I'm not sure what you think of me, or how you imagine I write what appears on this blog. It would be nice to say I sit down at a neat, uncluttered desk with an aesthetic spray of eucalyptus at one side and a classy mug of tea on the other, my hair in a perfect messy bun and the glow of inspiration on my forehead. And that I was born with a pencil in my hand, and have five publishing contracts to my name to date. Though that's not the case, my relationship with writing--both past and present--is still what lies behind the posts you see, behind my ambitions, behind my writing bump and rejection letters and discarded plot drafts and character banks. So let me tell you a bit about writing and me. Writing is something that only really happens after reading. I was dutifully copying ABCs when I was four, but it wasn’t till I was well into my first pair of glasses that I really started writing. Writing, in this case, meant creating something—something that wasn’t about Peter and Jane or My Favorite Subject—something original: a story. I only read at six, but I made up for lost time and earned my first pair of glasses at eight. My parents had always been readers. Dad had accumulated theology books at cheap second-hand sales since he was a budget-wary student, and even as a budget-wary pastor with four kids. Mom made us memorize “Glory Be to God for Dappled Things”, and unconsciously fed us equal amounts of oatmeal and Charlotte Mason’s views on education at the breakfast table. My siblings and I grew up with their legacy of a house full of books (friends called it the Chong’s Library, and we even kept logbooks to record the books they borrowed), all of which we rapidly devoured—except Mom’s cookbooks and Dad’s theology, which was a pity; we might have become better cooks and theologians if we had. Calvert, the curriculum we originally started homeschooling with, had a good reading program. The only problem was we always lacked the self-control to stop at each day’s appointed quota, and from the first few days onward were doomed to rereading. Anyone who has read Shiloh or Johnny Tremain should be able to sympathize. New books—getting a big, gloriously heavy box filled with crinkling clean brown paper and brand new worlds shining in smooth pages—made up for that. But boxes didn’t come every month. An annual box was already considered riches, and we usually finished all the interesting new books within two months, leaving the duller ones to mope us through the remaining ten months. I think that’s one reason why I started writing. Reading was so important a part of life that when the books ran out, you made your own. At any rate, books themselves were so familiar that trying to write them (a euphemism for “scribbling”) came as a matter of course. I started learning to express myself when my mother got me to narrate diary entries, which she wrote and I illustrated. Later, when I was able to write in a fairly straight line (without having to use a ruler, which cut off the tails of my Y’s and G’s), I wrote my own. That was the zero-to-one beginning of my scribbling. My first story was probably Fairy Fables, a collection of tales lavishly decorated with colour pencil illustrations, of an idyllic fairy community that dressed in flower petals and lived in water lilies. I infamously attempted to read one story to my family over the dinner table. It was about a fairy who “got so jealous that her wings dropped off. This shows the other fairies that she is jealous and must not be a fairy anymore. Because if she gets jealous, she won’t be happy there”. To my dismay, the story was completely forgotten in their hilarity when they discovered I had spelled “jealous” “jelouse” consistently throughout. Fortunately, I wasn’t mortified enough to stop scribbling. Unfortunately, I wasn’t mortified enough to stop misspelling either—which continued to haunt my early scribbling career in the comically deformed ghosts of words. I went through several stages in my scribbling, from mostly drawings with minimal words to an equal proportion of both, and eventually to all words with no drawings. The first stage saw melodramatic medieval adventures—detailed, labor-intensive drawings with text in speech bubbles—featuring fantastic humanoid animals that only I could recognize as dogs and cats. I couldn’t draw humans, and so of necessity drew animals. My Chinese tuition teacher once mistook one of my dogs for a giraffe, to my unutterable outrage. But then to be fair my dogs and cats were a separate species in their own right. They lived in a hopelessly romantic King-Arthur-like world where the males carried jeweled swords and fought duels, and the females swept about in luxurious ball gowns or the classic rustic-page-boy disguise, and someone was always climbing out of turret windows to escape. Or on horseback. Like Kenneth Graham in Wind in the Willows, I airily put my dogs and cats on horses without feeling at all disturbed. The second stage was the transition from dogs and cats with elongated necks to “real books”. I produced two masterpieces of this sort-- thus defined because they were written in notebooks and not on loose sheets of paper. They were flat Exercise Books with brown paper covers rubbed furry, their 12 mm squares meant for Chinese characters. Evidently my interest in languages was sadly skewed. One of these rare Exercise Book masterpieces vanished forever, having been lent to a young friend who lost it, to the equally young author’s dismay. It had the grand and enigmatic title of The Battle of the 4 C’s and the 4 U.B. C’s. Translated into English, it was shorthand for The Battle of the 4 Cats and the 4 Unbeatable Cats. By this brilliant move, I saved on exactly twelve letters. Sometimes I'm not quite sure why I think I'm normal. The other Exercise Book masterpiece, which survived, was an epic novel of anthropomorphic bears in the familiar medieval setting. I look on The Count of Evergreen Castle as a milestone in my scribbling. Not only was it a striking example of how the books one reads influences how one writes, it was also one of the funniest books I ever managed to write. Unintentional humour has the zest of intended dignity which makes it hard to beat. The names for my bear protagonists came from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, the labels on St. Dalfour jam bottles (which indicated my height was eye level with the jam on the breakfast table) and random words I liked the sound of, from books. As result, I had a Bassanio and an Aliena (thank you Shakespeare) alongside a Rhapsodie (origins: French jam label) and a Macabre (have no idea.) There were also many choice words and phrases: “visbelely” (“visibly”) and “a delicous brekfast of rost pegion”, for example. They were all the funnier for the contrast to innocuous phrases on the same page, like “By the light of the fire’s dying embers everything was peaceful”, and “The sky was pink, light baby blue, a bit purple, and creeping away bit by bit, very dark blue. (Insertion:) It made the snow shine in different colers”. Well, more innocuous, perhaps. In Academia, English writing was never burdensome. It was always stress-free—except when spelling came into the picture. I happily went through Calvert, which brought me from My Favorite Subject compositions to book reviews; and after finishing Calvert went on to Dave Marks’ Writing Strands curriculum—which proved to be just as stress-free and pleasant. Perhaps that helped me to see writing as something enjoyable enough to be a hobby. Meanwhile, on my own, I continued scribbling. I wrote a five-book series called Alley Cats on the Prowl, collaborating with a friend who illustrated. I accumulated more and more notebooks. Even my grandma bought me notebooks as presents, to “write my magnum opuses in.” I started a great many stories—I had too many ideas!—and finished few. For example, the scope of my self-written library would range from poetry to an unfinished play, an unfinished musical, and an unfinished novel titled Friends and Fleas. Queen of Half Bakes might be a title I could claim undisputed. There was a period I went headfirst into the amateur crime fiction spree after reading Agatha Christie; still one of my favourite authors to relax with. During my finals I would comb the libraries for new Christies I hadn't read (something which got increasingly harder), and comfort myself with a good dose of vicarious suspense, whenever reality's suspense got too much for me. I read more and wrote more. Like real people, the authors I met and spent much time with shaped me. Shakespeare and Rosemary Sutcliffe showed me how beautiful words could be; Charles Dickens, Gerald Durrell and P. G. Wodehouse showed me how hard they could make you laugh. Dickens in particular became my best friend. My dad had lugged home an almost-complete collection of Dickens novels going cheap at a sale. I didn't think much of the front covers or the illustrations, then, (sorry, Phiz) but in a few years I was everlasting grateful for them. I don’t think I’ve read as much, or as often, of any other author, and to this day I have a soft spot for Victorian literature for the same reason. I've since moved on to exploring other favourite authors, but I still go on cyclical rereadings of Dickens. It's therapeutic, like curling up on a favourite old sofa. Probably due to Dickens' influence, I started novel-writing on a big scale. 2008 and 2009 saw two vastly long novels: an 87-chapter Dumas-inspired novel about a declining French family and a 97-chapter Gaskell-inspired novel set in England. I wish I had that tenacity now, though I also hope I write better than I did then. Looking back at scribbled notes on my schedule from that time, I realize I must have acquired some discipline, at least, in the process of pegging towards an end, unlike the previous heyday of half-bakes: “Tuesday—check up research on typhoid fever X eurgh pneumonia will do” or “Writing!! past carroty-stubbled youth & morning @ inn”. These diamond-anniversary novels, as my sister called them (she drew diamonds on the pages marking the eightieth chapters) probably were milestones in their own way. Miletomes, rather—of discipline in writing. Looking back, I have to acknowledge something. If I were an artist I might do a self portrait of myself, composed entirely of various books: Portrait of the Writer as a Young Sponge or something like that. Originality is one thing in itself, but context is inevitable, and often instrumental. Just like--after my own experience--why I think an aspiring writer should study literature (though I received some advice not to, if I wanted to be a writer) You need to know your precedents, your context within the field and within your society, even if you want to do something entirely different. And at any rate 'different' is relative, and implies a need to first understand what you're being different from. Besides shaping me into who I am, books have been, and still are, vastly important in influencing and producing my writing. A journalist once said that a writer cannot put anything out without first putting something in—whether life as we know it in our own world, or the colourful and diverse worlds in books. We need books, whether as readers, writers, or both. So I look forward to reading more books, and writing more; to finding more bosom-friend (to borrow a L. M. Montgomery Anne phrase!) authors—and of course, to marking many more milestones. |
the process of appreciating life
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