Writing 

Reading this blog post http://www.mrbrown.com/blog/2013/10/special-children-are-born-to-special-people.html about parents of a special child whose dinner was paid for by a random couple at a restaurant here made me pause and think. 

Train of thoughts:

1. It has story potential. Unexpected kindness to marginalised section. 

2. Who are the most marginalised in society? Or the ones who are suffering the most? 

3. Does fiction in general give voice to them? 

I was in a coffeeshop the other day and thinking roughly the same thing. Looking at the drink stall seller, thinking, what is his back story? 

I think, outside my cushy pampered life, I want to explore characters I don't usually encounter. To give them a voice and to stretch my own viewpoints. 

A list: 

1. Abused wives -- I've been strangely drawn to this topic for a long time. There's something terribly odd, yet at the same time frighteningly relatable about suffering wives, although I've never been in a abusive relationship, and never really encountered one in close proximity (unless you count some friends and relatives). 

2. Hen-pecked husbands -- With the rise of the career women, hen-pecked, emasculated men make such great characters. 

3. People with special children 

4. Orphans and neglected children 

5. Singles -- by choice (ma jies, nuns, priests), by circumstance (widows, illness, responsibilities), by random social lottery 

6. Foreigners -- children of ghurkas in Singapore, expats

7. People who suffer beyond comprehension -- chronic illness that science and faith cannot help, death of a child (stillbirth, accident, illness)

8. Abandoned old folk 

 

Writing

Writing the POTMOTSP story was a personal challenge to go beyond a 3000-word story. At the  2000-word juncture, I wanted to give up. At 4000, I whined that it was too grueling. When it did creep up to 6000, I thought my original ending was too cliche. Then I got rid of 1000+ words and re-wrote, thinking that I wanted to try doing an unreliable narrator.

It was a crap ending.

This is like a beast I need to tame. 

Writing  
 
I was so close to reaching my targeted word count for the corporate story yesterday when I decided that it was too staid, sounded too much like a Primary 6 composition piece, and decided to experiment with using an unreliable 1st person narrator.

Arguably I could have planned better and avoided this change, since it was something I was toying with doing after reading 'Japanese Tales'. But somehow it didn't occur to me to do it with this story, now, 3 days before I'm supposed to send it out. Augh.

Reading

Read 'Write Before Writing (1978)' last week, apparently a classic chapter from 'The Essential Don Murray'.

It was part of work, and these were the questions we had to answer:

1. Please select a thought / idea / phrase that interested you in this chapter and share with us why you found it interesting. Does it affirm something you already believe in? Do you disagree? Why?
2. Murray describes four 'pressures' that move writing along. Which of the four is your personal push factor? How does it influence what you write and how you write?

These were my answers. 

1.  The sentence 'The writer who starts to write a solemn report of a meeting may hear a smile and then a laugh in his own words and go on to produce a humorous column' (p34) resonated with me. Writing NOMs can be strangely inspiring (sometimes). I also found the idea of genre exploration interesting -- I recently heard that in order to break the rules of writing, one needs to know the rules of writing. I think there's the same for genres. In order to subvert a genre, you need to understand the features of a genre.
2. Definitely an approaching deadline. I wrote 1 short story in 2 years because of the Law of Delay (such a great phrase!), but ever since I have writing submission deadlines, I find myself setting my alarm at 2 am just to plough through a story. A deadline forces me to focus and to push myself to experiment within a limited time frame.

Completely feeling number 2 now.

Inspirations

Went on Architours for the 1st time. I've been wanting to go for an Architour for years, but for some reason, never registered. It was serendipitous that E was one of the architects involved in the first site, Singapore Life Church. I think I'm intrigued by industrial design and architecture because of the balance between functionality and aesthetics.

Links to writing

Singapore Life Church: The architects had purposely created a narrow corridor that opened up into a large auditorium space with a high ceiling for the main sanctuary, to create a sense of awe and smallness. A middle-eastern-looking architect in the group compared it to the design of old cathedrals, where most of the building is dark, except for the natural light coming in from the steeple or stained glass. In architectural terms, the building serves to compress, before expanding. I wondered how that would translate to writing. Compression --> opening. 

House at Victoria Park: Only 1 thing stood out for me at this house. It was so massive that it had 1 floor for entertainment, and another 2 for the family area.  The entertainment floor looked like a hotel lobby, with a show kitchen, infinity pool and a small gym at the end of the garden, while the family area looked like a 5-room HDB flat had been transplanted there.

Chiltren House: I was fascinated with the attention to detail at this house, which was built by a couple who owns an architecture firm. I'm using off-form concrete walls in the setting of the corporate story because of the walls from this house, as well as a conversation I had with E later on the pros and cons of off-form concrete. The house reminded me how much I used to like hiding in nooks and corners in my house -- the wife purposely created a long low baywindow that guests could tuck themselves in.  

Reading 

Reading has been terribly slow. I only finished the Japanese tales book.

Writing

I've been waking up at 2 plus each morning to attempt to work on the corporate story. I'm at 4500 words, out of 8000. It's a personal challenge to see if I can sustain a long short story, especially the ending portion, which I always have trouble with. This time, I attempted to write the ending just after I wrote the introduction.

I attended a writing session yesterday by a colleague. For one of the activities, we were told to pair up and face each other. 1 person had to keep asking 'who are you?' in as neutral a tone as possible while the other person rambled on. The point of the activity was to bring out the personal voice of the writer, but I found it too touchy-feely. I generally dislike these kind of bare-your-soul, tell-me-about-your-childhood kind of sessions. I'm sure there are other less psychoanalytic ways to explore one's voice as a writer. Over Summer, there was a session where we listened to a recording of Proust and shared what we thought about it. That was okay. Then there was another session where we closed our eyes and imagined our childhood home. That did not work for me because I've lived in the same house since I was 2 or so, moving out when I was 8 and moving back in when I was about 17.

Submissions   

I missed 2 deadlines this week, but I've been concentrating on that corporate story anyway, so I guess I can go a bit easy on myself this time.