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.
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.
posted by starlight at 7:41 PM
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