When I was in 5th grade, my school had three different exams for the languages we were taught. We had the grammar exam, a literature exam and a creative writing exam. You would get prompts or pictures in the creative writing exam and you could write whatever in the two hours we were given. I remember chewing on my pen, trying to write up stories that mirrored my favorite authors. Which was basically Enid Blyton. I was in awe. How could someone write characters I could read again and again. Children who went swimming in creeks and ate pot pie for breakfast. And so I would sit in these exams, and try to write to life those same characters that I was moved by. If someone had been able to run my stories through turnitin then, I would definitely have failed for plagiarism. But I did not know that at that point, there was such a thing as a logical flow, or a workable plot. I mean one of the stories I wrote for my Hindi creative writing exam was about a friendship between a horse and girl.

Eventually at some point the horse is shipped to another country through a cargo plane. I did get a C in that story, and my Hindi teacher expressed deep dismay at my lack of critical thinking but many years later when I narrated the same story to my creative writing Professor at university– he seemed to think it was unique! Interesting! Cool!  In all honesty, I think it was a pretty lame story but I do remember having fun writing it. I remember not worrying about whether the plot made sense, or that it seemed absurd that a person would ship a horse but I wrote because I wanted to. 

I started writing this piece and this anecdote because honestly, I had made a commitment to myself that I would do more interesting writing. That to be an intellectual in any capacity I must be able to introspect on my own writing, critically think about it and then proceed forth with my project. This past year, I spent a long time thinking about my own writing. I wrote a creative writing thesis on my grandparents– they mean the world to me but it was so hard to write them. Not because it was difficult but because I spent too long trying to understand the process of my own writing. Am I writing from my own memory? Is it honest? What genre? Is it funny enough? These are probably interesting questions, relevant questions. But I should have left these questions to the person who eventually would have been lucky enough to review my work. Because honestly? No one except me knows the exact working of my own manuscript. 

Who cares if I took creative liberties with my own life, I certainly don’t hold myself to that kind of ethical standard. Everyday I embellish stories, I manipulate certain facts so that I can present a more fun, more entertaining version. So then why must my writing be at the absolute end of the morality scale? 

At University, I spent a long time trying to study English, but eventually gave up. It gave me no pleasure to understand the literature I was consuming and writing. I hated that everytime I picked up a new book I was forced to look at it from viewpoints that were influenced by dead white men who had theorized language in ways that made me go slightly insane. But to be completely transparent, I do not dislike the idea of studying literature, it was instrumental for me in many ways. I can see certain structural problems with the act of writing and performance that I did not see before. That there is a certain way to read, was helpful when it came to critically looking at things that other people had read. But I detested the fact that I had become my own worst critic. My writing became a service for others. I wrote so others can read. 

And I continue to write as such. It isn’t a brilliant new realization I have come up with on my own. I am not unique or smart like that. My fiction is not inspired. I usually enjoy making callous observations about people around me and hope fervently that someone lightly chuckles, or at least snorts loudly whenever they read something I have written. But what I do understand is that, in my own trajectory of learning to write, I kept trying to perfect how I am writing. But who cares? Vogue is not sitting me down and asking me, “Hey, so what is your process?”. 

I have always written with restraint. This was first pointed out to me in a fiction workshop class I attended, where my peers read my writing and concluded that I am ‘pulling back'. That there is more to my ideas than what I have put down. And that is almost certainly the truth. I do write with restraint. But it was never  a function of my own accord, or something I did naturally. I had to sit and cultivate a personality that would most likely contend with a public that was agreeable.  These are many words for calling myself fake.

I know I usually write terrible things– ask anyone who has ever read a first draft.  This question has led me to the most troubling realization I have had. 

Maybe I am a pretentious arse.