What I learnt about writing by judging a creative writing contest at a college

A few weeks ago, the writer Aruni Kashyap and I were invited to judge a creative writing competition for college students. Besides the “sitting fee” – the organisers were apologetic about the amount – there were other reasons for me to be excited about this.

For one, Saurav (partner, co-author) and I had formed a brief but memorable friendship with Aruni a couple of years ago at a provincial literary festival. The organisers had bossily despatched the three of us to a government-owned guest house a certain distance from the festival venue, where district-level government functionaries ate copious alu parathas through the day in a dining hall and the children of top bureaucrats colonised the suites with their motley groups of friends, ostensibly preparing for some entrance exam or other but in all likelihood smoking up. The rest of the festival attendees, including many of our friends from the writing and publishing community, were ensconced at a nearby four-star hotel.

After lunch, we inveigled ourselves into one of their rooms and emerged with a grim list: mini bars, commodes that sang, flat-screen TVs on every empty wall, a view of the pleasant gardens studded with lounging goraas in straw hats, and the softest of duvets stuffed with goosedown. Our friends were still complaining, of course, as writers are wont to – apparently the croissants at the breakfast buffet had been too crumby.

On our way back to our sad guest house, we formulated a stoic friendship, of the sort that junior Soviet apparatchiks might have cultivated with each other, on their way back from some official function in the wildly decadent Paris or Vienna to the chills of Moscow – unlike those lording it in four-star luxury and quickly losing their artistic touch, the three of us felt we were the real writers: authentic, bitter and free.

So I was looking forward to catching up with Aruni; not only is he a writer and activist, but he also teaches writing at a liberal arts university.

And of course I was also quite keen to find out how young people approached creative writing competitions these days. Remembering my own pathetic dabblings of the past, I felt quite terrified on their behalf.

Later on, at the venue, we realised we needn’t have worried. There were nearly two hundred participants at the event, clearly confirming that young people are not terrified about having to create memorable art in half-an-hour slots at gunpoint, practically – and then be judged on it. Wait, hang on, a few of them seemed positively bouncy. We remembered our neurotic youthful selves and felt strangely annoyed at these shiny young Turks.

Memory of gunpoint-writings past

While the aforementioned shiny young Turks wrote up their masterpieces, Aruni and I sat in an unused classroom and gossiped. I remembered, with horror, how when I was roughly the age of these participants, I had written English Literature college entrances across various colleges in Calcutta. And then, because I was unsure of myself (my grades in Class Twelve were abysmal), I had also taken the creative writing trial under the “Extra-Curricular Activities” or ECA Quota at St Xavier’s College in Calcutta (Aruni had taken the ECA trial at St Stephen’s). There were two rounds. In the first, when asked to describe what I’d like to be reborn as, I claimed I would like to be reborn as Jonathan Livingstone Seagull! I still have no clue where that New Age fuckery came from, but I do recall a Richard Bach phase.

If that is not mortifying enough, let me tell you something far worse. I can’t remember what the dang topic was in the finals but I wrote something highly experimental, in verse. The title of my free verse epic, a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pretender-type piece, was Auto-Pictography of a Seventeen-Year-Old Calcuttan. Don’t ask me what it meant. I have no idea. If the past is a different country, I sure as hell wouldn’t be granted a visa anymore.

The prompts

The responses come in, all one seventy of them, and we sit down with tall glasses of coffee to mark them up; the sky outside darkened. We took a quick glance at the prompts (“topics” are for Class II kids; “prompts” are for wannabe writers) that we had offered to the participants earlier in the day:

- The oddest thing about travelling…
- This old house

And finally, one of Aruni’s prompts that was, by far, the number one choice:

- You meet an old friend for dinner and drinks after many years. You have always had feelings for this old friend. The old friend does not know this. Show; don’t tell.

It was a sort of Hail Mary pass for the hormonal lot. They might not win the writing contest, but they would certainly spill their guts. Pages and pages and pages.

In the beginning I grumbled at Aruni – but soon matters get interesting. I tapped my pencil on the table in excitement and told him, “You know, the one about the old friends? This one’s a coming out of the closet story – how about that?” Three scripts down, there was another one rueing why it’s Romeo and Juliet and not Romeo and Joseph (where it missed the point about not telling, it made up with passion). And then, another. One more. Was that the eighth?

By now, Aruni was most annoyed that all the heteronormative drama had fallen to his lot while I had got all the exciting stuff. At one point, after several of the gay-themed love stories had come to rude conclusions when the old friend presented a wedding card at the end of the dinner (the wedding card fait accompli was established as the single-most powerful trope), I wondered aloud to Aruni: “You know, are they being too clever by half, second-guessing what the judges might like in terms of radical content, or is it genuine?’

“We’ll never know,” he replied. “But I’m definitely giving better marks for political consciousness.”

There was a companionable silence while we exchange papers.

“Did anyone write about the old house?” I asked him in a small voice. “There weren’t any in my lot.”

As you have guessed by know, that prompt was mine.

“Oh yes. Several,” he replied kindly. “In fact, I’ve given the highest to an old house.”

Trends

Afterwards, we made a list of the broader trends that emerge from an analysis of this self-selected pool of aspiring writers:

1. Unafraid to write about their sexuality.

2. Given to setting their stories abroad, preferably New York or London. However, the places described are not New York or London.

3. A steady belief that poetry = rhyme. There need not be any meaning in any line, or overall.

4. Allied: there is no need to read poetry before writing poetry.

5. Unable to give their characters names like Roshni or Faiz, Jaspreet or Josy, instead preferring Amanda, Lyanna and Pascal.

6. Durjoy Datta fan fiction rules.

There are a few that stood out. Luminous. Hard. Realistic dialogue. Good sense of place. And bearing the stamp of the only one thing that cannot be acquired with practice – an original voice.

The writing life

A few, from this lot, would perhaps go on to write books one day. Several would go into journalism. All of them would keep writing Facebook posts and tweets, love texts and hate emails, and whatever else would be at the cusp of technology today to become par for the course tomorrow. There were a few things that we really wanted to tell them. Especially the ones who take the results of such pointless competitions to heart – whether they do well or badly, either way, and base big life decisions on it.

What we really wanted to say – but might not have founds the words for – was a thing or two regarding the fuzzy truth about the life of a writer, should they choose to accept their mission.

If you are a writer, there is always a ragged feeling inside you that makes your organs seem the wrong size for your body – or vice versa. Occasionally, you will forget this completely when you are in form, writing every day, forming sentences that approximate the silences of your characters, making your way through a dark room that the yet-unwritten book is. But the forgetting is always temporary; the terror is permanent.

Recognition will not mean much, except less worry about money, since recognition cannot alter the process of wading in the dark with infinite patience. Only other people’s books will offer you some comfort. You will often be amazed by them. And yet, it is your dissatisfaction with other people’s books that will profoundly affect your writing.

Finally, the awful fact. Books are long. They take many hours on a hard chair to complete. And, in any case, nobody reads books anymore.

But then, there are rewards too.

Like, on some days you get invited to judge creative writing competitions – though you might be against it in theory – and the discovery of an extraordinary sentence uttered in a fresh young voice sends a frisson down your neck. It is as though the entire language has been reordered in an instant. There is this link between that young writer you will never know, you, and the language that will feel so vital and important that for a day or so, the terror might even stay at bay.

Devapriya Roy is the author of two novels, The Vague Woman’s Handbook and The Weight Loss Club, and the co-author, with her husband Saurav Jha, of The Heat and Dust Project.