Should I be writing a novel ?

I have thought about it some.

Should I consider writing a novel, or a book or some sort?

I have contemplated writing something, in the form of a book, for some time now. And the idea is not just my own. I have also been told, by a few well wishers and friends, that I might consider putting my thoughts down on paper but in a more organized way, instead of disjointed emails, posts, comments, blogs, podcasts, bulletin board articles and so on. There are enough of them around already.

Apart from that, I also got involved in designing a book of poems by some of us, in Bengali, originally conceptualized to be printed this year 2011 or the next, sort of in celebration of Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary. The poems have nothing directly to do with Tagore. But, indirectly, anybody writing in Bengali, or even thinking in that language, likely borrows something from Tagore, since his contribution to the evolution of the language was so deep. And yes, the book of poems were mostly to be in Bengali, but not exclusively so. As it happens, I myself contributed by far the largest number of poems, which we called ছড়া (Chhorha).

But, designing the book is no mean task, and I have had not much help in it. To me the book should be visually extremely appealing. This means, it should have colors, pictures, sketches as well as text. Also, most of it should be original. So, I used some designs (আলপনা) made by my mother, as well as sketches I myself made of people and things. Even page numbers could not be just plain numbers - they had to be different. But, alas, designing such books take enormous effort and time. So, till now, the book is no more than a quarter ready. Also, I am short of poems. I need a hundred or two more. Friends are not coming forth with much poems any more, and I myself am not a prolific poet as such. So, I am tinkering with idea of augmenting the poems with some writings. In Bengali, in English - whatever. Perhaps even this blog will find itself in the book.

Another thing - who will print it ? I already had an idea that I was not going to go begging publishers. Rather, I would go and print a few copies myself, of high quality print and binding. Within my own capacity, I would print perhaps four or five copies and leave a few with this or that person or organization. That’s it. Being out of circulation, these would likely never gain much circulation or fame - but on the other hand, if they were any good, they’d be a collectors item.

But that’s not the subject of this writing. I am asked by folks to write a novel or a collection of essays and such.

And this blog is about that. The point is - should I ? Can I?

What should I write about ?

I once thought of writing a sort of an autobiographical novel. Or a novel that loosely follows my own lifetime. This should be relatively easy and require less imagination, because it is like writing what I already know happened, more or less, with a bit of tweaking here and there, to turn it into what one hopes would be an interesting story for readers.

But, the story must have a sort of an identifying character or description, or category. Should it be a sort of a romance novel? No way. I know for sure, that I shall never be able to write a good romance, because, well, because I cannot think that way. But, that does not mean there shouldn’t be love or a romantic angle in the story. Everyone, even myself, should be able to handle that.

But then, what should be the category? Autobiography ? Nope. A travel document ? I have been around the world. But, no - I am not ready to write travel documents, though my writing could easily include various locations on the planet.

So, should it be a thriller ? a detective novel ? A murder who-done-it ?

Nahh .. I am not into those, although I have read my share of Agatha Christie.

Historical novel ? Tempting, but I am not qualified enough. I have toyed with the notion of a man from India arriving at the North American shores fifty or a hundred years ago - more like a period novel. This is one option that is worth considering, perhaps. But its sale value is doubtful. But then, I have my own ideas about sale. Future of books and novels are going to be less dependent on Publishing Houses and more on electronic formats, I felt. In other words, books are likely to be bought and sold in electronic format through internet and with more direct involvement of writers and readers. At least this is my gut feeling.

So, Indian boy coming to north America sometime in the last century - this is one theme that might work. May be he kinda falls in love with an Italian emigrant woman that works in a laundry, while a mexican young mother that lost her husband through snakebite sort of likes him. Heck, the story is already getting complicated and turning into a triangle. I wonder if such story lines have any appeal what so ever with the larger readership. Perhaps no.

Perhaps just a quiet brooding kind of person that likes to observe life around himself and either talk to himself, or writes his own diary, or somehow passes on his observations to a writer (me) living a century into the future. How about him standing in line to collect weekly salary in a model T factory run by Henry ford? Or, going further into the past, actually working as a translator between a railway overseer and a bunch of Chinese labor. For this, he would have to know some Cantonese of Mandarin. Actually, I have no idea what language the early Chinese immigrants that worked on the railway system in the US spoke, or where they came from. Perhaps from Hong Kong, since that was a British Colony and connected to the west already. Or am I wrong ? Clearly, I need to do some research into these things. Besides, I know no Chinese at all. So, the Indian boy last century can hardly be expected to speak Chinese, unless he himself was living in Hong Kong for a while. It just so happens that I myself was living in Hong Kong for a while. Is there a sort of a connection ? Could it be that the boy had a wife or a mistress left behind in Hong Kong, a Suzy Wong of his own, that taught him Cantonese ?

Hmm… just talking about plots might be more interesting than actually writing the story.

Anyhow, the man that introspects a lot - well, what does he notice about life around himself ? The gun toting trigger happy Americans of the wild west - they likely had no time for a brown skinned Indian boy - mostly would mistake him for a Mexican. And I knew only a smattering of Spanish, not enough for the hero to pass off as a Mexican. But, perhaps he knew enough to get by, and perhaps that young mother sort of spoke with him in Spanish often enough. Which young mother ? I wrote about her already, the one that kinda liked the Indian boy. Hmm.. this is worth thinking through again.

But, just to make it more intriguing - how about a white skinned girl breaking the race barrier of the time, and offering to run away with him? Heck, there’d likely be a posse headed by the father and the town marshal after him. That might turn the story into some sort of a Luis L’Amour type of western thriller, where the hero ends up finding gold somewhere in Tennessee and befriending some passing Mormons, or Cherokee Indians, or a traveling circus, or whatever, and finds refuge, and ends up making a family with his new Russian wife, only to end up complicating matters because the Siox attack us and run off with the wife - traces of the movie The Little Big Man, while the Cantonese wife ends up somehow traveling to the new world and finding the hero. All hell breaks lose because by then he has a siox squaw too, who is notional about who shares my tepee.

But on the other hand, the hero could spend time wondering. Why did the smoky blue mountains come up ? Why do mountains come up at all? Perhaps he stumbles upon a fossil or two in Montana. Ohh, he gets to Montana somehow. Let us say, he comes across these fossil vertebra without any knowledge of such past creatures. This makes him contemplate. Also, he wonders why some creatures that look like gigantic fish, are to be found on the sides of mountains a thousand mile from the ocean. He gets to wonder if continents have always been the same or if they move about, rise and fall and change with time. Perhaps he even wonders if man came by workmanship of God, or chance evolution. Maybe someone will tell him about Charles Darwin, a white bearded man that looked like Moses, but was, in more ways than one - an anti-Moses. Where the man, coming from India, has a copy of Gita and reads it or not? I suspect not. I also suspect he cannot read Indian languages much, except, er, Bengali ?

But, leaving all that, how about a man that turns and entrepreneur and lives the so called American dream, only to realize, at the end of his life, that it was all quite worthless ? Or, somehow he ends up in the US during the civil rights movement and feels the brunt of racial hatred in the south, or the compassion of the quakers and ends up working in the underground railway.

But, why not be a bit more adventurous and mix him up with an Inuit village somewhere up north just around the Klondike gold rush? Perhaps he became a handler of a bunch of camels someone imported for helping out with the road building into the Canadian rockies - an experiment that backfired because the camels had a bad habit of trying to eat the tents of prospectors and miners, while the horses and donkeys had never seen wooly camels before and went berserk and would run off every tim the camels came into sight. In the middle of all this confusion, the boy would fall for the daughter of the owner of a stable that refused to house the camels. I might have to do some research into the history of the time. I know camels were brought in. Also, one could toss in a hanging or two. There was the famous hangman’s tree in Lillooet. Perhaps the story would describe the area around Lillooet and the Fraser and Thompson rivers and the works of the Canadian pacific railway men.

May be it should not be such a story at all. Let the man come in current times and contemplate sitting at Stanley Park on weekends. Or better still, let it be a set of essays.

Am I capable of writing non fiction essays? About what ? Current affairs? My observation of the world at large? Perhaps essays in English and Bengali ?

In a way, this is itself is an essay about writing.

Well, instead of writing a book, I might just continue to write about writing a book. How about that ?