MONTHLY BLOGPOST

Centre of an Imaginary World: Love Affair with Place in Fiction Writing

Recently, it came as a surprise how many of my stories were based in the culture and climate markers of the place I live in. If not by explicit mention geographically, they certainly wore badges of a common identifiable whereabouts. I realized it was the center of my imaginative world, just like for novelist Amitav Ghosh it is Calcutta, and in the same way James Joyce records his short stories upon the scaffolding of the city of Dublin:

In Westmoreland Street the footpaths were crowded with young men and women returning from business, and ragged urchins ran here and there yelling out the names of the evening editions… full of the noises of tram gongs and swishing trolleys and his nose already sniffed the curling fumes of punch. — “Counterpart”

Consider the accurate sketch of Dublin, the stage is the city’s pavements: urban working class on the throes of change are characters, drama in a state of flux. Compare the above with a similar passage from “The Shadow Lines”:

“…he was a familiar figure within the floating, talkative population of students and would-be footballers and bank clerks and small-time politicos and all the rest who gravitated towards that conversation-loving stretch of road between Gariahat and Gole Park.”

It is in the appreciation of this, that I proceeded to examine the importance of place in fiction-writing and how work needs to be seen through the prism of the cities themselves. Simultaneously, it intrigues me why fiction should be strongly rooted in place anyway? Accomplished writers deftly use cities and hometowns, like wefts and warps, looped into their writing. The chosen locales, then, lend themselves to superlative imagery and metaphors, becoming the fabric on which character nuances are weaved in, almost like rich tapestry. Authors use the place’s dramatic historical upheavals, and even mundane daily affairs. Remember Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine”?

In perusal of writing, drawn so much in context and reference from places that flow in the veins of writers, I find that we’re in love with them, like soil before a seed takes root.

Now, returning to why I write the way I do, I unearth from memory what may have something to do with it. Sprawled under the Jamun tree in my grandfather’s farmyard, I once considered a fallacy. What if all I saw was falsehood, make-belief: the pillared courtyard of the house, to indulge me like a child’s doll house; the ripened paddy fields just around the house’s periphery, just ochre abundant lies; the neighbor’s mango orchard, like an open notebook of fluttering green leaves. What if the halcyons had oars, the lily ponds hid spluttering cheeky young imps, the sky had shelves where I could store my jars of berry pickles or the colors of that rolling sunny afternoon. I wondered then if ‘un-centered center’ was the best way to describe this eternal swirl of muddled thoughts in my adolescent brain, just as I wonder now if the neon-lights I see beyond my writing desk, signages to guide them to that epicenter.

I realize writing should be tethered to roots, and place, to ooze both authority and authenticity. To fall back on origins and identity to build imaginary worlds seems natural. For example, I can easily recall the fragrance of rain-washed black soil, the bounty of nature as much as its ferocity, the warmth of a neighborhood where you knew what was cooking in the other’s kitchen, quite literally, and write about those. I can effortlessly visualize childhood summer fairs, cobbled lanes, cattle sheds, and the weekly marketplace: these are some recurring themes and images in my narratives. I hope to project these images like a series of frames, together with the unique sounds and experiences, through my work.

It’s no surprise then that writers will make tiny appertures out into the places that are centers of their creative minds, and readers can glimpse a new undiscovered world. This sort of place-centric approach piques the reader’s interest in general, and helps to emphasize both character and plot. 

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN CLEAVER MAGAZINE, AUGUST 2022]

PROMPTS

DIFFICULTY LEVEL 1: Unearth a particular childhood memory where you discovered an object or tool and how it works. Blend the narrative with the description of the place you were in at that time.

DIFFICULTY LEVEL 2: We travel and move houses many times as we grow-up. Any place where you went and immediately said to yourself that you wanted to live there forever. Write a story in which the future you celebrates the wish fulfilment OR complains that it was never fulfilled.

DIFFICULTY LEVEL 3: Re-write a fairy-tale or witch story or folklore using the setting of your current place of residence.

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