The first event I attended at this year's FGLF was presented by the Indian/Canadian author and teacher, Padma Viswanathan, author of ' The Toss Of A Lemon' and 'The Ever After of Ashwin Rao'.
She presented the workshop over two hours to 10 aspiring creative writers, seated around a large dining table in an old heritage house in Galle, and right from the start it was clear that here was a writer who believed in inclusive teaching and interactive learning, and had no time for flashy gimmicks and flowery gestures.
The focus of our attention was a complex form of 'self-seeking': how to portray human nature - those of our characters, in their settings and contexts - without resorting to mere factual description, incorporating research and data in an integrative way - in a layered process that gave us multiple access to them, and thereby insights into our own perspectives and beliefs.
She asked each of us to introduce ourselves, and to talk about what we were currently working on as writers, and her sincere interest in us made us confident to speak about some of the stories that we had, in some cases, been writing for years. She was attentive, she was detailed, and she was focused in her responses. And there is a tension and energy created by that combination of qualities which made us see why she chose the topic she had chosen.
When I was in school at a young age, once a week we had what was called 'Show & Tell' - a time when one by one each person in the class brought a particular object in from their home, to discuss it with the class.
The choice of that object, and what was said about it in a class of peers, was totally up to each individual child to make. As they spoke, we were given insights into the lives of our schoolmates, their daily routines, and what was important to them. An object was presented, passed around and viewed from a number of different perspectives, and a story was told about it.
Creative writing teachers are always telling their students to 'Show' and NOT 'Tell', by which they mean that a skilled writer will not need to over-write, and over-describe, telling us what to think and feel and by doing so forcefully directing the reader to agree with or uphold certain points of view about a character or situation.
Rather, a skilled writer will show the scene with subtlety, with symbolism, and with a certain degree of restraint, so that the reader fills in the narrative gaps with his/her imagination, and thus connects with the character and their situation on more open and voluntary chosen ground.
To create in this complex manner we need to pay close attention. And it is interesting that the quotation 'Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity', came to my own mind several times during the workshop. Paying attention to the existence and experiences of another human being is at the heart of the writing process. Situating yourself in their life, you as the writer are first of all a real life observer of characters: you are not detached and judgmental. You feel for them, before you are entitled to speak for them. Writing is shown to be an act of empathy, generosity of heart, as well as intelligent portraiture.
Padma told us about the plot of her first novel, which had been based on stories told to her by her grandmother, who had been at school with a girl who had been widowed at a young age, and, as a widow in her social milieu, had been forced to shave her head, and was denied permission to embrace her own children. As she spoke of this character's situation of culturally imposed isolation, we could see how, in a writer's internal processing of information, facts and anecdotes are transformed by the imaginative acts of insight and empathy into a living story with its own internal realism.
Her second novel portrays a character who is dealing with the loss of his child in a plane crash disaster. The loss occurred years before, but the long term effects show what a long process grieving such a loss can be.
The workshop included a three-part creative writing exercise in which we had to think of a person whom we knew, and recall them in as much descriptive detail as we could; and then imagine them receiving some unexpected and unwelcome news - how would they react? what would they do?; and how would this news alter the shape and direction of their life?
I asked if this particular topic was designed to reveal a character's essential nature at a point of personal crisis, and Padma said yes, that was certainly part of the intention of the exercise. No story is written about a non-event! Moments of crisis occur in many forms in every person's life. When we started writing, she closely watched us filling our exercise books, and encouraged us as we discovered opinions and judgments that we did not know we carried, about our chosen characters.
This interesting creative exercise showed us the power of human observation and perception, and the way a whole picture of a person, a lively and vivid dramatic portrait, can be created in writing through the cumulative sequencing of lexical sets of images.
The habit of observation, and the discipline of recording of observation and accessing the realm where thought and feeling fuse in the act of writing, powerfully benefit from the keeping of a diary or journal. Padma spoke of this at the workshop, and has also written about this in an article on her website:
Another friend of mine who loves to write once discussed with me what she saw as the similarities between writing and deep-sea diving. The underwater realm is brilliant with colour; but if you take the living coral out of the sea and put it in your laundry in a bucket, it loses its lustre and turns the colour of concrete.
She claimed that only the best writers can bring things - subterranean, submarine truths - to the surface and there treat them in such a way that they lose nothing in the translation from one elemental realm (water and emotional significance, feeling) to another (air and objective thought, the written word).
The 'voice outside our heads' is a voice which speaks to us and through us simultaneously. As we used to do when we were children, we can pick up a shell cast up on shore and hold it to our ear and believe we can hear the sound of the sea. We can read and write imaginative truths, generated by memory and perception, that connect us to the larger life of the human story.
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