Writer's block

Radhika knew that the best stories always happened at night. When she was lying awake in her bed and watching the gloomy street lamp poke fingers of light in through her window. She often considered getting thicker curtains to blot it out. But on the whole it suited her. It was not so easy to make up her stories in the daytime, when sales charts and meetings left her with no time or energy. Night served the purpose better. If she got up to write them down or key them in on the computer, she knew the light would disturb her mother sleeping in the next room. So she would try to memorize every detail as faithfully as she could, and write it down in the morning. But that was still difficult. The plots twisted themselves, the characters behaved in kinky ways, and what remained was a miserable fraction of the night’s effort. Perhaps her dreams had something to do with it.

Once she had dreamt that she was standing near a barren ground where a dark man with a scarf tied over his head was digging a grave. Large vampire bats flew around his head in swirls of psychedelic color. She knew immediately, though the dream did not mention it, that her mother was in danger. She woke up alarmed to find that the next room was empty. It took her a few minutes to realise that her mother had gone down for her morning cup of coffee. In general her dreams were fleshed out in such techni-color reality that it was difficult for the stories to sustain themselves through the night. After all, they were only figments of imagination.

Radhika knew when she was very young that she wanted to be a writer. When she had her first story published in her school magazine, her mother assured her that she was on the way. But sometime after twenty the stories stopped coming except in the occasional furtiveness of night. She had begun writing a story about a girl who lived on the seaside and fell in love with a Norwegian sailor who came to the port. But she realised that although she had lived all her life in a coastal city, she knew little or nothing about the sea. She could not say how high its waves were or what its color was or how small the ships looked when you saw them from the shore. For her, it meant only an annual excursion with her family to the beach. And that was not the end of her problems. Every time she tried to write someone else’s story, she found that the road to her head had been blocked. There was a hard packed column inside refusing to let the stories in or out. It was not an excuse or a product of wishful thinking. There it was in her chest, she could feel it, solid, symmetrical, unmovable. It did not stop her from breathing – air slid in and out of the spaces easily, but the rest was crammed with her own stories. Every cubic centimeter taken by memories, every smooth corner occupied by past events. Hurts imagined and real, misunderstanding folded up into cold politeness, disappointments, conquests, all jostled for space.

Radhika knew that she would have to be ruthless and carve these out with a surgeons knife. She had to reduce the column to zero, produce a hollow space which she could then fill with the stories of others. Inhale them greedily, churn them inside and spit them out with newly acquired panache. But the first incision was not going to be easy. . As the cliché went, writing was no child’s play, and a difficult game even when you were grown-up!