“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.”
— Chinese proverb
There are two quotes I use a lot. One is by naturalist John Burroughs, which I first read in The Artist’s Way, and it goes like this: “Leap and the net will appear.”
The other, making a similar point, is by writer Ray Bradbury: “You’ve got to jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.”
There are subtle but key differences between them. The first one indicates a level of faith in the higher order or the universe. The second demonstrates a faith in myself to figure it out as I move along. I’m all for embracing both. But there is something uniquely invigorating about the latter.
I have five completed novels sitting in my cupboard. I wrote the first one at 15, and completed the others at, roughly, 23, 25, 35 and 45. I (thankfully) ignored the first one, filled as it was with heavy influences from all I was imbibing at the time – Judy Blume, teen movies, music magazines. For the rest, I tried to get each one out to the wider world. With feedback from friends and family, I’d hone each one again and again, then send them to agents and publishers, sometimes through contacts, often cold calling. At the very first and certainly by the second rejection, I’d put the manuscript away and start work on the next.
The next one, I hoped, would be rejection proof.
By the time it came to the fifth book, I almost predicted the rejection, and didn’t get despondent about it. I put it away as I did the others, and told myself that perhaps I’m just not that creative a person after all, and my skills are better used to enable and promote other people’s artistic output.
Now, I have been writing a diary since I was 12, consistently, feverishly. It – whatever ‘it’ may be – hasn’t happened until I’ve written about it to myself. I don’t know what to make of a situation until I’ve first put it down in words. I’d go so far as to call it a form of therapy. When I would be on a film shoot, where the days were simply too hectic to have time to eat properly, take a shower in peace, let alone write my diary, there were weeks/months where I wrote nothing (beyond an occasional “so much to write about!” – only to end it there). In those spells, I missed writing, but most of all, I missed myself. So much was going on, easily some of the most intense periods of my life, but I couldn’t process any of it in the way I best knew how.
I started writing a blog in 2013, I think, to partly have an outlet for my musings and partly with an urge I’ve always had to share – stories, thoughts, my learnings. My target audience has always been me, five years earlier. What did I wish I knew so I could have navigated life a teeny bit better? What are things I’ll be glad to have memorialised in some fashion because, well, life moves fast? What are some ways I could help?
I sometimes took ideas from my diary and expanded on them for a blog post. I had to clean up my language (I can be quite filthy left to myself, it turns out) as well as structure – I have a tendency to meander, write with lots of parentheses and brackets, making 15 points in one sentence because that’s how my brain works. (Some of these blog posts were collected to make Seeking and Belonging.)
When I started drawing again after a 30-year gap, I was housebound in India during the pandemic, with stores shut. The only tools I had access to were a cheap pen and a cheap notebook. The notebook form really encouraged me to keep going. Each page was small enough to fill easily. I could then turn it over and do something the next day; it felt like a huge accomplishment.
I was incapacitated at the time with a terrible back injury where I wasn’t allowed to do much except lie on my back with my knees elevated on cushions, or lie on my front in a Sphinx pose, propping myself up on my elbows. My days were a blur, bleeding agonisingly from one to the next. To keep track of things, I wrote down the date and a few details on each page.
A month or two in, I began experimenting with watercolours. My time was spent going down deep google rabbit holes researching art supplies. I moved to my mother’s in Bangladesh for a while once I was able to leave India. I didn’t have much access here either so I became buddies with my postman who would deliver my overseas goodies once a month – fountain pens with bendy nibs, a bottle of permanent ink, a small set of professional watercolours, heavy cold-press paper, slender paintbrushes. Every step was a steep learning. I allowed myself to course–correct, rather than give up.
As it was how I started, I stuck to the notebook form, switching over to a watercolour sketchbook, liking how it was contained and portable. I drew my surroundings, and I started adding more text, just to get the thoughts out and down on paper. It became another form of my beloved diary.
I began to share my sketches on Instagram. It was my friend Priya who first told me that she would enlarge my tiny photos on the platform and read every word I was writing. She loved the art, yes, but she also loved to read my writing. I mentioned this, incredulously, to other friends who all said oh, they did that too.
What! Those random and not-terribly-interesting musings I jotted down around the artwork?
The truth was, I had little respect for my own non-fiction writing. It was what I did to process my rambling thoughts. It wasn’t Art, the way I thought fiction was. Surely this kind of writing had no value.
But as the five novels stayed shut inside the cupboard, I continued this new inadvertent form of book-making. I called my combination of art and text “sketchbook diary”.
Then, before I knew it, I had completed 10 then 15 then 20 or so of these books. I tucked those away inside my cupboard as well. I was still trying to figure out my post-film career and post–pandemic life.
It was the Camino sketchbook diary, that I shared live on Instagram, as a day by day record as I walked the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage across northern Spain in 2022, when I started to get messages asking if I was going to bring these pages out as a book.
As I’d written elsewhere, I went through the motions two years ago of creating a mockup book of my Camino diary to show to agents and publishers but never actually sent it to anyone. Perhaps I was scarred from the rejections I’d faced with the novels. Perhaps I wasn’t willing any longer for someone else “in authority” to give a verdict on my work. I think, though, that most of all, I want to be in charge of my own destiny.
All this to say, I am at last bringing out my first art book, My Illustrated Camino Diary myself. I have spent the last months going back and forth with the designer, and now the printers. There are a hundred decisions to make and a thousand learnings. I hope to apply all of them to the second Camino Diary book, which I plan to bring out later this summer. And then add those learnings towards a third planned book, a memoir on grief. And so, hopefully, it will go on.
I can’t explain how absolutely terrifying this all is for me. I may be open to adventure and travel, but when it comes to my work, I have long stood on the edges of perfectionism, waiting until the time is Right and I am Ready. Waiting until old wounds heal and I feel braced to take on the world.
More than anything, I would love to only offer flawless things that are universally approved, loved and applauded. I’m embarrassed to admit when I don’t know something. I wish I could have everything figured out. That is my daily head dance.
I know now that I will never feel prepared enough to take the plunge. I can only know how to bring out my art books by doing it. I would eventually like to offer these learnings and this service to other artists so they too can benefit from it. One thing will lead to next, but it can only start when I take the first step.
That is to say: I’ll have to jump off the cliff and build my wings on the way down. Even if it makes me squirm, and I feel foolish and scared every bit of the way.
My Illustrated Camino Diary will be available from 2nd April 2024 on Amazon worldwide, both as ebook and print. Pre-order for the e-book is available now. Print book pre-order will be available from next week. All links are given here, along with a short write-up of the book.
A print edition will be available in Bangladesh also from this date.
I shall keep you posted!
“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”
— Doris Lessing
Recommendations
NOVEL
Vikram Seth, in his earlier days, photocopied and stapled his poetry and sold it door to door. Now, of course, with a gazillion books sold, he uses slightly different techniques to share his work. A Suitable Boy is his most known and beloved novel, though I have a special place in my heart for his novel in verse, The Golden Gate.
FILM
There’s handmade and then there’s the car crash version of handmade. Tim Burton captures the eccentricities of a low-budget filmmaker in the eponymous Ed Wood. Played by Johnny Depp with whim and affection, it’s a delightful portrayal of an eccentric artist.
PODCAST
Modern Love first appeared as a column in the New York Times. A podcast version, then televised adaptations soon followed. It now feels like a brand in its own right. Twenty years on, its founder and first editor, Daniel Jones, returns to the podcast to talk about how he started, as well as three essays in the series that changed his life.
How exciting! Can't wait to get my hands on the book. Good luck!
Absolutely fantastic this is!! This article itself made for such a good read!
Congratulations and looking forward to the print book - I’ll place my order soon! :)