Authors are human beings, and no different from others. But there's a certain amount of creativity required to pen your thoughts, sketch your characters and guide or be guided by the flow of your storyline. Such creativity takes a complete backstage in certain situations. Here are a few such situations, where I personally get thrown off the creativity grid ruthlessly and lose days of thinking trails. It's sad, and funny, at the same time, but from an author's point of view, more than anything else, it's dangerous.
1) Groceries
You are thinking of the perfect chase sequence. Your central character is running through meandering lanes and by-lanes and by-by-lanes. You are a soaring eagle looking at the labyrinth a thousand feet below, where a bunch of goons are looking like ants, chasing another ant, who is barely staying ahead, and alive. The man's lungs and feet are failing him, and unknown to himself, he's slowing down. And you're staring at 10 different brands of Papad in the aisles and looking for that ONE brand which your wife specifically needs. Aha- there it is! No, she said Mangalore brand, this one's Kerala brand. The goons have almost reached the breathless man. One of them picks up a brick and throws.....Found it! Now, you just have to look for the 200gms pack. Remember your wife's words? "Not 100, not 250.....200gms".
2) Publisher-pressure
I totally understand why they do it. I run a business too. But here's the point. Have you ever tried telling a story to your child, while you yourself are tired and sleepy? "Then what happened? Baba, then what happened? Baba? (takes his tiny little fingers and pries your eyes open). The dragon threw a ball of fire towards the princess, then what happened?" You plant three heavy knocks on your head, and half open your eyes, as if there are exams tomorrow and you haven't studied all year. "Then the prince came on his white elephant and caught the dragon and sent him back to his dungeon and the princess and the prince got married and lived happily ever after." Being a child, your child is satisfied at such a beautiful conclusion and promptly lies beside you and father-son go to sleep. Unfortunately, your readers are not children. So, you can't rush things in the adult world. They will ask you at exactly what point of time the horse turned into an elephant, what happened to the ball of fire which the dragon had already thrown at the princess, and all the action-packed details of the chaining of the dragon and the emotional aspects of the prince-princess meeting, and the sexual ones of the kiss they shared. And unless you have enough ideas, you can't 'rush a novel'. Even great writers have written about the publisher-pressure, and boy, were they right?
3) Mother-in-law
If you are an author, you are a sensitive person. You do not like to be disturbed most of the times - not with coconut laddoos, not with complaints about how your mother-in-law's daughter (the one married to you) is becoming thinner and thinner (an observation you completely disagree with), not with frequent requests of going to the market and getting your wife's favourite sweets, fruits and dessert, and MOST DEFINITELY not with stories about how she used to be a sweet little girl in her childhood and how many parents of eligible engineers, doctors and NASA astronauts had lined up for her hand from the day she was 18, and how she had (big sigh) chosen "YOU" instead. In such situations, you finally realize why some authors check into a hotel to write, and why some of them are often seen hanging around in the chainsaw, shovel and noose sections of department stores.
4) Construction
Some authors have been known to travel to a place whose environment matches with that of his plot. For a story with events that take place near a beach, he would travel to a beach. Stephen King has been known to write in a dim, damp and dark dungeon. But even stories that involve plots with construction going on cannot be written with actual construction going on around you. Traffic, fine. Market, fine. Construction....nope.
5) Politics
Come to think of it, politics actually helps me in writing. Because where else can I hope to find so much of comic content? Also, whenever there's a discussion on politics, and someone is arguing the merits of one party over the other, I just swiiiiiiiiitch off. I look at the person speaking about the recent political developments very attentively, and I get lost in the wonderful ideas that I had been juggling with in my head and advance them a little further, waiting to get back to my writing desk, from which I carefully remove my mother-in-law's 12x18 Bajrangbali photo and write the plot down on paper.
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