Like many authors, I started young. Very young, given I was an extremely precocious kid. I was around 8 years old when I declared I was going to be a writer, after devouring an entire collection of Coleridge’s poems. That same afternoon, I wrote my first poem. For comparison, I actually decided two years earlier I was going to be a musician and a year after that (when I discovered classical music) that I was going to be a composer. But that’s besides the point. The point is that for the first two decades of my life I bungled about writing without thinking about the existence of such things as writing books or what I like to know as craft books. In my teenhood, when I sat down to seriously write an actual novel, I did it this way: I reread my favourite novels and made chapter by chapter notes on how each chapter started, how they ended and how I should introduce setting. Midway through my teens I discovered literary studies and that helped me a lot. When I became a literature student I learned about devices and was able to level up my writing game. Sadly, what came next was being made to enrol in law school instead of literature (with a minor in philosophy) like I wanted. But being in that university meant having access to the most excellent main library where I gave myself a literary education as well as a legal education (grudgingly). But I had no idea that there were such things as writing books.
When I first heard about craft books from another writer (on the internets), I scoffed. Why would anyone need to be taught to write? You either “had it” or you didn’t. Such was the arrogance of youth. Hilariously, I see this youthful opinion of mine repeated more than once on the social internets these days in the raging debates about whether craft books are needed or not. So what changed for me? I suppose at some point, I felt I had run into a brick wall. I was in my late twenties when I picked up a couple of John Gardner’s books: On Becoming a Novelist and The Art of Fiction. I read grudgingly and skeptically but I found something else. I did not always agree with Gardner and may have howled in outrage a few times but he gave me something. An assurance deeper than other assurances that this long lonely path I was on as a novelist was not one that I suffered alone. People can utter platitudes that captured this, but here, in practical steps and discussions I found a way out of my personal quagmire. I argued with both books. Passionately. But I found so much of value in them that really spurred me forward to the next step. “Uncle John Gardner” has become a mainstay in my writing classes as an educator simply because I found so much of value in parts of the book. The next book I chose to fight with was Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones. There was a lot of her life experience that did not speak to me. But when she spoke about writing, when she spoke about the process and about bringing that process out in writing students, that lit a spark. It was a spark that helped me not just as an author but as a creative writing educator. And goodness, Ursula K LeGuin’s Steering the Craft was an eye-opener for so many reasons. Although in truth, LeGuin had been teaching me how to write since I was a teenager devouring her novels and her short fiction.
There are so many other writing books out there. There were also books I fell into as a literature and stylistics student during my MA candidature, trying to find some kind of arcane secret behind the ways in which words and letters were arranged, trying to find the ways in which I could make each sentence sing more and bleed meaning. Those books included Leech and Short’s Style in Fiction, Susan Sniader Lanser’s The Narrative Act, Roger Fowler’s The Language of Literature, Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction. And I might as well include all of those books and articles in the postcolonial canon including Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture and Edward Said’s Orientalism, not to mention Gayatri Spivak’s Can The Subaltern Speak? and Trinh T Minh-ha’s Woman, Native, Other.
Why do I include these texts? Because craft and writing books should not just be about the mechanics of the craft but the ontological reality of being a writer which is so much more fraught for the postcolonial author who is a woman of colour. The books by Gardner, LeGuin, Forster and Goldberg were an early induction into the craft of writing for me but the books and articles by postcolonial scholars grounded me. They told me who I was and what I needed to do with that craft to which I had dedicated myself. They reminded me of my responsibility. And yes, I call it a craft, and myself a craftswoman of words because I no longer have the arrogant belief that you either “have it” or “you don’t”. I’m an educator now and I believe everyone has the potential to bring out that stories within them — they just need the will and commitment to learn. They just need the assurance that they are not alone in the journey. This is what these books gave me.
Curious to read my debut novel Watermyth? Here’s the information on how to purchase the ebook (and how to borrow it from the library) and the print edition.
Published in Petaling, Selangor, Malaysia, 2024