Making things unfindable

My job is to make content discoverable. SEO, metadata, content architecture, making sure that what someone searches for leads them to something useful. I am quite good at this professionally and it is the opposite of what I want to do in my writing. The literary fiction I write is about losing things on purpose. Not loss as tragedy. Loss as choice: people who step back from versions of themselves, who make themselves harder to locate, who refuse the coherence that other people want to read into them. I find this more interesting than stories about people who want things and pursue them. Pursuing is the default mode of so much fiction. Retreat is underrepresented. I'm from Jaipur and I live here still, in a flat in Vaishali Nagar, and I work from home most days. My writing happens in the mornings before the workday starts, between six and eight, with the windows open onto the garden. The current story I'm working on is about a woman who gives away a piece of furniture every month for a year. It sounds like a thought experiment. It turns into something else. That's the only way I know how to write: start with the surface, go deeper than the surface suggests.