Walking down that road is much harder if you cartwheel.

06Jan09

‘Diam ubi berisi; diam besi berkarat’
(loosely translated, ‘the potato is silent from its content; metal is silent from rusting’)
- old Malay proverb

After my most recent and marked failure, I immersed myself into the workings of self-pity – I started studying to be a writer.

I’m turning 22 in less than two weeks, and my first novel is overdue. The world has been waiting for me to debut – to finally prove my worth as someone more than just an amalgam of mediocrity, into something of a more specific success. Whatever delusions of a career at science I might have had were ripped apart by my most latest results; even imagining a life where I face that same failure daily reeks of a fear I’m too cowardly to look in the eye, nevermind denounce.

But all this, I reason, will be put aside, once I prove my worth as someone who can be good at ONE thing – someone who can be labelled instantly and kept under a neat category. (Screw post-modernism. Multiple talents in a single being is so rarely expected, they turn out into modest surprises. Soon there will come a day when a dog will be lauded for being able to chase its tail AND lick its butt.)

I think there is a deadline for all this, although mine is based on the next and nearest wannabe-writer. So if Dan Humphrey (yes, I watch Gossip Girl) writes five short stories, I will make six the next day, and not all of them of a girl, misplaced in another continent and who has no love life (insert fangirl reference here). And better still, I have a friend in Dubai who is almost there, proper novel-wise. Thank God she’s writing science fiction, something I tried only once when I was 14. Otherwise I’d never be able to compete. She’s already Indian, and has studied creative writing – two things that give her that special advantage over me when running for the Booker prize. (It’s always Indian writers who win it. Kiran Desai, Vikram Swarup, Aravind Adiga. Entire shortlists made of Indian expatriates and diplomats and former international students. What is it about India and the different ethnicities that sprout from it, that waxes award-winning lyrical about the little things? Because Malaysia’s had colonialism, and we have a fixation with urban development, and we have corruption and science and technology, as well as a down-trodden arts scene. We have all of it too.)

So for my research, I’ve been reading. Not so much for my imagination, or for inspiration, or even to escape. I’ve been studying the prose. I’ve been testing the waters. Flick, glup, bloop. I have one main story in my mind. It shall have drama and love and untold wishes and dreams. It shall have cynical hope. It shall have family, as so much of my other life revolves around solely that and its peripherals, and one can never be too obsessed with something one love/hates so much.

The only things it lacks, at this point, is money and a plot.

But being a writer, or how it works in my mind anyway, is not as easy as it sounds. I was convinced by the work of Steve Toltz that writing isn’t just a piece of concentrated spontaneity thing – we can’t all be young geniuses who pour out dense snippets of our and other people’s complex life, a la Froer – so I’ve been doing research. I have a book in which I write out ideas. I listen to conversations on trams; I discreetly stare at people and imagine entire lives behind their purposely vacant faces. But all that isn’t as difficult as doing this:

Imagining the world in words.

Can you? Every colour and every sensation? Everything it means to one person, and then imagine how different they feel to someone else, all of them studied and different and made up? I keep making sentences out of the words that usually pass me by in the hurricane of sensations that living in the city gives. Not even parks here, because everybody has a fixation with being in the sun, for some reason, and people whizzing by in slow motion, or any motion, is just plain distracting to my pathetic noggin.

And so, my brain’s gotten into a bit of a logjam. I’m sloooower in public – that much slower, it sounds like I have festering stowaway food in my cranium, blocking my nerve endings. I use up all the words in my brain into sentences I’m scared to forget. I reserve the simple ones for speech. All the cliches and pop culture references that one tosses into the air to sound relevant and present, when you’re actually drifting off into 1891. Song lyrics work too; someone’s else has done the thinking and emoting for you.

As it is, I am more comfortable being quiet and frowning. My mind is learning to take over from Bob Dylan and the Kings of Convenience and The Strokes. My mp3 player died, you see.

‘Your mouth purges words.’
- my mother, to me.

If she only knew what it took.

I don’t know how he does it, that man who told me he doesn’t need his iPod to occupy his mind. That might be why he prefers to listen and smirk. He’s reliving the world through my eyes, and yours, and yours too. Maybe he’s trying to fit a cumulative existence in his strong, steady head.

Maybe, really, all one needs is practise.

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