For the Plot: On Narrativizing Life
Eshna Sharma
Ever since I turned twelve, I found myself deeply concerned with stories. It started off innocently enough—with make-believe, with the imagining of figures at the bottom of the swimming pool, with thinking that the moon or the sun was watching me, then thinking that everyone at the park was watching me. I began to imagine that I was surrounded by an imaginary audience that was observing all my moves with their breaths patiently tucked inside their lungs. When I slipped and fell they howled with laughter, when something went right they sighed dramatically and broke out in whoops of joy. I imagined that if circumstances so happened to cause me to die, if I did die, the imaginary audience would be so upset. The news of my martyrdom would make it to national headlines. “Gone too soon,” they would say. “A reminder of hope and light and the beauty of the world”. It is a different story why I was so young and thinking of my own death.
As I grew older, of course, I channelled this child’s play into something more concrete and tangible, something I could show, show off to other people—my parents, perhaps, who encouraged my writing as it would help with my vocabulary, and my school teachers, who stuck little smiley stickers on all the pages of my notebooks and made me perform as a solo act during school events. From the imaginary audience I had graduated to the realm of the living, the thrill of imagining and creating here multiplied since I couldn’t always anticipate the response I would get. It had so happened that I had a precocious sensitivity to the world and I realised I liked the validation I received, and I was filled with the need to concoct.
In fifth grade, I switched schools and the change was hard. I grew withdrawn and felt lost. Often I spaced out in class, drawing the annoyance of teachers and the deriding laughter of my classmates. Sometimes at lunch I sat alone, spinning a fork over and over into the clump of dried Maggi in my tiffin box, unable to come to terms with who I had become. I liked people, and more than that, I loved connection. Feeling like I belonged was a central part of who I was. Performance had been one of the ways in which I had sought this belonging. I’d always been naturally curious, outgoing, ready to make a friend. I loved seeing how things I did or said could elicit a reaction from people.
All of a sudden, I had been cast out of that joyful world of connection. I took to writing more furiously, I needed to be seen, and since everything else had failed—striking random conversations, inviting girls over for birthday parties and movies, trying to score the highest in class—writing seemed like the only way to bridge the growing chasm between me and the world around me. I began to struggle to gain the admiration that I had once elicited so effortlessly—I was no longer charming.
In her essay ‘The Author, the Work and the No. 1 Fan’, Kristen Roupenian explains how, in high school, she tried to use writing as a way to bridge the distance between her and her peers. In her case, it didn’t work too well. “My attempt to trade writing for admiration worked with my teachers but not with my classmates”, she writes. “Word filtered back to me that they thought the praise I’d got for my writing had made me snobbish and braggy”. Like Kristen, I wrote this time, not with the lightness and joy of earlier, but with the blunt, thrashing strokes of someone trying to stay afloat.
For the longest time, writers have tried to convince others that writing is a craft concerned with true and complete honesty. Writing has been described as something urgent and immediate. As pressing as the need to pull out a sliver of glass stuck in the skin, or to drink water when you wake up suddenly parched in the middle of the night. To write, you must be willing to dig deep inside yourself, to probe the deepest corners of what is there inside and pull it up for the world to see. Blood and guts.
But I began to learn that writing is also about deception. In its care and precision it is as much about artful performance as it is about plumbing deep. It is blood and guts, but served on a platter. The plating is what makes the difference between a sit-down restaurant and a mom-and-pop diner. The confectionary on top decides what gets sold and what gets dumped into the refuse pile.
When I was fifteen, I started writing for an online platform that was popularising micro-fiction on social media. For the first time, I was exposed to an audience of thousands. I made a social media page to publish my writing, and slowly began to receive feedback in real time: likes, views on my story, DMs filling up slowly with people who loved my writing and people who hated it. Soon I understood what people like to read, and what they want less of, and that is how I began to think. In vertical terms. In Instagram vocabulary. What would look best on my story, what could be reposted with the best song or the most profound caption.
My obsession to be validated for my creative output has carried me far. I grew up creating for social media, and now do the same in my first job at a media startup—making content that is easily consumable, easily liked by people. “We create content that performs well”, is what we tell other people when asked about the work we do. Recently, while preparing for an interview for graduate school, I memorized my own “story” so I could explain the choice of degree to my interviewers if they asked. And they did ask, and I had the answer ready: a detailed explanation of how the degree would fit into my career trajectory, how it was the missing piece that would complete the puzzle of my life, and how after that degree the rest of my career would become conquerable, explainable, comfortably predictable.
Over the years I have imbibed this vocabulary of performance well. Now, everything I write is impressed with the knowledge that it will be read by someone. When I write about my day in my journal, part of my brain wonders if my notes make for great blank verse, in the hopes that they may enthrall some future historiographer. When performance becomes the primary way in which you come to be known, you do everything within your means to make sure what goes out into the world is perfect, controlled. Like a finely-tuned guitar, or an athlete’s body right before a match, existing in those moments prior to the stage, for the sole purpose of performance. I approached my writing with the exacting rigour of a particularly severe dance instructor. Come on! I would tell myself, I still do. You have to do it absolutely right, this time. Make them lose their breaths in awe.
The trouble with writing to be seen is that this act becomes second nature, you begin to impose the rules of the performance onto other aspects of your life. It begins to seep into other things. I began to seek experiences that were cinematic, that would somehow conform to the same standards of perfection I sought in the things that I wrote: the same aesthetic appeal, the same warm imagery brushed by poignance. As a child I’d never really felt too strongly about my hometown, Lucknow; in fact, I remember mostly liking its wide, tree-lined streets and the colour of the sky most evenings, but as I grew older it suddenly turned ugly to me, the sounds of the city ringing harshly in my ears, reminding me what a small, ugly town it was, how just by living there I was being deprived of the perfect coming-of-age I could be having elsewhere. As much as I enjoyed crafting (what seemed to me at that moment) a perfectly written short story or poem, I began to demand the same kind of rigour from life. In my stories I held the power to make certain demands of the narrative, but the people and the places and the experiences that my life offered constantly disappointed me. I was never truly satisfied with the kind of people I hung out with or dated or the things we did, constantly chasing the unattainable, and therefore, always a little disgruntled with life.
Philosopher Kieran Setiya would probably think of my misery as an outcome of my constantly trying to narrativize my life. In his book, Life is Hard, he talks about how thinking of life as a story may mean that our failures may swallow our lives whole, eclipsing the other constituents that make up our lives. When life becomes narrative, it also follows that the same rules that apply to narrative now impose themselves onto the rhythms and motions of life. Narrative demands linearity, it demands a rise and fall, build-up, climax and conclusion. More than anything, though a life as narrative means that life itself has an arc of continuity, that things follow from another, that there are no gaps, no inexplicable characters, no bits that trail off and don’t really make sense.
Life is the opposite of narrative; narrative constructs meaning, life defies it, and to think of suffering as something to whip into narrative gold is to attempt to look away from the heaviness of it, to prevent us from feeling its full weight. Would we—as creators of art— grieve our losses and hardships more if we knew we couldn’t wring something in return from them?
The first time I got dumped it was on the phone. The virus had shut everything down, and the world didn’t know how to handle it yet. I cried and begged him to not go away, even though I had a sick feeling in my stomach that I was never going to see him again. When it was done I lay down on the cold floor of my balcony and smoked a few cigarettes and cried some more. The balcony was just a small cement shelf jutting out from the twelfth floor of an apartment. It was devoid of any sort of additions or adornment, the small space suited only for making out with a boyfriend, or smoking cigarettes after he dumped you. I wrote very little in those dark months—if I did it must have been horribly sad and indubitably coloured by the sting of rejection and isolation. For the first time, the doubt and the uncertainty and the hurt had crippled me so much that I could not channel it convincingly enough to perform. There was nothing about the pain that could become poetry, no part of my inability to get out of bed that could be spun into metaphor. Nothing made sense. My suffering was not poetic, or interesting, or beautiful. There was only me, trying to hide from the world.
When performance and perfection become so intertwined with life it becomes difficult to extricate one from another—to disentangle the truth of life and the imagined, greatly embellished recreation of it in your head. My life does not need to replicate the story I’m writing, the girl in it is not me, her troubles not mine, her ending, too, very different from what mine would be.
Now, I'm learning to let go of the urge for things to make sense all the time in either case, and to stop pushing romanticised ideals onto a subject as slippery as my life. Easy answers, the Hero’s Journey, conclusive endings are out. Plotlessness, fracture and chaos are in.
The attempt these days is to create a certain distance between the art I create and consume and the ebb and flow of my daily life. Maybe closing that distance is necessary to artistic greatness, maybe I need to chase every story to its logical end, maybe I cannot be a brilliant writer if I choose to give up this obsession. Maybe I can be a less performative one, and maybe, just maybe, that’s a good thing, after all.
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About the Author
Eshna Sharma is a writer currently living in Mumbai, India. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in The Bombay Lit Mag, Himal SouthAsian, Spacebar Mag and The Alipore Post. She was longlisted for the Toto Funds the Arts Award for Creative Writing in 2022, and was a part of the Write Beyond Borders fellowship in 2021.