DR.SANTOSH BAKAYA
I am coming back after more than a month, and let me tell you that during this period, I read a lot. I also wrote a lot. Time and again, I have maintained that there are no short cuts to reading. If you cannot read full novels, begin by reading the stories of some great story tellers like Ray Bradbury, Saunders, O’ Henry, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allen Poe, Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekhov, Pushkin, Tolstoy. And many more.
You get pulled into their works. There are lonely, eccentric, whimsical, disturbing and idiosyncratic folks that one comes across while reading short stories and novels. I remember, Lorrie Moore, American short story writer once remarked:
“If novels are films, short stories are photographs, fleeting glimpses into other worlds and lives.” By reading these short story writers, one can get an idea how characters can be created, how intriguing ideas can start clicking in your brain, one can even know about pace and structure, crisp dialogues and credible endings. So read on, friends.
One of the writers that I read during this period was the 20th century, Raymond Carver [May 25, 1938- August 2, 1988]. A minimalist, he breathed new life into the short story. Some of his stories, Vitamins, Neighbours, and Fat in his short story collection Will you please be quiet, please? [1976] are about disillusioned characters who have fallen on bad times. He wrote about spiritual alienation, bankruptcy, alcoholism, divorce, and infidelity. I was intrigued by his story Fat- the fat character in this story is described from the point of view of a waitress in a restaurant. Carver always saw the humorous side of the tragic and the grotesque; human comedy was definitely his topic of interest.
This is how his short story Fat, begins. “I am sitting over coffee and cigarettes at my friend Rita’s and I am telling her about it.
Here is what I tell her.”
“This fat person is the fattest person I have ever seen…Everything about him is big”.
She goes on and on telling her about the quantity of food he ate, bread and butter, soup, dessert, vanilla ice -cream with a drop of chocolate syrup, but the reader can see that the waitress feels a strange empathy and fascination for him.
“My life is going to change I feel it”.
The story ends with this cryptic realisation.
There was a lot of food for thought there.
By the end of the story, the reader realises that his weight is inconsequential, and he is a powerful psychological symbol; a catalyst for change in the life of the waitress, in whose mind, the fat man becomes symbolic of the massive stagnation in her own life.
I had to read it many times to get to the meaning hidden in his ‘royal’ language- he refers to himself as WE, and not I. There is an enigmatic dignity in the fat man, as compared to her own helplessness.
So, the more stories you read, the more food for thought you will get.
The more you will know how to read between the lines.
Read on, till we meet again. The lines beckon.
Multiple award winning poet, Amazon No# 1 Bestselling author, novelist, biographer, TEDx Speaker, creative writing mentor, widely interviewed, and internationally acclaimed for her poetic biography of Mahatma Gandhi, Ballad of Bapu, Dr. Santosh Bakaya’s thirty- five books encompass multiple genres.
Her Tedx talk on the Myth of Writer’s Block is very popular in creative writing circles.
