The Menial Hypothesis: Building The Focus To Write

Our Himalayan Writing Fellow Varun Thomas writes on writing.

While writing long fiction, I often find that a lack of focus makes it easy to lose sight of the plot by the time I’m done fleshing out the premise and characters that I have in mind, thus often leading to an absolute mess of events that contradict themselves within a few pages. I, through this piece, seek to take a tiny step in attempting to address the issue, through an unconventional method.

Growing up, a parental warning that was quite popular, in middle class Indian households, went something like this: “If you don’t study hard, you’ll fail your exams and you’ll end up swabbing other people’s floors and washing dirty dishes for a living”. Now that I think about it as an adult, I guess it hits the sweet spot between a classist statement and fair warning. Upon dissecting it further, I figured that it could be a vocalization of a fear, rooted ironically in self-awareness, which isn’t misplaced in a society that doesn’t extend the dignity of labor to workers of menial jobs.

I’d returned, in September last year, like the prodigal son to my parental home, after quitting my full time job, to chart the sea of blinking cursors and mostly blank pages. After a few weeks of guilt free binges, I realized that I should be helping out around the house and that’s how I found myself scrubbing gravy off a used pan, wondering if the childhood warning had come true, now that I wasn’t working hard in a conventional job.

Surprisingly, over weeks of washing dirty dishes, I realized that I was able to allow my mind to focus completely on scrubbing away all the debris of notoriously aromatic and sticky Indian ingredients. There was this increased focus that I was able to employ to perform the menial job, a focus that allowed me to achieve the simple but important goal, of striving for hygiene. A goal which pertains not just to food, but also to writing and editing.

I often found that the inertia of the focus I’d built from the dish-washing, subsequently followed through into my post-dinner writing. The increased focus led to a yield of better lines that weren’t tangential to the subject matter but instead delved deeper into the subject’s layers thus allowing for fresher perspective. The focus sometimes also led to incisive insight for better editing.

I noted that I was capable of a similar mindfulness while chopping wood, and washing clothes by hand, both again jobs which are conventionally deemed menial.

Now the natural question arises, about how does one go about using the focus gained from one task (here the menial task), to achieve another (here writing). The simple answer lies in this well known proverb, “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”, a saying that supposes, and rightly so, that once a process is learnt by the mind, it is merely a question of repeated application, to achieve similar yields.

Unfortunately focus isn’t something you can collect in an army canteen and take a hearty swig of when the night is cold and the Germans are attacking. The process of performing menial tasks does not yield focus through some strange alchemy that cannot be explained. It has to do more with emptying the mind by employing it entirely to perform a simple task, but mindfully i.e. with all your attention, a concept that you will find employed in meditation (through mindful breathing) as well. Eventually the processes, of both meditation and performing menial tasks, practiced mindfully, lead to a calmer more focused mind that could be used more efficiently to perform heavier mental tasks like ideation, writing and editing.

In conclusion, I would suggest trying out The Menial Hypothesis to see if you notice any increase in general focus that starts helping your writing habits; if you don’t, well, on the bright side you’ll have clean dishes, a warm fire and fresh clothes.

The author is part of the YourQuote Himalayan Writing Fellowship 1.0. Here’s more about it:

To apply for the next batch, fill this tiny form.