WRUS
We Rose Up Slowly, The Second Edition,
is available at
Books Actually, all good bookstores and online here (free shipping in Singapore).
I must concede I did not take to the cover at first, and argued with the publisher - whose winning argument was that I was too old to know what would sell to the average young Singaporean.
Now I think the cover is really good and I don't know what I was complaining about.
I think I was too attached to the First Edition cover. Sigh.
Let me know what you think.
"So we lunched at Lau Pa Sat and talked through the surface of our lives. I told her my glorious pretensions and she smiled back with a charming reticence. I asked her what she was doing working for Mr Tan? Surely she could find something better? She said it’s just a job and she was biding her time while readying her heart and soul for the Universe. I told her I could relate to that. We talked about the dreariness of everyday life, how most things were old cabbage and wet socks. I told her I was getting out, moving to London where I could lose myself. I lectured her on the courage to move away from one’s comfort zone. She smiled at me and suggested Lombok rather than London."
Excerpt from A Long Bicycle Ride Into the Sea, a story in We Rose Up Slowly
You can buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore).
A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea is a story from my collection, We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2011 and published in Coast (Math Paper Press, 2011).
A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea:
Rizam Arsad, Energia Fitness, Riverside Point, Singapore 2009
"He remembered when he was a child, maybe about nine years old, massaging his mother’s feet. Pressing his little thumbs into her rough, calloused flesh as hard as he could. Feeling the warmth and softness beneath the dry, crackled skin and trying to smooth out all her tension and worry. When did the quiet comfort in each other’s company disappear? He loved his mother. Very much. It was just that she loved his brother more."
Excerpt from Rashid at The Sail, a story in my book, We Rose Up Slowly
In this story a young man, kicked out of home by his mother, retreats to his brother’s luxury condominium at The Sail to work out what to do with his life.
The story was written in 2014 and 2015 and was inspired by:
Rashid at the Sail:
In some ways this is an anti-Merlion story. The Merlion (that consumer staple of Sing Lit) means nothing to our protagonist whose inspiration is gained from another SingLit icon: a kite, representing the independence and agency of individuals rather than a contrived, 'marketing driven solution'. See Dave Chua's, The Beating & Other Stories, for a story with a Kite in it.
There are also references in this story to:
Next door Neighbour;s kid, Jakarta Selatan 2014
"He remembered when he was a child, maybe about nine years old, massaging his mother’s feet. Pressing his little thumbs into her rough, calloused flesh as hard as he could. Feeling the warmth and softness beneath the dry, crackled skin and trying to smooth out all her tension and worry. When did the quiet comfort in each other’s company disappear? He loved his mother. Very much. It was just that she loved his brother more."
Excerpt from Rashid at The Sail, a story in my book, We Rose Up Slowly
You can buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore).
Sophia at one month having a bath, July 2015
I thought it might be useful to set out the 'ideal' writing process I sought to apply in writing the stories in We Rose Up Slowly. Setting it out this way suggests I took a highly disciplined and organised approach. This is in fact a lie and does not do justice to my messy, chaotic and doubt ridden reality. I don't write in a linear fashion - I have ideas and sentences flying all over the place at various stages of development and quality - so I need an 'ideal' process to aspire to. Even if I never achieve the 'ideal', a little process and structure to my writing process helps.
What's your approach? I'd love to share notes.
My Writing Process
A. Capture
A1. In Notebook by hand:
1) Capture ideas, thoughts, scenes, events, conflicts, characters, observations, outline of stories. Dreams. Snippets. Passing conversations. Lines from movies. Bus trips. Get everything down. Don't judge or self censor.
A2. Digital capture:
2) Dictate thoughts & make notes on iPhone Notepad
3) Have an Ideas text file on iPhone to dump links, news articles, quotes, ideas etc - I tried to use Evernote but it was just to slow in syncing
A3. Filter Captured Notes into a workable form
4) Transcribe/dictate into Scrivener or iPhone notepad the handwritten notes & ideas I want to work on further. Highlight sentences, characters, quotes that stand out from the dross. Think about links, connections, common themes, interesting juxtapositions, contrasts, light and shade. Order & reorder.
B. Build the story
I use Scrivener a lot during this stage to work out what I want to say in a story & how to say it.
B1. First Draft
1) Using the outcome of A: write a quick first draft focussing on mood & tone. Do not worry about plot holes, logical contradictions, spelling, grammar or if sentences are correct. Use placeholders where you know there are gaps. Don't edit, judge or self censor.
DO NOT WORRY IF IT IS HORRIBLE - MOST OF IT WILL BE CRAP AT THIS STAGE (& PROBABLY, FOR A LOT LONGER)
2) Summarise what happens in each scene in the story in one or two lines.
B2. Research
3) Read & research key factual aspects of the story e.g. profession, setting, events, type of person, history etc
4) Put links, quotes, articles etc in Scrivener Research section
B3: Discover the Story
5) Does the plot make sense? What's the key conflict & how is this addressed & resolved in the story? Is another scene, event or character missing? Who wants/yearns for what? How are they challenged? What happens in the end? Look for connections & common concerns & themes. Don't worry if you don't have complete answers to these 'story' questions: Use placeholders where questions remain open.
6) Rearrange, build & develop scenes to make a story, conflicts & character in Scrivener
7) Rewrite, revise, edit - like waves over sand & onto rock - keep going, read, revise and reread the text again
8) Use Plaintext with Scrivener to facilitate writing, revising & editing on mobile & iPad
B4. Discover the Characters
9) Imagine what its like to be each of your main characters. Write their POV.
10) Ask what are their desires/wants/yearning? How do they change & why do they change over the course of the story? Is their narrative momentum? Does the writing make you want to find out what happens next?
11) Keep asking questions about the characters, yearnings & challenges, the conflict, the structure, the dialogue, what works, whats irrelevant, who grows & why, epiphany etc etc
12) Is POV consistent?
13) Do physically logistics make sense within the rules of the story?
14) Is there too much or too little of any of the characters?
B5. Beginning & Ending
15) Does the story start with a compelling scene which cuts to the core of the story?
16) How are key conflicts resolved at the end? Where do the characters end up? Have they changed? What questions are left open at the ending?
17) What questions does the text raise? How are these answered, or not answered, in the text?
18) Is their unity of theme, effect & purpose in the writing?
C. Let the story sit for a week or more
D. Further Revisions
D1. Initial Revisions
1) Are there extra words, sentences that are clunky or don't make sense?
2) Cut out 10-20% of words to distil the essence of the story to a concentrated unity. Does every scene, sentence, description, observation help progress the story? If not, delete.
3) Is story and character clear? Are any ambiguous parts of the story distracting? Which parts need more clarity & focus - which parts are best left ambiguous & blurred?
4) Dictate the latest draft of the story onto your iPhone & listen to what it sounds like. Check rhythm, pace, dialogue etc - revise further
5) Run spell check & grammar check. Look for nearby duplicate words, bad grammar & typos. Delete "-ly" words & remove unnecessary adverbs.
6) Cut and paste from Scrivener into word.
7) Print it out & review the physical printed word on the page
8) Finish a draft - this is a reasonable working draft but still may require major surgery
D2. Later Revisions
9) Send to a few friends who read my stuff. Ask them which bits they like & which bits they don't, where they lost interest, what is unclear, doesn't make sense. Get their feedback in writing, don't get defensive, incorporate their written input into the draft after thinking it through objectively.
Yu-Mei Balasinghamchow close read a draft of We Rose Up Slowly which was invaluable.
10) Put the story in a drawer for at least 2 months - then reread as though it were someone elses work & revise again either in Word, or cut & past back into Scrivener if deeper work is needed.
11) Don't be afraid to go back to B3. and rework your story and characters again.
D3. Use a Professional Editor
12) Get the input of a professional editor for story advice more than grammar - Stephanie Ye was a wonderful editor on We Rose Up Slowly : Full of wisdom, common sense & experience. I highly recommend her as an editor.
13) Revise, polish & finish
Old man looking up at preparations for an acrobatic lion dance at Chinese New Year, Penang, February 2013
"She told you, your father walked onto the veranda and saw a chook floating ten feet above the ground. The chook didn’t flap a feather and just sat there brooding, swaying in the breeze.
She said, your father stepped from the veranda to recover the recalcitrant chook, only to find the soles of his feet missing the ground, landing on thin air, and the chook drifting higher.
He couldn’t let the chook go, but with each step he found the chook rose higher. And of course he had to follow. She told you it was like watching him walk a stairway to heaven. Your mother said, he did not appear to be flying, more like floating, like someone rising from the bottom of the ocean to the surface of the sea.
Your mother watched from below until your father and the chook became flecks in the sky. She rushed inside and grabbed the brass navy telescope. She saw him and the chook slowly ascending. She saw him wheeze and hold his chest. She could just see his head turning from one side to the other in wonder, marvelling at the view. He appeared to turn towards her. He was white and he coughed violently. But he did manage to stiffly turn around and, ever so slowly, raise his arm in a wave. And she believed she saw the chook, rising up slowly beside him, its neck outstretched and its scrawny beak open in a silent chicken scream. She squinted through the telescope and thought she saw the frost fur crystallising about his eyebrows and his false teeth chattering so hard the blood ran from his gums to warm his mouth. His arm stopped moving and she knew he was hard as a block of ice."
Excerpt from the title story in my book, We Rose Up Slowly
You can buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore).
Between 1998 and 2010 I did not write a single story. I was to busy pursuing my career and trying to fall in love. My enthusiasm for writing was rekindled in 2010 when I walked into Books Actually, then at Club Street, and saw a copy of Ceriph Issue Zero. I decided to submit a story written in Sydney in 1997 called We Rose Up Slowly. Much to my surprise, the story was accepted for Ceriph Issue One (Math Paper Press, 2010). This story leads my debut collection, We Rose Up Slowly.
In this story:
East Coast, Singapore 2007
"She said, “You need to be shocked into seeing things as they are. I think what you need is a long bicycle ride into the sea.”
I looked at her, puzzled. What was she on about?
“It’s like an extreme cold shower. But you do it fully clothed. The resistance. The pressure. Your trousers balloon, fill up with air, and you try to trundle onwards. But your wheels sink in the sand, the water rises around your waist and your balls shrink to the size of peas. And then you end up falling sideways, plopping into the sea.”
I sat there thinking, what kind of a challenge is this?"
Excerpt from A Long Bicycle Ride Into the Sea, a story in We Rose Up Slowly
You can buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore).
A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea is a story from my collection, We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2011 and published in Coast (Math Paper Press, 2011).
A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea:
Cat, Singapore Buddhist Lodge, Kim Yam Rd, Singapore 2005
‘I hated the cats. The cats with their rasping, delicate coughs and furballs. Slinking about haughty and cocky, not needing anyone else at all. How could any creature be so arrogant and superior and also tongue its own butt? I spent my childhood feeding them and replenishing their cat litter. I hated them. There were just too many of them all over the place. Nettie brought home strays and kept the small, ragged, lonely ones. Once, she saw me kick a cat. She was horrified and slapped me and told me I would never grow up to be nice unless I treated cats decently.
I did not want to grow up to be nice.
I did not share these particular thoughts with you. I expected you’d find them distasteful.’
From ‘Other People’s Cats’, a story in We Rose Up Slowly
On Saturday 29 August 2015 at Company of Cats Cafe I’ll be reading from a story included in the anthology, From the Belly of the Cat, to celebrate its new reprint. Several of Singapore’s leading, award winning and exciting writers will be reading at the event: Dave Chua, Amanda Lee Koe, JY Yang and Jemima Wei. My short story collection, We Rose Up Slowly, also features this story.
My story, Other People’s Cats, is set in Australia with two students driving back to a small country town where they both grew up to attend the funeral of the narrator’s great Aunt Nettie.
Other People's Cats:
Come along on 29th August to Company of Cats if you are in or near Chinatown.
'“There’s this roti prata place on Kampong Bahru Road opposite SGH. It’s always open. We can go there.” Ling knows the place well. She’s been there many times and taken her murtabak beside the girls and their punters from the karaoke lounges, and eaten with the taxi drivers, police and nurses, relaxing after their shifts at the end of night.'
From A Fleeting Tenderness at the End of Night, a story in We Rose Up Slowly
Buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore)
I wrote this story during the latter half of 2014.
I started by ‘splurging’ all I felt, and knew, about the factual event at the foundation of this story - this event is well known to people living in Singapore in mid 2012. I wrote in a fast, haphazard, chaotic manner. I focussed on emotion and the action. I did not concern myself with grammar, spelling or proper sentence construction. I just wrote.
I developed the story by writing a detailed imagined backstory for fictional participants. I explored their motivation, their history and the conflicts between characters. I tried to articulate my understanding of their dreams, how these drove their actions, and how these actions changed them.
I wrote several different versions. An initial draft was written in first person POV - in a pale imitation of Rashomon. Then I decided on a third person POV. I changed the protagonist and wrote several alternate endings.
I submitted the story to a few literary magazines in early 2015 without success.
In A Fleeting Tenderness at the End of Night:
Artwork based on 'A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea; by Jonathan Leong, 2010
"She talked about the ways in which everything is connected to everything; that the lungs are an extension of the air in which you live and move around. She said no person is an island. So I asked, “What are we then? Continents? Planets? Solar systems?” Later, she told me we were car parks, where the self is just a little bit of grey concrete marked out by painted white lines and we define ourselves by who we let drive in and how long they stay."
Excerpt from A Long Bicycle Ride Into the Sea, a story in We Rose Up Slowly
You can buy We Rose Up Slowly here (free shipping in Singapore).
This artwork was created by Jonathan Leong for the Synaesthesia exhibition organised by Ceriph and The Substation in April 2011. Synaesthesia was a group show featuring 16 pairs of writers and visual artists, with the visual artist interpreting and creating a typographic piece out of a Singaporean writer’s poetry or microfiction, encouraging dialogue between the two mediums of expression.
A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea is a story from my collection, We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2011 and published in Coast (Math Paper Press, 2011).
A Long Bicycle Ride into the Sea:
Kemang, Jakarta, Indonesia, May 2011
"The café-bar-restaurant on Jalan Kemang Raya rests like an elegant fish tank above the bookstore. It has large windows through which you can look down on lounging tukang parkir as they laugh and suck on their clove cigarettes. If you sit on the retro living room ensemble in the right place at the right time and look beyond the car park, you can watch all of Kemang creep by in one long neverending traffic jam. This is the story of the origin of that traffic jam; at a time in the distant past when the traffic used to roam free and a trip from Blok M to Jalan Kemang Selatan used to take ten minutes at most."
Excerpt from A Girl & a Guy in a Kijang in Kemang, a story in We Rose Up Slowly
Available online with free shipping in Singapore
A Girl & A Guy in a Kijang in Kemang is a story from my book, We Rose Up Slowly. The story was written in 2012 and published in Eastern Heathens (Ethos Books, 2013, edited by Ng Yi Sheng & Amanda Lee Koe).
A Girl & A Guy in a Kijang in Kemang:
