He Makes Me Want to Write

It is February the Fourteenth, at that hour of the morning when all the children have been taken to school and all the husbands have driven themselves to work or been dropped, steambreathing and greatcoated at the rail station at the edge of the town for the Great Commute, when I pin my heart on Missy’s front door. The heart is a deep dark red that is almost a brown, the colour of liver. Then I knock on the door, sharply, rat-a-tat-tat!, and I grasp my wand, and I grabbed my wand, my stick, my oh-so-thrustable and beribboned lance, and I vanish like cooling steam into the chilly air.. (Harlequin Valentine, Neil Gaiman in Fragile Things)

Here I am, having gone through Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors for the second time and re-reading some stories from his Fragile Things. There’s no other author who inspires me to write quite like he does. There’s one particular story in Fragile Things that never fails to make writing seem like such a fun enterprise.  

That story’s “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire”. The story’s as quirky as the title, and Gothic with a capital ‘G’. A clever tale where the worlds of fantasy and reality (ours, that is) are inverted; the protagonist is a wannabe writer (even in Gothland, they exist, apparently) who lives in a world of ghouls and shrieking women, but who yearns to write fantasy with fantasy being our boring world of toasters, work, strained relationships and hurried breakfasts. It’s humorous, whimsical and – for me, curiously inspiring. There’s also a lesson-nugget embedded, delivered by that fixture of gothic tales – the drawn, humourless, seemingly bloodless but always faithful butler.  

In the introduction, Gaiman (one of the few authors who seems to have a rollicking time conjuring up stories for the rest of us) remembers how the story – which he wrote twenty years ago – was rejected by publishers. It was only two decades later that it was rewritten and published, first in a gothic anthology, and subsequently included in “Best of” Anthology Collections. It was the Best Short Story in the 2005 Locus Award.  

Fiction is subjective….and writing it is never as much fun as it seems. Anyway, here’s a state of bliss towards which all writers strive, even without ghouls and monsters and a mad, shrieking Aunt Agatha in the attic.  

The quill went scritch scritch across the paper, and the young man was engrossed in what he was doing. His face was strangely content, and a smile flickered between his eyes and his lips.

He was rapt.
(Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire, Neil Gaiman in Fragile Things)

Filed under: Books, Personal Note, Writing , authors, Books, fantasy, neil gaiman, reading, Writing

Just An Update

President Obama

So, you know, America has a new President who was ushered into the White House with celebration, anticipation and fervent hope. Around 1.8m people attended his inauguration, a record, I understand, and tens of millions more watched around the globe. I missed most of it, with regret, but am more keen to know what he is going to do about Palestine and Iraq. His ordering the closure of Guantanamo as well as his call to halt brutal interrogation techniques (but not all of them – just the “most severe” ones) is welcome but he has also green lighted missile strikes on tribal areas in Pakistan. Will Islam still be equated with terrorism under President Barack Obama, who spent part of his childhood in a village in predominantly Muslim Indonesia?

This list of his first 100 hours gives me some hope still that the new President will inject compassion, objectivity and humanity into the US’s foreign policy, although his silence over the deaths of Palestinians (many more over a thousand) has been deeply disappointing.

The Year of the Ox

Over on our shores, it’s holiday season again as we welcome the Chinese New Year. It’s the Year of the Ox this time around, the animal being quite a fitting icon for the stoicism and perseverance necessary to weather the tough economic climate. I’m realising that more of my Chinese friends have less reverence for this time of year, with a few even working through the holidays instead of returning for the traditional family feast. Wherever you choose to greet the New Year, Gong Xi Fa Cai, to all who celebrate. Here’s a very short tale where an ox “saved” the Austrian town of Salzburg from invaders, not by heroics but simply by being present:

To say that the humble “ox” played a pivotal role in European history might to some appear rather strange, but to the people of Salzberg, this beast is a symbol of courage in the face of adversity.

In the 1500s, an enemy army took over the city of Salzburg, Austria depriving the inhabitants of food and drink. Their cupboards bare with nary a bit of food left, the people were practically ready to surrender until they found a lone ox roaming the streets. They paraded the beast in front of the invaders to prove that they were not hungry. Then, during the night, they painted it black to show that they had more than enough livestock for the people to survive. Completely befuddled, the army retreated, leaving the people of Salzberg in peace.
(from Squidoo)

 

And click here for another story, this time from the Arabian Nights, of The Ox and The Donkey.

My Reading

At the individual level, I’ve done quite a bit of reading over the past month, and am glad for it though I wish the writing will catch up. I’ve completed Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (a creative delight!), Stephen King’s Just After Sunset (too mild), Clare Wigfall’s The Loudest Sound and Nothing (beautifully written), David Sedaris’s  When You Are Engulfed in Flames (hilarious), Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (second reading – it resonates more this time around), Jonathan Kellerman’s Gone (you know, I believe my reading tastes have changed; the story wasn’t as engrossing as I had expected it to be) and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well (I recommend this highly).

Right now, in my book “basket” are: Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father (so far, he is proving to be as eloquent in writing as he is in speech), Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer (I could not resist this beautifully matt paperback and what it promises for the reader and writer), Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (for its anticipated irreverence and humour), Robert Schlessinger’s White House Ghosts (am honestly stuck on “W”, however hard I try to move on), and John Pilger’s Freedom Next Time (it gets too depressing in one continuous dose but it provides the necessary reminder that we world citizens need of the injustices wrought by governments). I have also stuffed an old book (I realise that I have a whole shelf of writing books, actually, populated since my teens), The Writer’s Digest Handbook of Short Story Writing, which – ahem – is supposed to get me to write better short stories. But I’ve to sit down and complete my tales first. Particularly before the 31st March closing date for the MPH-Alliance Bank Short Story Writing Contest, which I, uh, intend to, sort of, I think, perhaps, enter.

And ps, one of my goals this year is to read the late Roberto Bolano’s mammoth “2666“ though goodness knows if I’ll get to finish it before 2010 rolls around. Here’s a link to the The New Yorker’s 2666 Reading Challenge.

Filed under: Books, Personal Note, Reads, World, Writing , barack, Books, library, reading, US, Writing, year of the Ox

Readers and Writers in Residence

I caught The Business Traveller on CNN today and was tickled pink by the segment which featured what must be a new career niche for writers: Bedtime Reader. A hotel in London is offering the live reading services of their Writer-In-Residence for customers who request for the service. That’s right. This writer will show up at a guest’s bedroom in his pajamas, and read from a book the guest selects. He’ll shuffle off when guests fall asleep, I guess. I wouldn’t be comfortable having a complete stranger read a book to me in a strange city, but it sounds like a wonderful way to earn money: getting paid to read and write. Hmmm.

Speaking of Writers in Residence, Shakespeare and Co, an antique bookstore in (where else) Paris, offers around six Writers-In-Residence places for aspiring writers. Among the warren of bookshelves the bookstore has sited six beds for wannabe (or present) writers and what is required of the writers in return is that they write (but of course) and read – yes read – a book a day. Sounds heavenly, if you don’t mind tourists and customers wandering in and out of your “bedroom” through opening hours (and sharing toilets)! Anyway, here’s a good, if dated, primer of more conventional writers-in-residence programmes in London.

The show also takes an enticing look at some of the world’s best bookstores. London’s most famous, Foyles, is listed among them but I remember this bookstore as being difficult to navigate, categorising books as it did then (in the 1990s) by publisher instead of author. From what’s written on their website, the store has had a huge transformation and now instead of housing books in overflowing, crammed quarters, the store has lifts, a cafe and even an art gallery. It even offers books for sale over the Internet. It’s good to know a century-old bookstore can keep up with the times.

You know, after watching Richard Quest and reading these articles, I am overcome by the urge to visit London and Paris…..

Filed under: Books, Collectibles, Writing , bedtime reading, bookstore, reading, shakespeare and company, writers-in-residence, Writing

Ad Break: A Writing Marathon

Since I’m too caught up in Preeta Samarasan’s lyrical narrative to be inspired enough to write my own (much less lyrical) ones, an advertisement seems to be a good bet.

It’s November, and so National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is back, tantalising writers with the idea that they should, can, must complete a 50,000 word manuscript in 30 days. That roughly 175-pages in a month, or almost 6 pages a day. It doesn’t sound like much, but…if you are anything like me, where you cross out half of the passages that you write, before you even get a full page – six pages is an awfully long distance. To do it daily can be like climbing Mount Everest.

NaNoWriMo works on the principle that you need to write mountains of crap to produce a tiny mound of gold (“gold” being Natalie Goldberg’s expression for good writing). In other words, you’d perhaps get 20 usable pages out of the 175 – but you needed to write the 175 anyway to arrive at that 20. (I try to imagine Preeta writing “crap” but fail – however, she did mention in a recent author’s event that her orginal manuscript was three times the length of this one, so there you go – it’s easier to cut down on material rather than not have enough to work with in the first place).

I entered the NaNoWriMo marathon about five years back, and exhaustedly crossed the finish line at just a couple of hundred words over 50,000. See Ming’s Word Up! was administrating then, and I remember frantic emails before each milestone. The administration is a lot easier now – with just the finish line submission to be made, and to a centralised administrator which will then verify the word count.

At any rate, the exercise was a good stamina-building exercise for writers, particularly ones like me, who delete more than I write, regret the deletions, undo the erasures, get frustrated, and then wonder if I should delete everything and start over (perfectionism or procrastination, take your pick). With NaNoWriMo, and each installment logged, I couldn’t undo, nor backtrack, and had to find a way out of the story I had written my characters in, somehow.

The story’s gone – it was in an old laptop whose hard drive conked out before I could backup the contents. I remember bits and pieces of the narrative – it was excruciatingly bad (though with good grammar, of course) – but nonetheless, I have been slowly building on remnants of the tale since that time, adding layers and dimensions from – well, where else? – The Real World. If writers are scientists and story scenarios are hypothesis, then I”d say more than half have been proven correct, though quite unfortunately, in some cases.

That exhausting, painful, extraction of Story from Goodness Knows Where, at the expense of a Normal Life, has made me shy away from subsequent NaNoWriMos. But if you are ready, willing and able – go for it. Last year, 15% of the 100k participants worldwide completed the marathon. So, you can feel proud if you complete the 50k words, and console yourself if you don’t. Either way, you’ll end up with a lot more rubbishy narrative than when you started, which you can then mine and sieve, for the glinting threads of – yes, there’s actually no better word for it – gold.

Filed under: Personal Note, Writing , NaNoWriMo08, Writing

Young Writers

They say you live your unlived potential through your children.

If that is true, then it could be that my writing life is finding its way out through my sons. Both now have started fiction-writing, the older brother penning chapters of a robot epic (with chronicles and sagas in mind), and the younger one composing short, frisky animal tales.

It’s hard to describe my emotions whenever I catch them scribbling in their notebooks or pecking out letters on the laptop – it’s a mixture of parental pride, a wannabe writer’s hurrah, and creative envy; with no restrictions on grammar, logic and plot, imagination has a merry romp in both their minds and streaks through their narratives. Ah – there’s a lesson there for wanting the editor in your head dead.

The pride overrides all the other emotions, of course (there could be a kiasu Mom in me, after all). It’s not that the writing’s particularly good – it’s the fact that they are writing, weaving tales from figments of imagination and snatches of real life. It’s the fact that they are putting pen to paper and downloading the world and scenarios that they see in their heads to black and white type. It’s the fact that the boys are incorporating new words and expressions into their writing and are reading more avidly than before. It’s the fact that they can get just as excited buying notebooks as they are Playstation games.

And it’s the fact that the older one says he enjoys the writing process (oh, heaven!).

And so I tell both, but in particular my eldest, that no matter what happens, no matter what goes on in life, no matter who is around and who dies, no matter what people around say, that they must keep writing. And reading. And writing more.

They will, I hope, appreciate the message once they are older. For now, my job is to encourage and enable, and then to get out of the way (down, you Editor, down!).

And while my own writing ambitions are far from dead, if I do die without a finished manuscript, at least I would die knowing someone in the family can take up the craft, pick up the pen, form lyric and sense from scraps of scribblings, and produce, well, who knows – textual magic.

Filed under: Personal Note, Playing Favourites, Writing

Paper Binge

I succumbed to Moleskine and spent RM60 plus on the Moleskine Soft Cover Plain Notebook (large). Moleskine has The Star to thank for my upgrade from their cahiers (I’m on my second set) to this notebook. The Star on Sunday 18th very conveniently offered a 25% discount voucher for all moleskines at Kinokuniya, so……how could I resist? I was also influenced by Daniel Price’s cute handwritten book on journalling – and the sketches he includes in his make me feel like drawing again, hence the plain paper version.

Mr Price also offers one piece of good advice – fill up your journal with life affirming stuff, he says, good things that you see about the world and the people around you, and relegate sufferings (“exorcises”, heh!) to lesser notebooks. Hmmm…. that could be why only two pages of my new notebook is filled.

Kidding.

Really.

On a serious note (oh, I was already, wasn’t I?), the notebook has such beautiful, smooth, blank paper that I was loathe to mar it with my imperfect writing. The second page was much easier to fill. And I do love the soft, pliant cover, and the elastic keeps everything together beautifully.

It’s well worth the RM60, but because of its nature, I think twice about what I stuff between its covers, which can be a good thing or a bad thing.

The moleskine is not the only notebook/journal I have recently purchased. Because writing has become more important to me in the past year, I also purchased Doreene Clement’s 5-year Journal; it’d be pretty cool to be able to a “Today in History” comparison, albeit within a five year perspective, and depending on whether I will still be alive a year, or two, or five years from now.

With death in mind, I also bought a journal specifically to be passed on to the children after I’d passed on. A Mother’s Legacy is – heavy on the pre-packaging (as only American commercialism can be), but I rather like the questions it poses. The most difficult bit is to write out the answers, of course.

Despite the three beautiful books to fill, I am still writing on bits and pieces of paper, stuffed here and there in various hiding nooks and crannies. My cahiers are still repositories of passages and snatches of narratives, along with observations. And then there is this blog - the public face for my textual jaunts.

Is this all overkill?

It could be. 

But I recently came back from an international archivist congress, and the point that was driven time and time again during the course of the congress, is that records do matter and observations can tell a story that could be of interest to someone, somewhere, years down the road.

If my words can help my kids - even if it’s just one of them – cope with the world better, that’s good enough for me.

Filed under: Personal Note, Writing , moleskine, notebook, Writing

Tunku Halim’s Creative Writing Course

I managed to steal time over last weekend to attend Tunku Halim’s Creative Writing Course at MPH 1-Utama. An alumni of Sharon Bakar’s lengthier 6-week writing course, I attended Tunku Halim’s to get reacquainted with the creative writing process and to find out first-hand from a pulished fiction author, what the writing process is like.

Tunku was slimmer than I expected, and friendlier. I didn’t get to stay until the end of the class but still found the experience worthwhile. The class was interactive with the author making us write after each section of explanation (setting, characters, etc). Characters was a particularly useful introduction to creating your own characters, and I do believe that I have a glimmer of an interesting “hero” to grace the book that I shall write one day in the future (maybe when the yuppie side of me is ready to retire). He also showcased writing samples from local writers like Karim Raslan and Dina Zaman, an excellent move.

The participants ranged from 14-year old students to more “mature” writing hopefuls, including a legal professional who would be writing up his family history. It was a good mix of people, and the writing that was read out was equally diverse and interesting.

You do not actually hope to learn all there is about writing through a one-day workshop (at least, I hope none of the attendees were expecting that). I wanted to touch base with the writing muse and coax her out of her sulk if I could. She smiled a bit, I think, but is not yet ready to come out of hiding. Which is fine, because I wouldn’t know where to fit her, n the midst of the work-family-MBA juggle. It’s good to know she’s still around, though.

I got a signed copy of Tunku’s 44, Cemetery Road, for my son, who loves horror stories. I’ve read the first story and appreciate the sparing writing style (the ending was a bit too predictable perhaps for someone who grew up on a diet of Stephen King). It’s also refreshing to have a horror story rooted in your own traditions an superstitions.

Tunku will probably have sparked many a hopeful fiction writer’s fire which can only be good for the country’s writing scene. MPH should host more of these brief writing workshops – maybe a series that focuses on specific aspects of writing like dialogue, beginnings, endings, plotting, etc.

Filed under: Writing