For Omar Shahid Hamid, a police officer who has served on various senior posts and yet found time to write five novels, writing was never his calling and he had not the slightest idea in his childhood that he would one day become an author.
“I stumbled into writing when I tried it as a sort of cathartic exercise,” he said as he engaged in a candid discussion about his journey into writing at the Arts Council of Pakistan, Karachi, on Friday evening.
In a conversation with Safinah Danish Elahi and Ayesha Mian, Hamid said there was a time in his career as a police officer when he got quite frustrated and disillusioned and started writing as a means of catharsis. He added that he did not know how it snowballed into a manuscript and then a book, and he authored four more books thereafter.
“I don’t consider writing as my primary career but as a hobby and addiction,” he remarked. He said this newfound love for writing brought a balance between his highly risky and stressful professional responsibilities and his thought process.
Discussing the inspiration behind characters of his novels, Hamid explained that as a novice writer, he found it easier to create characters with the help of his experiences as a cop and weave them into his fictional world. “You draw from the world you know and craft characters from it. As you become a seasoned writer with better abilities and skills, you conjure up your own characters, reducing reliance on real-life characters,” he went on.
“The first three books I authored were Karachi-centric, revolving around its politics. Then I tried to move away and write about something that I didn’t know actually and did research on that.”
The author said his journey from his first book, The Prisoner, to the manuscript that he had recently finished had been a revolutionary one. “As a storyteller, I believe that with each subsequent book, I have experienced a continuous evolution in my craft, irrespective of the fact that whether or not it translated into a commercial success as people have diverse preferences when it comes to books. Fortunately, all my books have been commercial successes but I also feel that I have consistently improved with each one,” he remarked.
He was of the view that writing was a tough business. “Being a writer is a bit like being a politician because you have to put yourself out there and say this is what I have to offer, leaving it to the people’s choice to embrace it or not,” he said.
About the reading culture, he said that there was a lot of interest in reading books that too had gone through a transition and survived over years of evolution despite the emergence of social media and television.
He added that the reason the people read less in Pakistan might be linked to lack of infrastructure that promoted reading. In the United Kingdom, for instance, he pointed out that people at underground train stations were seen engaged with books whether in a physical form or audio or e-books, which indicated that they had supportive reading infrastructure.
Hamid said reading helped one develop a perspective that they otherwise would never have. A lot of issues at the national level arose due to lack of that perspective that could have developed through reading, he added.
Regarding writing, he said it made one a better observer. “I personally feel I became a better police officer after I became a writer because I became far more observant of professional duties.”