Storytelling – The Female Way

sangeeta — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 06:39:40 +0000

The other day I found myself including a long sambhar recipe in a story that had nothing to do with sambhar or indeed food of any other kind. The inclusion just happened. I stared at what I had written, wondering how it got there. It had got there, of course, because I had typed it out there myself. It wasn’t something I had cut and pasted off the Internet. I had written the recipe, inside my story. I didn’t remember doing it, since, till the previous day, I had been concentrating on writing a mother-daughter narrative replete with bathos and sarcasm. And suddenly, the recipe.
I don’t have a very healthy relationship with my sub-conscious. I don’t understand it, never talk to it, and most of the time don’t believe in it. So it could offer no help to me whatsoever on why I should be writing recipes instead of stories.
And then my logical self told me why. Like most female fictioners, I’m not a writer alone. I’m also wife, mother, daughter, daughter-in-law, and maid about the house. Irrespective of what I’m writing, of what my deadline is, of what my book promotion schedule is, or of what research I’m required to do for my next book, I have to ensure that everyone dependent on me, kids, husband, parents, are all looked after PROPERLY. After all, writing a novel is no excuse for slacking off!
And since I needed to make sambhar for dinner that night, it was the recipe that engaged me, and not the next plot twist in my potentially award-winning story.
Female writers are writers on-the-go. Their writing is fractured and inconsistent, and therefore more passionate. They write when they can, where they can, sometimes sitting at the kitchen counter where they write in between doing other chores, sometimes at the dining table, when it is not occupied by family dinners or children’s homework, sometimes at the crack of dawn, when nobody else in the whole world is awake, and there is no risk of inadvertently writing down a sambhar recipe, sometimes in the late hours of the night, when finally everyone is asleep. They write because they can’t help it. It is the only way they can regain their sanity and self-esteem.

Cloud 9 Minus One » multiiple roles

Storytelling – The Female Way