tales of Suchita

I was brainstorming for the letter J with Claude and it came up with an idea that joy may have big meaning in everyday life but it doesn’t work particularly well in fiction.

We may crave “cottage core” reading. We may say we want to know what happens to a couple after the “I love yous.” But we also know that if nothing interesting or entertaining happens in the story, we will get bored and move on.

Life is not as interesting as fiction – and this juxtaposition of needing conflict in writing versus joy in real life is something that has intrigued me greatly since Claude mentioned it.

Because I have been contemplating joy a lot lately. Where I find it, what it means to me, why do I find it so difficult to feel, why I cannot hold it gently but must turn it into something heavy.

Is it my writer brain looking for stories everywhere that I find joy difficult to hold? For a story needs masala, conflict, a narrative arc that shows some form of struggle – inner or outer – before the payoff. It needs some peaceful moments to help the reader and the characters catch their breath before the plot needs to plot.

But life rarely follows a narrative structure. It does not have a beginning, crescendo, climax and end in that order. I start and stop several things. Only few things reach a crescendo, fewer still culminate and many times, before the end, a new lifecycle begins.

Maybe this explains why my regular brain that is not looking for dopamine hits while reading, finds joy tedious. After all, I find joy in mundane things. I woke up feeling fresh. A meeting I was dreading got cancelled. A boring day turned around because of good food, or an interesting conversation.

How can such mundane joys compete with the twists and turns of fiction? Have I as a writer forgotten how to live in the mundane world?

I remember while I was watching Rockstar and someone gave Ranbir Kapoor’s character the most unhelpful advice: you cannot write songs because you haven’t had your heart broken. I thought, what a load of bullshit. You don’t need a broken heart to write. I write without one.

Except with some distance from that version of myself, haven’t I always been a bit heartbroken…a little sad? A little not all there. Haven’t I used writing to wade through my soup of abandoned and suppressed emotions so I can find that treasure island on which joy is supposedly hiding?

Maybe that’s why joy is a challenge. Because it comes only after I have worked through the pages, the muck, the boring bits. And perhaps that explains the impatience to reach the end, like that holds more meaning than the journey itself.

The writer in me, who needs things written down for something to feel real, doesn’t have the words to articulate joy. Its so ephemeral, uncomplicated, quiet. It feels…unfinished, gone before you can capture it in any meaningful way. Much like those photos of moon or stars that never do it the justice that gazing on it can.

Maybe that’s why joy doesn’t make a good story. And what I cannot write, I am always chasing.

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For Letter J, written as part of #BlogchatterA2Z