Which is harder: writing a novel or improving a national legal system?

I had the privilege of seeing Zia Haider Rahman this morning at the 4^th annual Dhaka Hay Festival talking about his recent novel In light of what we know.  Seeing the author of a book that you love is always risky; it’s possible that the book eclipses the person who wrote it, and meeting its creator will actually tarnish it.

But today I got lucky! Zia’s discussion was as thoughtful as his writing.  I loved that his book managed to weave together a story that literally takes you around the world, while exploring class and nationality, while also ambling through many asides, interesting quotes, and other tidbits. And a love story for good measure.  Zia said that he hoped the book made its readers feel uncomfortable—until one feels uncomfortable, it’s hard to get to a place where you see things in a new light.   It did not make me uncomfortable, but it did make me think and brought many thoughts into sharper focus.  For example, at one point, one of the main characters finds himself parachuted into Kabul in the midst of the development frenzy.  His commentary on the American “my rights end where your nose begins” attitude to other cultures, the expat party scene, and general lack of humanity among many aid workers is a section that all development workers should read and consider.

He said that it took him four years to write the 550-page book.  So on average that’s what, a page every three days of so?  Many of the ideas “made themselves known” as he was writing; often as he was headed to bed, something would appear in his mind.  So writing was as much about emergent thoughts as those that had been percolating around during his earlier travels around the world and earlier moments, such as those when he was sitting in lower Manhattan from a posh Goldman Sachs office, staring off at the Statue of Liberty thinking, “How the hell did a Bangladeshi villager end up here?”  Takes a while to make sense of it all, and still more to get it on paper in a coherent fashion.

During his comments, I was not really surprised that it had taken him four years to write such a deep novel.  It didn't strike me as a particularly long time.  The book feels meditative, the complex ways in which the stories dart between present and many pasts would require the author to spend a great deal of time with the characters and deliberately orchestrate the order in which the reader learns about experiences and events.  It’s too careful to have been done in haste.

But later I started thinking about the timelines that we often give to development initiatives.  Since a lot of development funding is provided by governments, rarely is the timeline longer than a four or five year term.  Often foundations give even shorter grants lasting just a couple of years.  Yet one expects great things—a scaled-up health system, a sustainable way to create legal inclusion of the poor, water and sanitation for all.  If an individual act of creating a masterpiece takes five years, how can we expect that in the same time, a group of people can change behaviors, norms, and systems, and transform infrastructure, recreate institutions, enact policy, etc?  When put side by side, it seems crazy to think that such complex changes can be orchestrated on such a short timeline.

Zia talked about how many novels these days are written to be amenable to a block-buster movie.  He said that this means that often contemporary authors avoid “interior-ity,” which he seemed to define as the inner lives and narrations of the characters in the book.  What is the Great Gatsby without the perspective of Nick Carraway?  Movies don’t allow readers the same type of unseen connection with characters that books do.  As a result, that type of novel is dying out.

Development also needs a big dose of interior-ity.  Many of the important steps required for real change are hardly something that one can brag about to a donor.  And many take time—considering how radical some changes are (for example, bathrooms for all in a community with a deeply embedded caste system), people need time to process, rebel, argue, discuss, and learn before they can accept.  It’s internal to individuals and to communities; unlikely to be observed or truly understood by outsiders.    Skipping it for the “action” may make for a better show. But that’s the magic that makes change stick.

Note: My colleagues and I recently wrote up a piece on "What it takes  to have social impact at scale" with a specific focus on successes in South Asia, where we share more thoughts on timelines, internal change and other related themes.