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Writerland, Chapter 19: Amitav Ghosh and “the Trance of Joy”
Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.
I owe a debt of gratitude to Amitav Ghosh, who could not have known that a brief exchange at a book party he was hosting – as always he did all the cooking, which rivals his prose which is pretty great – would assure me that my well-along-in-my-career discovery that writing could actually be a joy was not, as I had feared, nuts.
We had known each other for thirty years, and in that time Amitav had achieved one of the rarest and most coveted of all literary distinctions: internationally best-selling author. His books have been translated into thirty languages and he has received a host of awards and honors; his novel “Sea of Poppies” was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2008. While his work is primarily in fiction he has written nonfiction as well for such places as The New Yorker and The New York Times, and his 2016 nonfiction book on the perils of climate change, “The Great Derangement.”
We were standing in his kitchen surrounded by a lot of people tucking into seconds and thirds. I was well along to being stuffed when I mentioned that I had returned to writing after eight years ago, and that for the first time in my life I was enjoying myself.
Amitav lit up. He smiled. “Writing,” he said without hesitation, “is the best.”
The best?
There might have been a time, actually a very long time, like decades, when such a comment might have suggested to me someone who was either mad, or had never done this work for a living.
But now I understood just what he meant, and hearing it from someone who had written so much and so well for so many confirmed that I had been seeing this wrong all along, that writers could experience joy.
Perhaps writing was “the best,” and if not quite the best, then a pretty wonderful thing to be able to do. Not easy. But then, how could anything so good come with ease.
Joy feels elusive just now. And yet, it is at such moments, when times are as hard for so many of us as they have ever been, that writers can find not just solace and meaning in their work, but delight, which in turn gets passed on to readers. Because writing is hard, the joy is well-earned. But it is easy to forget, even in the best of times, why writers need to do what they do.
So, it seemed a good time to reach out to Amitav, to remind him of our conversation when it was still possible to be in a crowded room with happy, mask-less people.
I asked, when did you discover the joy of writing? Was it always a joy? Or did that come with time?
As it happened, he was just about to send off his latest manuscript. Now that he was done, he had time to think back to how his journey as a writer began.
He replied, “Just about the only thing that I am any good at is writing, so I always feel incredibly blessed that I get to do this for a living, and that people actually read my books and make it possible for me to live this life. I sometimes wonder what I would have done if I had become an airport or hotel manager as my father wanted (he was an Arthur Hailey fan back then). (Note: Hailey’s novels included Hotel, Airport, and Wheels).
“That I've actually ended up as a writer is a kind of miracle in a way. In India when I was growing up, writing was really not a career option. Hardly anyone could make a living from writing; the closest you could come was doing journalism. So that was how I began my career as a writer.
“The day I left college, and in those days we used to leave college very early in India so I was only nineteen, I joined a newspaper as an “apprentice”. This meant learning to do everything, from setting the paper, to reporting, copyediting and proof-correcting. It was a very labor-intensive way of producing a newspaper. But I think it was a wonderful training in many ways; I had great colleagues from whom I learned a lot, about being observant, about watching how things happened around me, about keeping notes, about organizing huge amounts of information in an efficient way, and so on.
“I worked at a newspaper in New Delhi for about a year-and-a-half. But at a certain point I realized that it just wasn't for me; it became clear to me that if I actually wanted to make a life as a writer, I would have to go about it some other way. So, I went back to University, and it was not till I was 26 that I sat down to write my first novel.
“I still remember how difficult it was at first. In the beginning when you have a day when you can't think of anything, it just creates pure terror. But I remember also days when it was a kind of magic; when there were sentences ringing in your head and sending you into a kind of trance of joy.
“Now that I’ve been a writer for almost forty years, I’ve had my share of bad days, but I’ve learned not to put too much pressure on myself. The main thing is to prepare and to practice, and then suddenly one day everything falls in place. And it’s completely magical when that happens; it’s as if the entire horizon is opening up in front of you.
“I've had days when after about twenty minutes I find myself thinking, “this is a year’s work ahead of me.” I'm the kind of writer who works very regularly; I come to my desk by about nine and I work through till five or later, with a short break for lunch. There have been times in my life when I thought that I would take longer breaks. But every time I do that I find I get bored. Because writing is what makes things real for me. I could have an experience but it's not until I write about that experience that the experience becomes real.
“For all these reasons I feel incredibly grateful to be able to do the one thing that I'm any good at. I look around and see so many people who really don't like what they're doing. David Graeber wrote a book called “Bullshit Jobs” in which he says that something like eighty percent of the jobs that people do are really pointless forms of busy work. That’s something that anyone who is doing something fulfilling should remember.”
We’ve just published what we’re calling our first “nonfiction graphic novella.” It’s called “Waiting for Normal.” It’s the story of a writer returning home to Beirut fearful that the revolution she’d had to watch from afar was over. The embers were still burning. Then came the explosions of August. The text is by Tamara Saade and illustrations by Eleonore Hamelin, and it is as powerful a read as it is an innovative approach to storytelling. We hope you like it, and if you do please share it.
Finally, a reminder about our Diversity Grants, which we announced in our last newsletter which featured an interview with New Yorker writer and Columbia Journalism School professor Jelani Cobb. You can find details at the end of that newsletter. Grants are for $1000.
Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture. The Delacorte Review Newsletter comes out every other week. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.