Photo by Mykl Roventine

This month I had an event that comes only once a year –  my birthday.

As a Hind child growing up in the west, December 25th came and went in our house like most other days. Friends would call and ask what I got. While I fumbled for an answer, the conversation would move on to their substantial gifts. My birthday however was the one day in our house that we were able to choose a present, a cake, even on rare occasion, plan a party funded by our parents. As a child (and later as a college student) I learned to let my birthday slide because it was so early in the American school year that those kids who came to my birthday parties were not those I was friends with by that other great gift giving time: Christmas.

Moving to Qatar had somewhat the opposite effect as there was a national day that was celebrated on September 3rd. This holiday meant a three day weekend during which I’d dash to Bahrain for some festivities. Now we celebrate National Day on December 18th so it appeared I was robbed of the Labor Day like weekend in Doha. Except for this year: Eid Al Fitr came a few days just before, so we packed our bags, snatched up the baby, and went for a weekend getaway to Santorini, Greece.

I promised myself a digital fast as a way to clear my head, enjoy the trip, and also being with my family. I did what many thought would be impossible: left my Blackberry at home. All the flights for this trip were early morning, making my vow to stay away from the Internet relatively easy. The morning we flew out, I did scan my email as the nefarious Cyclopistic blinking red light beckoned me even at dawn.

Congrats on winning the SheWrites New Novelist competition, Mohana!!!!

Incredibly, there it was. One of those messages that you keep your antennae up for but I had to brush my teeth and get on with the more normal parts of real life.

Needless to say, getting into the airport lounge and onto a computer was immediately the next order of business. I read with astonishment that my project, the one that had been rejected 10 times by agents and editors because they “weren’t compelled by it,” or didn’t feel they could do it justice. While the no’s were increasing from polite to reverse compliments (you have a wealth of material) they were still dismissive.

Of course, being no rookie, I knew all about not taking rejection to heart and writing on. And I did — saving this manuscript that is a semi-autobiographical first novel onto the hard drive — starting a second novel based on questions I was thinking about life in Qatar and how people fall in love. Yet when SheWrites reminded me on Twitter that they were doing a contest for the first chapters of unpublished novels. Winners would have their material in front of agents and editors with critiques. I downloaded the chapter, sent it in with my photo, and there my husband was in Greece, reading my synposis and first 2000 words as one of five finalists.

The Help a book that purportedly was rejected sixty times is now opening as a film all around the United States. J.K. Rowling is perhaps one of the most lucrative examples of never giving up on your work or yourself but there are many, many others including Stephen King, whose wife fished out that nail bitter, Carrie, from the trashcan and said she’d help with writing the teenage girlishness he was unsure of.

A contest breathes life back into a story and indeed this writer. A good lesson in writing close to my birthday or indeed any time of year. If you’re an aspiring writer or a writer who need encouragement, dust off the keyboard, notebook, desk and get back in there.

After all, no one can read you if your work isn’t finished.

In writing my second novel — working title WAITING FOR SUNSET — I was having a lot of fun. The characters were lively; they said outrageous things, behaved in outrageous ways, and in general made fiction jump off the page. But then as the story progressed into part two, I began to wonder: is this how people really behave? Or rather: am I depicting how people fall in love accurately?

The theories about the function of art and writing vary. Some think that they should imitate life, vera similitude and really let the reader see things as someone might experience them in the ‘real’ world. Others think art is a mirror for us to understand ourselves and sometimes that can mean the mirror of a funhouse at the fair.

I had a basic question that I put to everyone I encountered over the course of week three of getting through my first draft: how do people fall in love? The answers were discouraging to say the least. Although love is a topic we all talk about irrespective of race, religion, or gender, no one wanted to go ‘on record’ and give me their opinion. A group of married men, all practicing husbands with ten or more years under their belt of relationships, children running all around at a two-year-old’s birthday party — evidence of their love with their mates — were hampered perhaps by the proximity of their spouses and unhelpful. I was dismayed by the generic answers I was getting from these friends, each of whom I knew their personal journey to their spouse. One met her at the tender age of 16 as a foreign exchange student. Another while a first year student at college. Still another while working in D.C. On average they had a 1.5 children (one couple 2, one couple 1 with one on the way, skewing the dynamic).

“Married people know nothing about love,” I said that day, fulfilling a stereotype that actually isn’t true. Married people know more than anyone in any industry that spins the cobwebs of love that love is a daily choice of loyalty, fidelity, and head working in conjunction with heart and the other parts of the body to honor commitment. But this doesn’t mean we can verbalize how we come to make this strength of bond to someone else over all others. I am also included in this non-expressive bunch because although I had a ‘love’ marriage as most South Asians would call the act of choosing your own spouse, three years later, I couldn’t identify what drew me to my husband. Not to say I didn’t remember how or why we were attracted: my memory had erased the moments when any such union between a monolingual Lao-Thai American and converted South Asian Christian could have been in doubt.
“It was our destiny,” I said to my Indian friend and her husband and the other couple at the table at her husband’s birthday party when I raised my question and they pointed out both of their marriages had been arranged by parents. “We had no choice but to get married — it all funneled in that direction.”
I suppose I was making an argument for divine arrangement – that while true and in fact how it happened when the two of us met in Qatar — it was still an easy way out of the kind employed by my male friends at the toddler birthday party.

My own personal inability to answer the question only fueled my fire and the novel was a secondary benefit. I had to know why people didn’t want to talk about love in a definitive way even though all music: English, Arabic, Tamil or otherwise is about love; movies whether Hollywood, Bollywood or Egyptian feature star crossed lovers, and each of us during adolescence to adulthood searches for a lover who will stay true throughout life.

I went deeper into my search and got more answers at our early Thanksgiving potluck.

“Poise, confidence, and beauty,” a six month newly wed said, as he twirled the hair of his new wife.

“Things start tallying up until there is an aggregate of positives that tips her over,” another friend said.

“Common interests,” my husband said (which is hilarious because we actually have very few).

“Immune systems,” my other friend said, “I read that women can sense men with stronger immune systems and so biologically they want to mate to make strong off spring.”

I mulled these over and came back to my characters, Abdulla and Kavitha, who meet in an apartment in London unexpectedly and sparks fly. I tried to distill together what I had grasped from the various conversations, with men in particular because women will love as easily as we inhale air, and came up with the following skeletal list:
Attraction — check.
Strange circumstances — check.
Polar opposites — check.
Small discoveries of similarities — this is what needed developing, I decided, “the meat” missing out of the story and the heart of how people come into proximity and decide not to look at anyone else any longer.
After a few weeks of asking, I feel a bit like Carrie Bradshaw and still don’t know that I have a concrete sense of how people fall in love: it is ethereal, indescribable, ever present, and yet, just beyond our grasp.

What I do know that is that for Abdulla and Kavitha it will be each of these things and none of them. For each love story is it’s own unique tale.

My first novel (currently seeking representation) started in early drafts about how two people fell out of love: the anatomy of a breakup. This second one explores how two people who seemingly have nothing to gain, find the world in each other. The third one I’m researching on this trip to Laos and Thailand has early hints of the first and a bit of the second: Why would a woman leave her eleven year old son and father of her child for the wide world?
I’m not sure how long the idea of love will interest me as a writer but for now the cultural and social dynamics of how we choose our partners is fascinating, perplexing, and great fodder for fiction. Perhaps I am a romance novelist at heart but minus the graphic covers and sex scenes.
Share with me your experiences or thoughts about love and help enlighten the path of my characters – and the rest of us in real life.

You may or may not know the line made famous by Virginia Woolf while giving an address on the topic of women writers. She said, a century ago words that still hold true for so many writers (male and female) today: 

"All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved."

In my case it hasn’t actually been the room or the time or the money. Most Saturdays for the last four years I’ve trudged up to the library and spread out my papers, books, pencils, files. And then been sucked into email for at least one of the four hours allotted to writing. Then the work messages I forgot to take care of; then the people who want to do a stop and chat. By the time I actually get any writing done, there’s an hour on the clock before I have to go and meet my husband somewhere for dinner or the movies or washing my hair.

Lack of discipline has been my problem. Close friends snort at this because I just had my first book published (non-fiction, a literary study of three Muslim women writers) and have co-edited two collections of essays in the past two years.

But the fact is my novel has suffered from this constant inattention of always being on the backburner and never having enough time if the library is not open.

So today, all this changes.
Because the desk that I bought four years ago is now clean. And I’m sitting behind it. With a computer, and the pencils, pens, books, notebooks and folders — all the accoutrement that I’ve been schleeping back and forth to the library. Right here in my own house.
 

But guests are coming in 20 minutes to say hi so it appears that things have not changed that much. I’ve been on the computer for three hours already.
 

So hopefully, since I’m caught up, tomorrow will be the first day of novel writing at home.

Do you have a desk of your own? Or other writing secrets? 
 

It has been a long time since I’ve written, mainly because starting a new job is often challenging but starting a new job in Qatar is like jumping on a runaway train. My head has been spinning for some time and I’m dismayed to find that writing, the activity I always credit with giving my soul air to breathe, has fallen under the rails.

But I renew my vow to myself and to my craft to cultivate moments to write even if I have to snatch them from the jaws of nine hour work days and weekendless work weeks.

The good news is that all of the associated new events which are required with a new job have found me in the back of my closet, digging out those treasures which have never seen the light of day. No kidding, they have all received rave reviews.

So my pledge to wear everything I own continues.

And I’m delighted to find that I actually enjoy my wardrobe more.

Is there a metaphor for life somewhere in here?

Heard of it? It’s the National Novel Writers Month. Yes, where people all over the world (even me in Qatar) commit to writing a novel (50,000 words) in one month, starting November 1 and finish November 31st. Why do people do it? Some for the sheer community building of it; there are forums and blogs and veterans of this crazy month. Some for the challenge (new year’s resolution like it looms over us) and then there are likely others like me, who love writing, but in the quest to get better at it, have let some of the fun drain out of it.

Why is writing not as fun as it used to be?

Because I’m trying to break into the magazine market? 
Because i’m trying to finish a dissertation?
Because I’m mid-stream one novel project after having written sixteen chapters of another?

For all these reasons, and perhaps the most important one to me, the loss of spontaneity, I’m taking on NaNoWriMo.

I’m going to sit down everyday and come out with 1,500 words. 

And I’m going to let it be about whatever it wants to me. 

The title? 
“What Surprises Me Most”

Stay tuned to see what that will be.

And it’s not too late to sign up (November 1st isn’t until tomorrow!):  www.nanowrimo.org