In the last month or so I’ve been considering, through thoughts and feelings, the place of writing in my life. In part, this interest has come from a series of conversations. I visited a former senior colleague, who is now approaching a time in life where health concerns become very real, who has been a creative writer in various genres all his life but, to his bitterness, now can no longer write. And then I had a further conversation with a friend in her forties, who has written some beautiful short stories, a fascinating non-fiction book, but who yearns to publish a novel, and who talked to me of examples who still inspire her, of writers who had not published their best work until they grew older. Finally, I think of myself.  I don’t really identify as a writer—it’s one of many things I do. But there is something very fulfilling for me about writing fiction, a fulfilment that I don’t quite find in academic work. I’ve only published a single collection of short stories, eight years ago. I thought, moving to Canada six years ago, that I’d write more: perhaps even a novel. I ended up starting a number of writing projects in succession, but finishing very few, and only a couple resulted in publication. And then a couple of months ago, back in Singapore, I fell back into writing fiction, partly through the prompting of others. I wrote three short stories in two months. The first took time, but by the time I got through to the third, written to a deadline imposed on me by a prospective publisher, I’d found my way back into writing fiction effortlessly again. You seemed to be enjoying writing, a friend with whom I shared the final story wrote to me. 

I’ve now paused again for a couple of months, gone back to research, editing work for others, and my guided autobiography group, and also, more importantly, to living in the moment. I struggle to get back again. There’s still a vague sense that I have another book in me, a new collection of short stories about the ageing process, but I’m finding it difficult to start up. Another book would, surely, still those voices I still hear inside me. Of course this isn’t true – a new book, if I managed to write it, would simply lead to another: there would never be a last word. But there’s something tempting about trying to find symmetry in life through writing, a feeling of fullness.

I also had another lunchtime conversation with a publisher friend, in which we noted how common memoir manuscripts are in Singapore. These are frequently submitted to publishers and are the product of a huge amount of time and energy from the authors. And yet often they are unpublishable: their writers know how to write on a mechanical level, but not how to plot and to engage an audience. For the memoirist or autobiographer, there’s also an inevitable disappointment. They send their manuscript to various publishers, perhaps even try to work through their contacts to get a foot in the doorway. They are turned down again and again. If they resort to self-publishing – not a bad thing in itself, and in fact very suitable for, for instance, a memoir to be shared within a family – it is with a feeling of failure, of not being recognised by a larger world. I remember that my father, after retirement, worked on his memoirs. He bought himself a new electric typewriter, never quite being able to master a computer. He must have sent out some of his work to publishers, and steadfastly refused, when I suggested self-publishing, to approach a “vanity press.” After his death I looked for the manuscript, but I only found a folder of autobiographical short stories, some quite keenly observed, that gave me new insights into his early life. He stopped talking about the memoirs late in life, and I wonder if he might have shared same sense of failure and a lack of recognition that my publisher friend noticed with the memoirists he encountered.

What stops me writing more fiction? Partly perhaps it’s that fear my father had, of spending time and effort on something that’s a generative process to the writer, but fairly useless for the world.  Recognition from others should not really matter. In the last few years, studying counselling psychology, I’ve been much more concerned with process rather than product. In session, the stories that are told are ephemeral: narrative therapy and other approaches would stress that a therapeutic effect comes in the process of narrativization, not in the final story that emerges. In the guided autobiography group that I’m facilitating now, forgotten experiences emerge and become the bases for new stories. Participants are free to publish anything they write, but few do: much more important is the group as a space of listening. In my own, private, writing activities, I’m also much more caught up in process. This year I’ve gone back to making a diary entry every day, sometimes simply an observation of a moment or the recollection of a dream, sometimes a much more extended piece. And I’ve committed to a monthly entry in this blog. In both of these activities I either don’t have an audience, or do not spend much time cultivating it: I studiously avoid all those prompts from Word Press and unsolicited emails from my hosting company about how to reach a wider readership. In contrast to this is public, academic writing, which is very much geared towards an audience: it’s easy to gauge the utility of what you do. I’m rewriting my Rajaratnam paper in response to two readers’ reports, and it’s at times painful. You go into the text, edit, add, clarify, and before you know it the line of argument has been lost, or become hidden. You need to stop for a time, draw back, wait a week or so until you have fresh eyes, and then return and cut back the undergrowth. Such public writing doesn’t have the meditative quality of journaling, but at least you know where you are and why you are writing: my paper’s both an argument and a guide to others.

What’s wonderful and yet also agonizing about writing fiction is that it brings together the meditative and nurturing elements of journaling with the focus on readers that I find in my academic work. Wonderful because there’s something beautiful and transcendent about the writing process when you’re inside it, when you go into flow and proceed simply because it feels right. Agonizing because at times you drop out of flow and are besieged by doubts. I find it difficult to plan a story cold. I need to write myself into it with a host of tiny fragments that I often never use. But when I begin to write a fragment, I find myself pausing after a paragraph, taking a break because the experience is too intense, and when I come back five minutes later, I can’t quite enter that moment again. At times I can coax or force my way back, at others, I can’t, and other daily tasks begin to crawl towards me, so many that I can’t brush them away. Try a few times, experience the disappointment of starting and yet not quite gaining momentum, and I find that procrastination has become a habit that’s difficult to break. Yet urge to write continues, like an itch. I can tell myself not to scratch it, and it’ll go away for a time. My life is full of many other things, and it’s good to be with my partner, to stay in the present. And then the urge to write fiction will come back again, more strongly, and, because I have dropped out of the habit of writing, more difficult to face.

There’s a world outside the space or scene of writing, in which I move most of the time. Over the last week we went on two walks following the trails of Upper Thomson Road. On the first we walked down through the forest to Lower Pierce Reservoir. We passed a couple with two small children on the trail, and it wasn’t until we got close that one of the adults greeted me, and I realised it was a student I’d taught a decade before. I’ve always had a difficulty with faces, perhaps a marginal case of prosopagnosia which meant that I often found it easier remember a student’s voice or dress sense. To this, as I age, I’ve also added a forgetfulness with names. So I was grateful when the student introduced himself before he asked me if I remembered him, so that I did remember him and the interests he brought to our in-class discussions. We talked for a few minutes, and his young son asked me my name and then, shyly, gave me his.

On the second day, we walked up the park connector from Spring Leaf to the old Hainan Village at Thomson Nature Park. We followed traces of roads, still metalled but now overgrown, passed banyan trees, with long aerial roots, and coconut palms, too, so far from the sea. The houses had slowly vanished: there were still steps up to raised platforms, a few crumbling walls, and concrete caps over numerous wells. It’s strange to think of how quickly time passes. The place was abandoned not at a distant time in the past, but in the 1980s, when I was already an adult teaching in China. My partner found one of the road names familiar, and wondered if she’d visited friends at the village as a teenager, walking between and into houses that had now vanished. It was hot, and the macaques rustled in the trees above us, leaping from branch to branch.

So much for these experiences. But as I recall them, picture them in a moment of quiet, there’s a feeling of being lost, of things not quite holding together. You enter the forest or the village again in your memory. As you do so, when you round a corner, pass a tree or a low wall, you hope to find a hole in the fabric of life, not so much a Miyazaki-movie-like tunnel into another world, but a place where the warp and weft of the everyday has frayed, which you can pick, enlarge, enter. That’s where writing starts.