How To Write Like An Author

But if the richness of family life coloured his vision,he was also looking through the eyes of someone who was born in Lahore,raised partly in California,who studied at Princeton and Harvard University and called New York and London home: the outsider who had once belonged and the insider who had ventured out. Looking at Pakistan through this person’s eyes was sometimes empathetic,sometimes objective — “disorienting in a way,with varying depth perception,but always seeing more than a person with a single eye,more than either an insider or an outsider,” he says,during an interview in Delhi. It compelled him to leave out specificities of geography and time,shearing off exotica,keeping the setting nameless and universal,just a city by the sea,“sizzling with energy,opportunity and inequality.” “For the longest time,we have used New York or London as templates for universal cities. Yet,Lahore or Delhi fits the mould just as well. There is a conflict between the old values of society and the new order that capitalism brings in,a predicament we all find ourselves in,having to choose between values we have grown up with and those that suit our changing needs,” he says.

Like most writers of his generation,Hamid finds it difficult to remain isolated from the politics of the land. But he chooses his politics,like his plots,with care. In Moth Smoke,against a backdrop of nuclear tests and a crumbling economy in Pakistan,the protagonist Dara’s life unspools into a drug-induced haze when he loses his job and falls for his best friend’s wife. Changez,another bearded Pakistani man,sits in a cafe in Lahore,telling an American how his glittering Manhattan life crumpled after September 9/11 in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In How to…,it is the politics of capitalism,of people migrating and moving into a dynamic landscape pregnant with possibilities. Unlike his earlier novels or Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning The White Tiger to which it is being compared,Hamid’s vision in his latest book is redemptive,even ameliorating,the life lessons it leaves one with is only the knowledge that you have loved and lived. “I think it had a lot to do with where I was in life when I began writing it. When I wrote Moth Smoke,it was about Pakistan,but partly through American eyes. The Reluctant Fundamentalist looked at America through semi-Pakistani eyes. I began writing How to… when I was already in my late-30s,when I was more comfortable with growing older; with my writing; with who I am; more confident that I could write about experiences that I had not directly had,” says the 41-year-old.

With this growing confidence,there was also the urge to move away from the stereotypes of terror and restrictive politics that Pakistan draws from the world media. “It’s not for me to negate that there are drones flying overhead,that in some corner,people are burning flags,but I do feel the need to humanise it. I am not a propagandist,but,sometimes,a tight-angle shot is simplistic,you only see the flag up in flames. Pan your lens wider and you’ll also see a boy flying a kite nearby,a group of men gathered at a tea stall. The city carries on. That’s the whole picture. That’s what my stories try to tell,” he says.

But three years into writing the book,the form of How to… was a riddle still. “When I started,I had a grand plan of making it a 1,000 page epic. I tried various micro-narratives that would lead up to the conclusion,but it didn’t seem to work. Then I was in New York,visiting a friend,an editor of a literary magazine,and we were talking about how fiction was also a form of self-help. I said,perhaps,I ought to write one too,considering the book was going nowhere. When I returned to Pakistan and resumed work on it,the joke became serious,” he says. Hamid found ‘you’,the protagonist,“huddled,shivering,on the packed earth under your mother’s cot one cold,dewy morning”,Hepatitis E-ridden,not deadly enough to kill,but debilitating enough to need a relocation to the teeming megapolis.

Even if the trajectory of a self-help narrative was easier to navigate,mastering the “you” took time and effort,though it wasn’t completely unfamiliar terrain for Hamid. In both his previous novels,he has dealt with the second-person in some detail,but in How to… it comes into its own. “In a self-help narrative,‘you’ comes naturally. But within that generalisation,it’s also about me. I thought it would be interesting if ‘you’ could also be the reader,the character and even I,the writer. What makes a novel interesting is that it allows us an intimate space into the mind of some other. It needs a momentum of its own,this intimacy,because one moves from unfamiliarity to empathy. I may not be ‘you’,but I have the capacity for the same emotions as ‘you’ do. It takes time and nurturing to get to this empathy,” says Hamid.

The process of reaching there is often painstakingly long. Hamid spends his mornings writing in his room for about four hours every day,distilling narratives,mulling over each sentence and every construct. “All my novels have taken about six-seven years to write,so that’s nearly 20 years between the three. My drafts move from terrible to very bad till I have something to build on. I believe each novel has to find its own voice and pace,so essentially,till I find that,I try out multiple voices,working out which sounds the most authentic,” he says.

The rigour is arduous,but it has taught him the discipline of conciseness. None of Hamid’s novels run beyond 250 pages by design. “As a reader,I enjoy short stories and novellas,and as a writer,I take years to hone my work,so compression is crucial to me. I don’t believe that I need to dredge out an experience to its last details for my reader to crystallise it. If something can be said briefly,I gravitate towards it,” he says.

What this leanness of narrative also achieves is to seek out a new readership for his books. Hamid has been closely associated with literary festivals in Pakistan,both as a participant (Karachi Literature Festival) and a patron (the inaugural Lahore Literary Festival in February this year),and confesses to a dramatic rise in non-Urdu readership in Pakistan. “The university population in Pakistan is changing. Often,when students come up for conversations after sessions,I speak to them in Urdu,but I see a rising insistence in them to speak in English,with whatever articulation they have mastered.

It’s an urge for inclusion,and I feel it’s important to engage these first-generation English speakers/readers. They might be daunted by 1,000 pages of a literary novel,but if I give them 250-odd pages,they might find it engaging. It might act as a gateway drug to literary fiction for them. It could even be a self-help book,” he says.