A writer’s world of quirks and fancies

As I chop almost a kilogram of lady’s finger, the polygonal pieces that slip off the knife’s slimy surface, miraculously churn out ideas for stories from the crevices of my mind.

The star-shaped figures that lie looking at me encouragingly from the chopping board, never ever fail to help me deal with a writer’s block, snipping off all other distractions as I’m nudged into a peaceful, mundane, quietude.

Yes, I don’t have a desk where I write, the kitchen table has my ink pen and a notebook on it where I jot down my thoughts, long hand, as I wait for the curry to boil or tea to brew. Well, maybe in the humdrum I find solace, as I cook, I learn patience and the ideas, I let them simmer till they take the form of the written word.

I read somewhere that Agatha Christie complained she had “endless trouble with journalists, who inevitably wanted to photograph the author at her desk”: a difficult request, because she didn’t have one. Any sturdy tabletop for her typewriter would do.

My maternal grandmother had to deal with the eccentricities that Grandpa resorted to, in order to write. He would disappear into his study for days, barely eating a morsel or two, at the break of dawn he would go out for a walk by the pond nearby, scribbling ideas that came to him on a small writing pad that he carried.

Another weird habit was that he would take his car to the garage on some pretext or the other, there he would sit and write as the mechanics went about their work. It stimulated the creative juices!

A columnist/blogger friend of mine gets maximum inspiration while munching on chocolate (hazelnut) and simultaneously smoking shisha (post-Covid, she has forgone of the latter, replaced it with vanilla ice-cream).

She reminds me of many others like Christie who munched on apples in the bathtub while thinking up murder plots, Flannery O’Connor crunched vanilla wafers, and Vladimir Nabokov fuelled his “prefatory glow” with molasses.

Almost all writers resort to some quirky habits that propel them into creating stories, as if the windows of their minds are set open and the ideas pour out into paper or the screen. A writer I know keeps orange peels in the drawer of his desk, the citric-turned-acrid stink makes him ideate.

Just like Friedrich Schiller. Johann Goethe, the poet and Schiller’s friend, had dropped by his house and upon seeing that Schiller was out, decided to wait for him. Rather than doing nothing, the poet sat down at Schiller’s desk to write down a few lines.

A peculiar stench wafted into Goethe’s nostrils. He discovered that the stink emanated from a drawer in Schiller’s desk. Goethe found a pile of rotten apples in his draw. Schiller had let the apples decay. The smell, somehow, inspired him, and according to his wife, he “could not live or work without it.”

Index cards, vibrant Post-its, fancy journal books, Staedtler pencils and sketch pens adorn my kitchen table. ‘Stationery’ can be a quirk too. Alexandre Dumas penned all of his fiction on a particular shade of blue paper, his poetry on yellow, and his articles on pink; on one occasion, when in Europe, he ran out of his blue paper and was forced to write on a cream-coloured pad, which he was convinced “made his fiction suffer”.

Virginia Woolf used different hues of ink in her pens — green, blue, and purple. Purple was her favourite, reserved for letters. John Steinbeck wrote the Pulitzer winning ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ using 60 pencils a day. Hemingway would use the pen and the typewriter too, he favoured pencils, sharpening them with care whenever he got a moment’s break from writing. “Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day’s work,” he once said.

However, the best quirk according to me is to hang upside down! A therapy that Dan Brown uses, to ward off writer’s block, it helps him to focus and relax, the hourglass on his table tells him to do a few freehand exercises, each hour. Exercise improves immunity, so important in the time of Coronavirus.

Well, strange are the ways of writers and amidst their quirkiness we find masterpieces that dwell in our hearts forever.

— Navanita Varadpande is a writer based in Dubai. Twitter: @VpNavanita