So You Think You Can Write?

With shows like American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance? becoming such big cultural phenomena, it only makes sense to adapt their formats to other art forms that could use similar constructive ... criticism.

Sharmilla Ganesan in Starmag today writes about the So You Can Think You Can Write? event organised by The British Council.  Ten stories were chosen, my own among them, and performed by members of Instant Cafe Theatre at the PJ Live Arts Centre.

It was an excellent idea - I found it fascinating to hear how an actress (in this case Joanne Bessey) read my work, and the comments afterward from the panel of judges (author Ardashir Vakil, playwright Ben Payne,   British Council Malaysia education and programmes director Peter Clack, and ZI Publications publisher Ezra Mohd Zaid) were encouraging. So ... the setting needs work but I had "great control" and there was pleasing symmetry. I was happy with that, and know what to work on.

(I did record my story for those of you who asked me to ... but apologise for the poor quality.)


We didn't know which story had been written by whom, and we voted for the one we liked best.  :

Writes Sharmilla :

What was impressive about the stories presented was the sheer diversity of themes and ideas – and yet, they retained a uniquely Malaysian identity.

Some revolved around simple, everyday experiences that told a much deeper story. For example, It’s Alright, Auntie explored, through a child’s eyes, his parents’ hollow marriage, while Martha Falling is filled with vivid imagery centred on a woman dealing with the loss of her unborn child.

Others looked at the greyer areas of life, such as Intermission, which speaks honestly about a woman’s broken marriage and her subsequent attraction to a much younger man. There were others that took on darker, even spooky, undertones, such as A String of Pearls and A Walk in the Dark.

Ezra found this very encouraging. “What’s amazing is how these writers presented such a huge variety of stories and viewpoints. Each reading had something different from the one before!” he said.

Datuk Dr M. Shanmughalingam won for most popular story for his Rani Taxis Away :

... a simple but touching tale of an Indian girl in post-Independence Malaysia who finds her own freedom in small ways.

and will receive a Professional Development Planning Programme mentored by Spread the Word which will help him devise a route forward in creative writing. I'm very pleased for Shan and I hope that this award encourages him to - finally - get a book out.

It was unfortunate that the timing went awry and most of the audience had drifted away before the end, but I hope that we do have more events of this kind.  Many thanks to the British Council and to Instant Cafe for putting this together.

What We Did in Our Second Workshop

The second week of the British Council's City of Stories workshops was lead by author Ardashir Vakil, whose first novel Beach Boy won a Betty Trask Award in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Whitbread (now Costa).  His second novel One Day was shortlisted for the Encore Award. (Sadly, neither novel was available in the local bookshops.) Ardu teaches creative writing at Goldsmith's College, London.

We were worked pretty hard throughout, with plenty more tasks and readings to keep us busy in between.

We did more exercises to develop character : we took a character from our fiction and described them ravenous with hunger for a particualr food, and then wrote about the last time they had eaten it; we placed our character in a room and described it ,and then wrote about a place where they would like to be; we described their favourite object. We wrote about who we were (Me? A brit dispalced ... a neither here nor there person ... too big, too loud too messy.)

We put stories under the microscope to see how they worked : The Kiss by Chekhov, in which a man's life is changed by a single kiss a mistake in the darkness and Jumpha Lahiri's Sexy (from The Interpreter of Maladies).  We saw how economically character can be brought to life in one or two telling details, and at how so much meaning can be carried in just a few words. ("Less is More" was one of the mantras of the workshops.)

And we looked at a much more complex and skillfully handled story, Five Points by Alice Munro, we looked at shifts of time and how transitions were made. (And now I realise what a bad reader of Munro's work I have been.  You can't hurry them, need to read and reread, and tease them out.)

We spent all day Saturday workshopping pieces of our own writing. It was done kindly and everyone I think took something very useful away from from the experience.

And one of the most fun things we did on Sunday was to go down to Petaling Street, to watch the crowds and record the things our senses took in.

(We sat down to write wherever we could ... and of course a nice beer helped!)

We had to make notes on one particular character who we could use later for our fiction.  (I met this fascinating guy called Jack who was selling bamboo whistles from his motorcyle tricycle.)

We came back to the British Council to share pieces of writing that had inspired us and pieces of writing from our notebooks which we had written over the previous few days.

I'm sad that the whole thing is over - I've come away from the experience feeling re-enthused and validated, and I feel I know how to move forward with the pieces I shared.

My greatest wish is that we could have more workshops of this kind so that more local writers can benefit. My greatest thanks to Ardu and Sarah and to the British Council for providing us with this opportunity - I feel mighty privileged to have been part of it.

Postscript :

Do read Damyanti's excellent take on the two workshops too. She fills in the gaps and says all the things I forgot to say.