into the book, I was beginning to get worried. Half an hour later, I knew I was in serious trouble. There was no way I was wading through this bilge for the next seven hours. Well, not without losing the will to live. Which would be rather ironic given the plot of the novel: a mad scientist tries to infect the world with a deadly plague and succeeds. But then, it turns out that it’s not really a deadly plague after all…ah well, never mind.

Suffice it to say that it took me not eight hours, but five weeks to finish the book. And by the end, even I couldn’t quite figure out why I was persisting with the damn thing. I couldn’t be bothered about what happened next. I didn’t care if Professor Robert Langdon was finally killed off. Hell, I didn’t care if Dan Brown killed off the entire human race in his parallel universe.

But still, I persisted until the very last page. Only to ask myself why I had bothered. Maybe the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ argument has run its course and it is time to remember that life is, indeed, too short.