Archive for June, 2006

Photo: Writing Group - from flickr.com, by nadar

It can be difficult for writers to handle feedback on their work. After all, we’ve slogged long and hard to produce our short story or chapter or novel. One paragraph may have taken us days. We’ve dug deep into our pysche and soul and bared all of ourselves in this piece of text.

We offer our work to someone to read and they have the audacity and heartlessness and cruelty to tell us that there’s something not quite perfect about our baby, our pride and joy - about us!!!!! Our world crumbles, our sense of our own worth crumbles, our very self crumbles!!!

Okay, that’s a wild exaggeration of what it can feel like to ask for and to get feedback on our writing. But I think under the humourous example, we can all recognise an element of truth in the description. The question is: if we want our writing to be published, we must face the fact that our hard work enters the public arena and anyone has the right to critique it.

As a lawyer, I might draft a badly phrased legal document and no-one will know about it unless something goes horribly wrong between the parties to the contract and they dig it out and go through it with a fine toothcomb. My humiliation at that point would be confined to those parties and my workplace. Professional indemnity insurance would help to cover the financial cost of the boob-up and I would live to draft another day.

No-one is going to critique my legal document the moment it is finished and signed up. The best that can happen is that it goes in a filing cabinet and is never seen again because the parties to it are working swimmingly together. The world will not have to read a scathing review of it: “Ooi’s writing at clause 251 subclause (e) is weak and lacks panache. Her phrasing is inelegant and entirely lacking in characterisation. We just don’t care whether the Second Party hereto gets the compensation or not. There’s no tension or drama. The tone is completely flat.”

But once your novel is finished and polished and you start sending it out to agents and publishers, you are likely to face a lot of rejections before it finally gets accepted - if at all. Once accepted, you will get feedback from professionals on how to maximise it for publication - at that point, you don’t want to throw a big drama queen scene about how your editor can’t mess with your art. Unless you truly are a genius that the publishers will do anything to keep on their books, the result is likely to be: “The door is over there”. And then, when your novel comes out across several continents… Gulp, there are likely to be the bad reviews to deal with.

So, how can we thicken our sensitive skins and even turn criticism to our advantage?

In this post, I offer some tips on giving and receiving feedback among friends, before you get to the stage where you are talking to agents and publishers. I will talk in later posts about dealing with professional feedback from your agent and/ or editor and also about what it’s like to get bad reviews!

You’ve finished and polished your novel as I’ve described in the last two posts in the Getting Published series. Now you are ready to show it to others for get their feedback on it before sending it out to agents.

1. If you want complete unconditional love for your work, show it to your mum. “It’s lovely, dear” is lovely to hear but not very helpful if you want to be a professional writer.

2. The best place to start is to show your writing to people who love to read or other writers. Ask for honest feedback - and mean it. Prepare yourself for the worst.

3. When you get the feedback, don’t answer back. Don’t justify. Don’t get defensive. Don’t try to explain how the point they make is answered in Chapter 50. Listen.

4. Listen.

5. Listen.

6. Ask for clarification. Can they be more specific? Can they give an example of what they mean?

7. Now you have a list of the different points. You may also have a list of different points of view from different people. You may agree with some and disagree with others. Resolve to make amendments based on the points you agree with.

8. As for the points you disagree with, consider: of the friends you asked for feedback, whose opinion do you trust and respect the most? What are the points they’ve made that you disagree with? What if you tried what they suggest, even if you disagree with it - would that work? In other words, be open to suggestions, even if you do not agree with them. If you think the amendments might work, try them out. You always have your original draft to go back to if you change your mind.

9. But at the end of the day, it’s your novel. If you don’t want to make amendments based on any of the feedback you get from friends, whether you agree with it or not, have the confidence in your own judgement. Don’t make any changes.

10. Thank your friends who have taken the time to read your manuscript. It will have taken them a lot of energy also to think about how best to tell you their views without upsetting you or jeapordising your friendship. If they are other writers themselves, they will have spent time reading your manuscript which they would otherwise have spent on working on their own writing. Return the favour when they come to you for help.

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Next time in the Getting Published series, we look at the converse of receiving feedback. If you are asked by a friend or someone in your creative writing circle to read their writing and give feedback, how can you do this in the most helpful and constructive way?

We continue our Fusion Stories series with the first Fusion View podcast where I interview Dishad Husain, the British-Asian director, about making his award-winning short film “Holly Bolly”.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking on the embedded player below.

Alternatively, you can listen to this and other Fusion View podcasts by clicking here.

The links to Dishad’s films and projects mentioned in the podcast are:

• www.imotion.com
• BBC Film Network, “Holly Bolly” page

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To read or listen to more Fusion Stories, go to the sidebar in the far right of the Fusion View homepage and click on the Category “Fusion Stories”.

Do you have a fusion story to tell? Do you have cross-cultural experiences in your life you would like to share? Find out how you can tell your story on Fusion View by going to the Announcements section in the middle sidebar of the Fusion View homepage and clicking on “Tell Us Your Fusion Story.”

My friend Jane (not her real name) came to stay the other day and I was reminded of how a book changed both our lives.

Back in 1994, I had just turned 31. I had a successful career as a lawyer and a great flat in London. I had friends and the chance to travel - and I had just fallen in love. It seemed I had everything that a woman might ever want.

Jane also had a great career as an accountant in a famous multinational. She had a great flat, friends and the freedom to do what she wanted after her divorce.

But for both of us, we wanted something more.

Ever since I was a child I had promised myself that I would have a published book by the time I turned 30. Now I was 31 and as every day passed, my childhood goal was receding. Jane had travelled to India on holiday a few times and yearned to go back on a longer trip. She longed to find a more meaningful job than merely “counting lightbulbs”, as I used to tease her.

Angie had just come into my life. She had come over from South Africa with a rucksack and £250 in her pocket, having given up her job and her flat and her life over there. She gave me her well-thumbed copy of Susan Jeffer’s “Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway.”

I read it in one sitting and it blew me away. I went out and got a copy for Jane.

I had written many pages of many unfinished novels. They remained unfinished because at some level I was afraid that if I finished them and they were no good, I would have to face the fear of rejection. I had never truly, really risked anything for my passion - for my great love of writing.

I had never truly, really risked anything. I had always done the sensible thing. Studied at school. Passed my exams. I had gone to law school and got a good job and did that job pretty well. So far so ho hum.

After reading the book, Jane and I decided that we could change our lives. We dared each other. I said, “The last one to give up their job is a rotten egg”.

I won the dare by a day.

I resigned with no book contract, no contacts in the publishing world, no book idea in my mind. I had to make a success of writing or I would have thrown away everything for nothing but daytime TV and slobbing around at home. So I am pretty relieved to report that I did achieve my childhood dream of being a published writer, although a few years late!

Jane packed her rucksack for a three month tour of India. In the end, she was away travelling for 18 months. When she came back, she got an job with an international aid agency and was posted to Russia, Nepal and India over the next 5 years. She has hiked the Andes and the Himalayas. She hiked alone from Geneva over the Alps and across southern France to Nice. She discovered Buddhism in her travels and is now travelling a spiritual path after her global travels.

When she came to visit the other day, we sat in the garden and raised a glass to how far we had come.

Photo: No Spitting sign, Mumbai - from flickr.com, by Paul Keller

The Times, London (20 June 2006) reports on a survey done by Readers Digest magazine on the state of politeness around the world. The findings are unexpected.

They surveyed 35 cities and used three tests. 1. The researchers dropped papers in the street to see if anyone would come and help. 2. They counted the number of times shop assistants said “thank you” and 3. They counted how often someone would hold the door open.

New York comes out as the world’s most polite city.

Near the very bottom at no. 33 is Kuala Lumpur and at no. 30 is Singapore. The rudest city in the world is Mumbai.

The Times article says:

“Courtesy is not big in Asia, either. Every city on that continent tested, with the exception of Hong Kong, finished in the bottom ten. None of the three tests scored more than 40 per cent in any Asian city.”

London comes somewhere in the middle at no. 15, jointly with Paris. Now we can no longer complain about the Parisians being rude to us when we go over there!

I am stunned by the results of the survey. Asia has always prided itself in being polite and Malaysians in particular have always enjoyed thinking of ourselves as more gentle and polite than Singaporeans, in keeping with the friendly rivalry between the two countries. And here we are, Asian cities in general and KL in particular, at or near the bottom of the politeness list!

Perhaps we can try and comfort ourselves by saying it was a test carried out by a Western publication and reported in a Western newspaper. Personally, I think that’s a bit of a cop-out, like saying I didn’t pass the exam because the examiners set difficult questions.

I’d like to hear what you think. Are Asians really that rude? Should the researchers have used different measures of politeness? If so, what counts as general politeness in public places in Asia? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

A tale of forbidden love - and time travel….

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And there I was thinking that Back To The Future III was just some kiddy movie with no profound depths or agonising longing.

"Mashing up" movies is the latest internet phenomenon. You’ve seen two of them now on Fusion View - see also 10 Things I Hate About the Ten Commandments. Mashup artists take clips from trailers for a real movie and recut them, add their own music (or music from another trailer!) and their own credits and voice-over and you have a whole new movie - or a whole new way of seeing an old movie that you’d never seen before.

posted to Fusion View by: Yang-May Ooi

My partner has been ill recently and we’ve been trekking to and from the GP and hospital appointments and medical tests. She has had a strange swelling of the feet that is part of reactive arthritis. The condition is not life-threatening but it is very distressing to see someone you love in a lot of pain. She is forced to move around like an old woman and cannot stand or walk for long. She has to use crutches and we have borrowed a wheelchair just in case.

The trouble with feet is that we take them for granted and a lot of our lives depend on being mobile on them. Take simple matters like crossing the road or entering a house - a step can be a huge exhausting hurdle if you cannot get the wheelchair over it. And even just pottering about at home can be a marathon of endurance and pain.

I think about my great-grandmother who had bound feet and the generations of Chinese women stretching back a thousand years whose feet were broken and deformed by this practice. I had always recognised how barbaric and cruel the tradition was but never fully realised the actual daily implications of living your whole life with crippled feet. For my partner Angie, we know that in a while, her feet will slowly get back to normal and in the meantime, there are friends and family who are supportive and mechanisms to help her get around and minimise the pain. For the women who lived in a society where it was the norm to be crippled by bound feet and there was no support structure of any kind, their lives must have been daily hell.

It was not just high-born women with minions to carry them around in sedan chairs and servants to do the chores who had bound feet. The fashion trickled down through the whole of society and many mothers bound their daughters’ feet from the age of three or four to improve their prospects of a good marriage. So women in rural areas had to work in the fields and do the household work, carry wood for the fire, lift pots of boiling water all on bound feet. Many worked on their knees. Seeing Angie painfully hobble along the street the other day, wincing at every step, taking half an hour for a distance that used to take her five minutes, the horror of those women’s lives became real to me for the first time.

The tradition of bound feet has died out with the last old women of pre-revolution China in recent decades. I hope it is never ever revived.

Following my Open Invitation to my readers to tell me your fusion stories, I am delighted to post a Guest Blog from Alex Smit, telling us her fusion story of being a South African in Germany.

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I’m Alexandra, born and bred African, who decided at the ripe ole’ age of 30-something to make a grand move to Germany, taking my eclectic writer/musician husband, Martin Barbee, daughter, Nicolette (then 7) and our black street cat.

After 10-odd years as a newspaper journalist for various Johannesburg publishing houses, I felt it was time "for more."

We moved to Hannover where my brother had a little flat and for the first month or two, huddled in one room, cat causing mayhem as she scratched my brother’s girlfriend’s furniture.

My daughter redid the first year of school. We were lucky her headmistress admitted her, considering she only knew the colours in German. The law has since changed and no child will be admitted without first doing a language test!

She’s done remarkably well. Her friends are fellow ,Ausländer’ (foreigners) and both teachers she’s had, always preface parents’ evening seminars with, "Despite not being a native speaker…"

Finding a job is not easy. I packed bread in a factory with the other foreigners and learnt how emigrants take the jobs locals find are beneath them. Of my team of about 20, one was German and he hailed from the East which is almost as bad as being a foreigner.

Having lived the birth of our new democracy makes South Africans tolerant of others. It’s strange as an ,outsider’ to see how subtle intolerance is par for the course in Germany. My grandparents and parents are German so, according to German law, I am German but a Turk born in Germany, who speaks fluent German and knows the culture is a Turk, because of his/her parents. That is just nonsense!

At the same time, there are misconceptions about Germans -  people automatically think Germans have no sense of humour and that’s way wrong. My new work colleagues hosted a tongue-in-cheek German party in America, with beer and the usual cliches and their visitors were not sure how to take it. Many believed they were being serious :).

The country is clean, intrinsically democratic and a great place to live. Bigotry is not allowed (they are very aware of their Nazi heritage and never want to go there again) and that makes it like a small slice of the new South Africa. As much as I’m inherently African, this is my home. I’m a half-breed, part African, part German and that makes for an interesting addition to this beautiful country.

On the practical side, we love how cheap it is in Germany, from the cheeses and yoghurts and pasta to CDs and DVDs which we are passionate about. Moving back to South Africa is not an option.

Written by Fusion View Guest Blogger: Alex Smit

I’ve blogged a few times about the depressing state of the publishing industry in the UK - see More Bad News for Writers and Bimbo Publishing.

So I was relieved and pleased to come across a more heartening report on ABC News that says that small publishers are thriving in the face of common wisdom.

This is due partly to digital technology which offers print on demand (known as POD) – a book is stored in digital format and when it is ordered by a customer or bookstore, the printer can do the equivalent of “click on Print” and the material object book can be produced and shipped within a few days. This saves on warehousing costs for stock and the risk of having excess unsold stock.

Traditionalists often query the value of POD because of print quality issues. Technology has come a long way in a short time and the quality is pretty good - it can be difficult to tell the difference between a POD book and a ‘warehouse’ book. The second edition of The Flame Tree is published using POD technology and I am more than happy with the look and feel of the book.

The ABC News report also says that some writers also prefer the intimacy of working with a small publisher as there is more opportunity for a more personal working relationship.

Read the full item here - http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/print?id=2043027

Photo: Tell us Your Story - from flickr.com, by linda manymuses

On Fusion View, I have been writing stories about my experiences of being from the East and living in the West - take a look in the Category “Fusion Stories” in the sidebar on the far right. Talking to my friends and wider family, I realised that I know many people who live “fusion lives”, or cross-cultural lives - or who travel widely around the world and are interested in cross-cultural living. One friend is a German who has studied in San Francisco and is now an English-qualified lawyer in the UK - he is married to a Greek art expert who travels regularly round the globe. Another friend taught English in Hong Kong and then cycled across China and Europe home to Somerset in the UK. Through this blog, I have also met many cross-cultural bloggers such as Sharon Bakar, a Brit who has made Malaysia her home.

So I thought: Wouldn’t it be great to hear more “fusion stories” from around the world?

I am issuing an Open Invitation to all my readers - and anyone who happens upon this blog by chance - to write a post for Fusion View about any cross-cultural aspects in your life. I would love to build this blog into a community blog or forum and I hope that you will take part and share your stories.

I would love to hear your story if your family or you have migrated from East to West or West to East - or in fact, any place that is culturally different from your country of origin (so South Africa to Germany counts as would New York to Toulouse etc).

What is your experience of moving your life across the world? What have you loved about your new life? What helped to get you through the tough times?

Or maybe you are living and working in the medium- to long- term in another country. What cultural curiosities have you noticed?

The questions I’ve mentioned are meant just to start you off and are not specific requirements. The content of your blog post is up to you - but your post must be relevant to
the topic I’ve described and in keeping with the aims of Fusion View, which is to celebrate fusion lives and diversity.

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Our first fusion story by a guest blogger will be posted on Thursday 22 June 2006 after 08.30am so come by then and check it out.

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Your fusion story should be no more than 1000 words. Please read my Guest Blogging Submission Guidelines here - or see the Announcements section of the sidebar on the near right.

You can submit your posts anytime starting now. If I like them and they are suitable, they will be posted onto Fusion View as soon I have approved them. This Open Invitation will close by midnight on 31 August 2006.

You can submit your fusion story to me by using the form below.

After the laughs we had last week over the wannabe idols’ auditions, the winner is truly sensational! Wow, Malaysians can be proud of a true star - Jacyln Victor.

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To find out more about Jaclyn’s subsequent career after winning Malaysian Idol, click here - http://www.malaysianidol.com.my/12_jac.asp