*Update, the 20th anniversary
of Lovers and Strangers Revisited
Here are links to some
of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:
Golda
Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.
Preeta
Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day.
Chuah
Guat Eng, author of Echoes of Silence and Days
of Change.
Plus:
Five part Maugham
and Me series
Beheaded on
Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part
I
6 comments:
Thank you sir for sharing this..
I am among those people quoted in one of your stories in Lover and Stranger Revisited - dreaming of writing my short story, but never have the gut to start writing..
SO, until then i'm collecting all the tips on how to start writing...
And following your blog and books hoping that the writing tips would appear every now and then, like your article here and tree method in the Tropical Affair.
Thanks again.
Hi, Ummufatihah, thanks!
If you to my website, check out the writing tips from my Quill articles
http://www.borneoexpatwriter.com/writing-tips.php
Have you seen the Story Behind the Story blog that I did on the stories for Lovers and Strangers Revisited? Lots of tips and insights in there to the writing process, especially when editing to make the story better. http://thestorybehindthestoryoflsr.blogspot.com/
All the best,
Robert
Yea.. I did get that copy from MPH recently and read your article.
Learnt a lot... Hope i will have the courage to write the first sentence very soon...
Was writing my first ever cerpen last year and it was published in Utusan Swak. never able to produce anything else after that...
I think the first one was the product of coincidence because i started it with story of perfume i smelt in a lift and then the story took its own journey without i draft/plan anything.
Anyway, thanks again.
Now im reading the essays by Orhan Pamuk hoping that i can win a nobel prize like him.. :)
Ummufatihah,
Congrats on the published story. That's how they usually begin, something innnocent triggers the mind and you just go with it and then try to improve upon it draft after draft. Getting that first draft down is important, but it's merely a starting place.
Keep reading, keep getting inspired, and keep writing.
All the best.
Its so funny how you learn all this in english in 8th grade, and then again in college using the MLA format and all that jazz. But its crazy how often a writer forgets to use these valuable principles when not in the classroom structured environment! Great read! I took notes and It's only gonna sharpen and temper my focus even more.
Timothy,
Mystery solved! This reply has been elusive, I thought it disappeared, so I re-posted it. Then today I found that it was held up for moderation, only to realize it's on the older post of this article, not the recent one!
Glad you found it it helpful. I hesitated posting the new article since I posted The Writer article last May, but thought, just in case someone missed it...
In eight grade, we think we'll never need to use any of this stuff, our minds elsewhere (usually on girls). Then later, we scratch our heads. This all seems vaguely familiar.
I've had colleagues at the university here in Malaysia who learned this when they studied overseas in the US or UK, and I asked them, do you teach it to your students, and they look at me funny, as if that thought had never occurred to them in the ten years they've been teaching!
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