The writer's anxious, inward adventures
As readers, we imbue writing with romantic leaps of inspiration. In truth, it is a hard grind
In a dimly-lit strip club in Brisbane, his pen at quiet rest before his pad, the writer thinks. He waits. Words will come. There is no cover charge in the daytime here, he is free to sit. One girl, half-dressed, is a maths major with whom he spends a convivial afternoon discussing chaos theory. Others wander over, "curious about the Chinese guy sitting in the corner".
This club, it strikes the writer, is a make-believe world where "most girls pretend to be someone else and take on fantasy names". So he assimilates this idea, he starts to scribble poems in the voices of different characters, a serial killer, an abused wife, and there, draped in inspiration in this undressed world, Singapore's Felix Cheong writes his collection of poems titled "Broken by the rain".
In a strip club, I might not quite be looking down and writing. But Cheong, 48, does, he discovers an idea, his mind takes strange, brilliant journeys. It only reinforces the truth that the writer, who walks amidst us, is in fact not like us. And it is a fascinating notion.
I am, perhaps like you, part of the jostling throng at Kinokuniya who buys a novel, digests it and stacks it on a forgotten shelf. Some of us - and the Internet has revealed a legion of aspiring wordsmiths - even contemplate writing one, but prefer to stay obedient to the late Christopher Hitchens' suggestion: "Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay."
But occasionally, as the athlete creates, the ballet dancer whirls, the musician riffs, the architect draws, we don't just enjoy it, but wonder: How? Where does creativity come from? How is it processed and harnessed?
Lionel Messi can draw lines with his feet as utterly beautiful as John Steinbeck did with sharpened pencil. It is as if inspiration, like Archimedes' "Eureka" in a bathtub, suddenly lands on their shoulders and sits there forever like a friend.
But it is a romantic notion, for as with the athlete, the writer's craft is born of sweat and struggle. The great Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid's novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, took him seven years to write. In a way, for all their clarity and wisdom and perceptiveness, it is reassuring that he, like Archimedes, must have sat at his desk for hours, a man and his mind at endless wrestle, for insight is often the child of labour.
Athletic genius is constructed from hard work. Writing is worse, or as the great Philip Roth once reportedly said, "It's a nightmare". Nothing intimidates like the waiting, blank page. The writer will summon emotions, take flight, read out a dialogue in his head, be suffocated with self-doubt, a first line trying to form yet not travelling to the fingers. As Cheong says: "People tend to mystify the writing process, but it's a four-letter word: Work."
Writers are prisoners of intriguing method that appears almost alien to us. Ernest Hemingway - among the many things the delightful book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work reveals - wrote standing up, John Cheever often did so in his boxer shorts, while the poet John Milton, blind in his later years, lay in bed at 4am and memorised lines in his head.
Everyone wants the secret to creativity, some universal key to unlocking the brain, but no formula exists for freeing words from the prison of the head.
Andrew Tan, 40, whose graphic novel Monsters, Miracles & Mayonnaise was nominated for an Eisner - a sort of Oscar of the comics world - borrowed a writing suggestion from his copywriter wife. He exercised his imagination by doing "10-minute stories", where he was not allowed to stop, or censor himself, or over-think, but just write, honestly and immediately.
Writers, like us, are travellers, but unlike us they take inward journeys and negotiate strange, unexplored worlds. It often turns them into finicky, fastidious folk who tie themselves to routine. The poet Maya Angelou closeted herself in hotel rooms. Unless words pour out - Anthony Trollope reportedly required 250 words from himself every 15 minutes - there is to be no escape.
Whiskey will be one man's stimulus, green tea another's. For the journalist, like the younger impressionable me, it came from the drooping cigarette, as if the curl of smoke would translate into a string of words. But every writer finds his own version of peace, a comforting table, just enough light, even, in Tan's case, a "perfect" pen which produces the stroke he wants and the "feeling" he craves as he draws.
Invention has no fixed address and creativity no established abode. Cheong finds the "buzz" the kopitiam offers him an "energy". Balli Kaur Jaswal, 30, author of the novel Inheritance and writer-in-residence at Nanyang Technological University, wanders off to libraries, sitting there with headphones on, and says: "The act of going somewhere is like heading out to fulfil a purpose."
Oh Yong Hwee, 40, who wrote the graphic novel Ten Sticks And One Rice with illustrator Koh Hong Teng, prefers the cling film of silent nights. He works between 11pm and 4am, at his dining table, near a window, and once his environment is arranged, he, the procrastinator, "runs out of excuses". Now he must write.
Such ritual is soothing, it calms writers as they leap into the unknown. As Jaswal eloquently puts it, the writer is a "nomad" venturing into the "different worlds you are creating". In this anxious adventure, the ritual offers a sense of rootedness. You are flying, yet still you are home.
I remain envious of writers and their felicity, and if speaking to them helps me peel back a little of their craft, they continue to provoke my wonder. Especially when Cheong tells me that on his 45-minute bus ride to work, he writes rapidly on his phone. By the time he disembarks, he has a finished short story which he loads onto Facebook.
Forty-five concentrated minutes is alarming for a journalist like me, who must rise from his desk every 15 minutes, as if to revive a stalled brain. A walk is often required, though not for as long as Charles Dickens, who reportedly wandered for miles.
Ironically, for writing to continue, occasionally it must stop, the fingers paused, life inhaled. Gertrude Stein, it is said, would drive out on her breaks, specifically to look for cows. Good thing she did not live in this city. There are none to be found here.
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