Do It The Write Way!

Went for the Singapore Writer’s Festival last weekend. Came back with only one regret – that I couldn’t stay long enough. But at least I caught two really good talks. One was by Rattawut Lapcharoensap, the young Thai writer who recent blazed into the literary world with his first book, a collection of short stories called Sightseeing. He did a reading, which I missed thanks to Orchard Road’s Saturday afternoon traffic. Got there just in time to hear novelist Suhayl Saadi author of Psychoraag wind up his reading. Then came the good part – we got to ask questions.

Someone asked Rattawut how true the saying ‘write what you know’ is for him. His nuggets of wisdom;

Write what you know from your emotional center which you know is true.
Write what you know but realise it could be more than your life experience.
And knowing what you have written can be more useful than writing what you know.

Actually he said a whole lot more than that, but these were the bits that stood out. Another lady asked him how he learnt to write and he shared his secret - by reading. A timeless, painfully simple solution that has been tirelessly dished out and largely ignored. Rattawut also cheekily warned that once you start writing a lot, you start plagiarizing yourself. It was a funny thought but oh, so true! Haven’t you ever written a really swell sentence, patted yourself on the back, suddenly feel like you’ve recognised it before, panicked because you think you’ve stolen it from some great literary icon and discover you wrote the same sentence in a previous piece of work? Well, I haven’t. Which means I’m either very creative with words or I just haven’t written enough.

Rattawut wound up his talk with ‘the internal critic is the only one for whom you should write’ and ‘your responsibility is to the paper, not the market’. And for those of you who despair over the lack of interest in your short stories, take heart in the fact that Rattawut himself was inundated with a pile of rejection slips and regretful sighs of “If only you wrote a novel, we could take you on.”

The second talk was Writing Crime: C.S.I. Style. The speakers were Kathryn Fox author of Malicious Intent and FH Batacan author of Smaller and Smaller Circles. The former is a medical doctor and the latter is an award-winning writer.

This talk was definitely intense! Fox talked about her experience as an intern and her first encounter with a dead body. She spoke about examining bodies that were battered with unimaginable atrocities, of her growing desire to create more awareness on the complexities of forensic science and of the advantage of being a woman in this business.

“Women always have the upper hand in crime because men tend to take them lightly. They become more careless in what they say and what they leave behind in the room when they slip out to take a leak because they think we won’t peek. But we’re women, of course we’ll peek!”

On a more serious note, she says that every aspiring crime writer should keep one thing in mind. Always let science be a slave to the plot, not the other way around. According to her, CSI is guilty of breaking this rule, which is why their episodes keep getting more and more bizarre.

Batacan on the other hand says she always tries to earn the ending. ‘I try to end it in a way where there could be absolutely no other way for it to end. I’m not a fan of endings that hang in mid-air.”

Lest anyone think that crime writing is a piece of kuih lapis, here’s something for you to chew on. The most time-consuming, yet absolutely crucial aspect of crime writing is the research. Fox related how she once had a friend over whose son ran out to play in the yard. The two of them were role-playing a scene in the book to see whether it would work and when the kid ran back in right in time to see Fox attacking his mother with a butter knife. Batacan recalled how she asked the new man in her life to sit with his back facing her while she experimented the best way to clobber him to death.

So how long did these it take for these two books to hatch? Hold your breath now. Fox took seven years to write Malicious Intent (she wrote 30 drafts and showed it to five people) and Batacan took six to write Smaller and Smaller Circles (three to write and another three to rewrite). I guess I’d better get started on my psycho-thriller now before I’m forced to add another item to my mid-life crisis list.

Editing

Last week, I told someone whose book I was editing that it needed a whole lot of reworking. She replied, “Ya la, my writer did such a bad job. Since you’re editing it, can you rewrite the bad parts?”

Today someone asked me how much I charge for editing. When I told him, he said, “Wah! So expensive just to check for typos ah?”

Editing is so misunderstood that if it was a person, it would constantly be on Prozac. Why oh why do people think that editing a book is like reading a bedtime story? I have great admiration for editors because I know how difficult it is to be one. Last year I worked as a freelance sub-editor for a women’s magazine. They finally found a full-time sub-editor after three months and I gratefully relinquished my duties. It’s a tough job made even more gruelling when the story is boring beyond belief. And putting myself through that is breaking my golden rule. I try my best not to read anything that bores me. Life is too short.

Editors are terribly underrated and underpaid and almost never acknowledged. They’re the faceless sculptors behind every great story. The people who see a story for what it really is, not what the writer wants it to be. Theirs’ is the invisible hands that guide a writer up the bestseller list.

Stephen King pays tribute to his editor in his book 'On Writing'. In his third foreword he says:

“One rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book: ‘The editor is always right.’ The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor’s advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection. Put another way, to write is human, to edit is divine.”

NaNoWriMo

I did another uncharacteristic thing today. Woke up before noon to attend the NaNoWriMo meeting in MPH 1 Utama. The event only commences at the stroke of midnight on October 31st (looks like I’ll have to end my annual Halloween party a little earlier this year!) but some wonderful soul decided it would be a good idea to form a ‘support system’ even before it began. I was thrilled to bits!

The turnout was better than expected with about 40 plus people turning up. And who should the wonderful soul who initiated this be but Sharon Bakar! By the end of the morning emotions had run from I-think-I’m-going-to-try-this to oh-my-god-who-am-I-kidding and finally to I’m-damned-well-going-to-do-this! It was fantastic to see aspiring writers of diverse ages and backgrounds with one thing in common – a scorching desire to get their inner story on paper. I took part in NaNoWriMo a couple of years back but didn’t make the cut. Well things are going to be different this year!! Fingers crossed.

Have also finally addressed the yearning to do ‘something’ for the Malaysian literature scene. Will be meeting Sharon this Thursday to thrash out my half-baked ideas on how to help local English fiction writers make a mark in the international scene. The Tash Aws and Rani Manickas of the world are great but I don’t want aspiring writers thinking you can only make it if you cross the ocean to sell an exotic Asian story to a Western publisher. Then again, many local writers are also suffering from acute sour-grapes-syndrome, attributing Tash and Rani’s success to location rather than effort. Trust me, I’ve the whining.

So what’s my goal? To clear the misconception that a few published letters-to-the-editor and celebrating your 40th birthday isn’t enough to warrant a book. And also to help aspiring writers understand that while writing is like a fun-filled trip, a certain amount of effort is still necessary to get to the destination.

Dancing The Night Away

Arts and culture are to me what WiFi is to a kampung kid. So I suppose I gave my cultured friend quite a fright when I invited her to watch an Indian classical dance at Sutra Dance Theatre. And on a Friday night too!

My yoga teacher from Yoga2Healthcalled me that Tuesday afternoon asking if I would be interested in watching the show. I delivered my usual non-committal I’ll-think-about-it line. Well, guess what? I did and I decided why not do something different. So there we were at Sutra Dance Theatre on a cool Friday night, after almost getting hopelessly lost in Taman Ttitiwangsa.

Sutra House is absolutely gorgeous! Fell in love with it right away. The soft lights, lush trees, good hot coffee and intoxicating incense made it all quite surreal. That night’s show was the third performance in the Under The Stars 2005 – A Season Of Odissi programme. This time two sisters – Leena and Leesa Mohanty – were going to perform a repertoire called Shyam Shyama – A Journey Divine. Even the name sounded surreal!

I’m pleased to report that my very first taste of the classical world was wonderfully sweet. The dancers were amazing! Swirls of white and brilliant vermillion, painted hands and feet, clinking jewellery and fluid movements – it was breathtaking! Am planning to go for January Low’s interpretation of The Apotheosis - In Search of the Dark Lord next month.

The other highlight of the night was shaking hands with Malaysia’s dance legend himself. Would you believe it was my first time meeting Ramli Ibrahim? My friend couldn’t. When I told her, she just stared at me and said, “What world do you come from?”

Oh and how could I forget the clever pricing strategy! Rather than say ‘Entrance Fee: RM30’, it said ‘Invitation by donation of RM30’. If that’s the case, then I just collected 60 Brownie points since I paid for both tickets!