Imagination is a Place

No, no, no, no, no, no. You don’t run short of imagination. You can get jaded, myopic and maybe sluggish. But imagination is...  it’s more a place actually, or a lab. Stories are infinite. You help yourself to as much as you want. You. Your kid. The human mud of your marriage. It’s all material. For that to run dry — it’s unthinkable. It would be like a fish worrying about water when it’s in the sea. The world has infinite plots for me.

Great quote from Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell who is interviewed by Patricia Nichol on The Times website and talks about why he enjoys anonymity. His latest work is a historical novel set in feudal Japan.

Sell Your Soul to the Devil, Will Travel

This map from Lapham's Quarterly [via] of how some of the world's best known stories (including the Faust and Oedipus legends) have travelled over the centuries is absolutely fascinating.  Would we nowadays call writers plagiarists if they borrowed a plot?  This certainly doesn't seem to have worried authors like Thomas Mann and William Shakespeare.

The Stories Behind the Stories

Dr. Seuss’ editor, bet him that he couldn’t write a book using 50 words or less. The Cat in the Hat was pretty simple, after all, and it used 225 words. Not one to back down from a challenge, Mr. Geisel started writing and came up with Green Eggs and Ham – which uses exactly 50 words. The 50 words, by the way, are: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.

Stacy Conradt celebrates what would have been Dr. Seuss’s 105th birthday by telling the fascinating stories behind 10 of his most famous books. Green Eggs and Ham - though not a halal choice for some of you - is my favourite of the ones I've read.

Where Ideas Come From

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if...?

(What if you woke up with wings? What if your sister turned into a mouse? What if you all found out that your teacher was planning to eat one of you at the end of term - but you didn't know who?)

Another important question is, If only...

(If only real life was like it is in Hollywood musicals. If only I could shrink myself small as a button. If only a ghost would do my homework.)

And then there are the others: I wonder... ('I wonder what she does when she's alone...') and If This Goes On... ('If this goes on telephones are going to start talking to each other, and cut out the middleman...') and Wouldn't it be interesting if... ('Wouldn't it be interesting if the world used to be ruled by cats?')...

Those questions, and others like them, and the questions they, in their turn, pose ('Well, if cats used to rule the world, why don't they any more? And how do they feel about that?') are one of the places ideas come from.

Perhaps the most annoying question that authors get asked by those who would like to write themselves is - Where do you get your ideas?, and Neil Gaiman tackles it just beautifully on his blog.

The Story Behind the Story

Robert Raymer is sharing how each of his short stories in Lovers and Strangers revisited came to be written. So far he's written about On Fridays and The Future Barrister.

This is essential reading for anyone who wants to know where story ideas come from, and there are few writers more generous in sharing their process than Robert.

As a sneaked in aside for short fiction lovers, can I point you in the direction of the Guardian website where there is some excellent new Summer fiction by Chris Ware, William Boyd, Alice Sebold, Julian Barnes, and Tessa Hadley?

Robert Shares His Secrets

It was lovely to see author Robert Raymer on Saturday for MPH's Breakfast Club at the branch in Bangsar Village 2. These days he's so far away in Sarawak (teaching creative writing at UNIMAS), so it was nice that the launch of his revised collection of short stories Lovers and Strangers Revisited gave us the opportunity to meet up.

Remember how we talked about authors going back on earlier work to turn it into something much better? Well, our Robert is one such, and this is the third incarnation of the book. (In the picture, he's holding all three versions. The latest is published by MPH, and the previous edition by Silverfish.) His reason for rewriting is that when he started off, he was satisfied with writing for a local audience, but now want to take them to a higher standard and aim for an international readership.*

Robert is always very generous in sharing what he knows about writing, and in this session, he talked about how :

Ideas come from every place.

His short story Neighbours, now included on the SPM syllabus was based on a real-life incident. His neighbour had attempted suicide, and Robert drove him to hospital. (I don't think the guy made it.) When Robert got back, he found the neighbours gathered outside his neighbour's gate gossiping about him. Out came the note book, and the idea for the story was born. Another story came out of the strong sense of deja vu he felt when he visited KL's Station Hotel.

Then he talked about how important it is he finds the beginning of his stories and chooses the right point of view to tell the story from :

Each point of view is a different story entirely.

he says, and adds that if a story is going to go wrong (as it does for many of the students he teaches) it usually goes wrong on the first page.

In his stories he often finds himself inside the skin of a Malaysian character and in fact he says he once felt very flattered when a judge in a competition organised by the New Straits Times disqualified his entry believing it plagiarised, because how could a Mat Salleh write so convincingly about a Malay character?

Robert also talked about the importance of maintaining momentum :

Even if it's crap writing, stick with it. As parents we know that crap can be cleaned up. It's part of the editing process. When you've cleaned up that crap you find there's a cute little butt in there!

He reckons too that some of the stories that give you the biggest grief can be your best stories.

He urged his audience to take writing off the backburner of life and said write for yourself first before you do other things in the day (like answering email or checking your blog!).

Robert's hard work and commitment is clearly paying off, his novel The Lonely Affair of Jonathan Brady won 4th place in the 2008 National Writers Association Novel Contest (USA), there is going to be a play based on Lovers and Strangers, and he has a book about 20 years living in Malaysia coming out soon.

Those of you in Penang who would like to catch Robert can find him at Little Penang Street Market on August 31st, selling books on one of the stalls and giving a reading at 11am.

*Aiyoh! This got misinterpreted (thanks to my own clumsy writing) in the comments and Robert steps in to clarify how and why he rewrote his work.

Turning Up the Air Con

Went with Animah and Sham to see Air Con, Shanon Shah's first full length play at KLPAC at the weekend. Although I don't usually write about theatre on this blog, this play is very special to me because I feel part of the FIRSTWoRKS family, and because I have seen parts of the play at different stages of development at performed readings.

In the programme notes Shanon says that one of the starting points for the play was the news that a mak nyah (transvestite) had been found brutally murdered and dumped in a monsoon drain, and nobody came to claim the body:

... no family, no friends, no anybody. nobody at all seemed to care that a mak nyah had been killed. Simply because of what she was - abnormal, a misfit, an aberration.

This story connected with Shanon's memories of his school life in Kedah, and a memorable incident of a visit from a police officer who told the boys at assembly that they were absolutely forbidden to visit the sex workers who hung out at the railway station :

Apparently an adventurous hostel border had been clobbered with the stiletto of one of the mak nyah sex workers because he had refused to remunerate her for services rendered.

After a Mak Nyah sex worker is found beaten to death near the railway station in the play, the administration of a nearby boys boarding school decide to take action - a sort of reeducation camp is planned for all the boys who are a bit ... effeminate, in order to toughen them up so they don't, presumably, become mak nyahs themselves.

(This kind of round of 'em up and make long speeches about morality at 'em for hours and hours to make sure they behave exactly as we want 'em is a fairly common here. Even judges get subjected to them. Blaming victims is pretty common too.)

Having taught for three and a half years in a boys boarding school very like the one depicted in the play, I felt that Shanon's depiction of the school and teachers was very good indeed - these were convincing characters, coming to terms with their own sexuality, getting bullied, coping with personal problems, making and falling out of friendships and love. And this was a completely believable scenario.

Amerul Affendi and Zahril Adzim played senior prefects Chep and Burn, and Ryan Lee Baskaran and Nick Davis as Asif and William, the younger boys who become prefects were very good indeed. But there wasn't a single weak point in the casting.

The murdered sex worker, played by Dara Othman has no identity when the play opens, but gradually assumes a voice, and then name (Aiswarya Roberts - for a couple of very famous actresses), and then a form, becoming in the end a fully-fleshed and endearing character.

The Air Con of the title, incidentally, is a play on the word airconditioning (some units of which are being fixed in the prefects room by local contractor, Ah Kok, a character who adds humour and counterpoint to the play) and also a certain sexual practice which will probably now lead to a local shortage of Hacks.

"Did you enjoy the play?" someone asked me afterwards. Enjoy, I'm not sure is the right word. sure parts of it were very funny and I laughed along with the rest of the audience. But I also came away feeling quite traumatised. It is a powerful play and my emotions took a bit of a battering.

Sadly the run was all too short, but I do hope it gets staged again. and now that Shanon has found his feet as a playwright, he continues to take a little time out from being a famous pop star.

Congrats to all the FIRSTWoRKS crew, especially Jo, Suzie and Zalfian.

(More about the play on The Star website.)

The Kunal Basu Interview Part 2: The Japanese Wife and Other Stories

(The Kunal Basu interview continued from yesterday.)

Although Basu realises that it is impossible, as an author, to strategise for film, one of his stories is finally making the leap to the big screen. He describes as “fortuitous” a meeting with Indian film director Aparna Sen in 2006 at an Oxford dinner party. In the course of the conversation Sen said that she would love to do a love story, except that love is so boring, and everything has been written about it.

Half jokingly, Basu told her that he had a love story that was completely different, and related the story of The Japanese Wife, a short story that had been lying in his desk drawer for ten years. It describes the tender relationship between a Bengali schoolteacher and his pen-friend, a Japanese woman. The two never meet, but agree to a marriage. “It is a relationship of great intimacy,” says Basu “but no domesticity.”

As soon as Sen read the story she was determined make the film and asked Basu to write the screenplay. He turned down the offer, feeling that it would find it difficult to revisit the story with his original passion. But he has remained involved with the production and says that he is very happy indeed with what he has seen of it so far.

“It’s not Indian cinema dubbed for a diaspora audience abroad, but world cinema like Pedro Almodóvar’s films and Il Postino, which people all over the world can relate to.” The film is scheduled for general release in October. Since it seemed strange to make a film from an unpublished short story, it was clearly the right time to bring out a whole collection.

Basu has always loved writing short fiction but says that it was always an uphill struggle to persuade his publishers that they were commercially viable. He says that he would like to debunk the myth that short stories don’t sell once and for all.

“All publishers need to do is believe in their short story collections. If you start out saying I don’t believe this book will sell, then it won’t. But if you believe in it passionately, then you can convey that passion to readers.” It is a viewpoint he’s in a good position to defend with this first collection currently riding close to the top of the bestseller list in India.

Basu jokes that his stories arise from “a sort of chemical imbalance in the brain. First, he must get himself into the right state of mind, which he describes as a relaxed state of free floatation.

Writers can’t get too anxious about getting their stories down to the page: “It’s like when you’re young trying to find a girlfriend. If you’re too purposive about finding a girlfriend you’ll never meet her. But if you’re totally loose in your life, if you’re totally relaxed, then you’ll bump into her.”

Stories might be sparked by the smallest of things, a chance encounter, snatches of conversation, a small newspaper article. If he’s struck with the starting point of stories he pushes them further asking “What would happen if?”, and exploring the possibilities.

He says he writes only those that keep him awake at night. “Take for example Grateful Ganga, the second story in The Japanese Wife. I was in India and I was reading a newspaper, cup of tea in my hand, and there’s this little story about Jerry Garcia. Apparently he had two wives and one of the wives came to India with a cask of ashes to immerse them in the Ganges. The story was that when she went back, the other wife said ‘How dare you disappear with my husband’s ashes?’ and they had this fight over them.

“I wasn’t interested in that, but in the whole image of this western woman on a plane with a cask of ashes, coming to India for the first time. All she wants to do is go to the Ganges, immerse the damn thing, and go back. Except that she gets waylaid by circumstances. On the plane she meets this middle-aged pot-bellied Punjabi business man who loves the music of Kishore. So I said, that’s interesting. What if this were to happen?, What if that were to happen? He’s going to be married and that’s going to create a few problems, how does he deal with that? How’s his wife going to react? On the one hand you’ve got great Indian hospitality for a guest. Except the wife suspects that this guest is having an affair with her husband. So how would that go? It’s important for me to keep day dreaming or float. Hopefully I would have seen something that later I would have on would become a story.”

Basu continues to find inspiration in the unlikeliest of places. He describes how, on a recent trip to Beijing, once again wearing the hat of academic, he was invited to a banquet by one of his former students, now the director of a school for public health, attached to one of the biggest schools for Chinese medicine. He almost declined the invitation fearing that the evening would be boring, but civility won out. After the meal, his student told him that there was a museum of traditional Chinese medicine upstairs and asked whether he would be interested in seeing it. He was. As he walked around the two floors of exhibits that the got the idea for his next novel, about a young Portuguese doctor seeking a cure for syphilis.

He’s interested in particular with the philosophical underpinnings of the contrasting eastern and western attitudes to health. It’s this scholarly thoroughness and a willingness to deal with deeper intellectual issues that marks out Basu’s novels from most other historical fiction, and thus it comes as something as a surprise that he hasn’t yet enjoyed the commercial success his work deserves, or been nominated yet for literary prizes. But he’s quite sanguine about that.

“You cannot simple lead an authors life thinking when will the bells ring for me and when am I going to win an award?”

“We are in a domain where there are no defined measures of success and the marketing hype of books often times surpasses real appreciation. We’ve commoditized everything in life, you know, including the arts.

“ I’m much more of a traditionalist in that regard, and if my books stay on bookshelves twenty-five years after I’ve died and different people read them, then I will think that I have succeeded.”

From Fragment to Novel

I am so excited to hear about Michael Ondaatje's new novel since it's been quite a while since the moving and beautiful Anil's Ghost.

In an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald he talks about how writing a novel is a process of evolution for him. He reveals that he began his new novel, Divisadero with a fragment of story someone told him in passing:

It was something about a horse that got loose in a barn and knocked down its owner. He wrote it down: a stormy night, an animal losing its mind, the girl in a heap on the floor. Gradually, the beginnings of a novel collected around those two pages; one girl turned into two, followed by a young man.

"It was a keyhole that allowed me to discover the rest of the book," he says now. "It was the opening." A landscape rose up to meet the horses, humming with insects and shimmering with grasses and, over five years' writing, the three people in the barn gradually revealed themselves to him. "I wasn't quite sure what any of them was like; they were all mysteries to me," he says. He didn't yet know that they had grown up together, that one limped, that one became a gambler.

"Some writers know exactly what their books are about when they begin," he says. "That seems incredibly boring to me. I am much more interested in how the writer evolves in the writing, so that the novel evolves as well." It was the same, he says, when he wrote his most famous novel, The English Patient. "I didn't know who the patient was: he was just the patient. He was a mystery to me. But then, as a book progresses, there is a kind of archaeology the writer performs on the characters; you work backwards.

So if you need a starting point for a story carry a notebook around with you and jot down those interesting snippets that you overhear, the stories that people tell you. You might just find the starting point you're looking for.

Where Do Little Stories Come From, Mummy?

Where do stories come from? Could it be possible that they were there all along and all we had to do was open our eyes and ears to them? In Paula Isabel Allende writes:

"... it is possible that stories are creatures with their own lives and that they exist in the shadows of some mysterious dimesnsion; in that case it will be either a question of opening so they may enter, sink into me, and grow until they are ready to emerge transfored into language."

Short story writer James Salter, interviewed by salon.com says:

Short stories, sometimes you tear them out of the beak of life, so to speak. And sometimes they simply are lying there on the ground to pick up. You may have a certain idea for a story you have to tell, but the story didn't exist before because it wasn't lived by somebody else -- you constructed it yourself. Some stories come completely assembled and ready to go. Otherwise it may be like one of those nightmare Christmas toys where they say "everything is included but the battery and assembly required." You may spend hours and hours feverishly trying to make something of it.

And he talks about one magical occasion when he just sat down to write and a complete short story simply poured out onto his page:

There is one such story in this present book that was written in the morning. And that is "Bangkok." I had a start. I had two lines that someone had told me over the telephone -- "Weren't you going to call me back?" "Of course not." I began with those two lines and just knew the rest of it. I knew the people. I was able to write the story.

You don't have to "think up" anything. The stories are there waiting for you.

And if you feel inspired to write this weekend, why not pick up those two lines of Salter's and run with them?

Point of No Return

Beth Yahp was reading from a work in progress at Universiti Malaya this evening. Just a small group, not amounting to a crowd, made it over there. The rain belting down outside didn't help.

Beth talked about how the story Point of No Return came to be written.

Last year, she returned to Malaysia after 20 years away, and saw a country which embraced modernity and westernisation, with huge development projects, and a new rhetoric of openness and anti-corruption with its new Prime Minister. On the surface, there seemed to be widespread hopefulness.

However, reading the newspapers she saw that there was a darker undercurrent. Whole pages of rape reports and high profile murder cases, as if "the media was feeding on a lurid collective psychosis".

While the men involved in these cases (ranging from young boys to grandfathers) were presented as anomolies, she says, the burden of guilt appeared to be onto the female victims: with questions asked about the way a woman dressed, or whether she had been sexually active.

Beth cited two articles which had particularly sparked her imagination. The first was an article which appeared in The Sunday Times: Vice and Virginity by Sulaiman Dufford (Feb 8th 2004) which talked about the pressures of modern life on young people and suggested that because of Malaysia's strong culture of virginity, because hormones were raging more than ever at age 18-19, and because it made economic sense, young people should be encouraged to marry in their late teen years.

The other was a Dear Doctor column which appeared in Berita Harian where a young wifer wrote in to ask for advice on dealing with her husband's premature ejaculation (the "point of no return" of the story's title). The letter was answered in an extremely detailed and open way - surprising in a society where sex is little talked about in public. (But we see these contradictions all the time, don't we? The Gardner & Wife letter I pasted up the other day also illustrates this nicely.)

So Beth's story deals with teenage sex, a topic generally swept under the carpet, frankly and head on. She read a longish extract - beautifully crafted - of the story in progress which she says keeps growing.

A relevant story. A story about issues which people in Malaysia really face. A story which will for sure stir debate.

And that's what great writing is all about.