Iced Tea and Laksa - A Memoir

I’ve been working on a memoir tentatively called Bound Feet Blues for a while now. There is a lot of material and it’s a fairly major task, which I was finding quite daunting. I took a break to experiment with blogging and over the last few months, Fusion View has evolved into this multi-media site that has got me writing and podcasting regularly in between my day job and other commitments. My friends have asked me if the blog is really a distraction technique to give me an excuse not to be getting on with writing the next book. To some extent, i think they may be right! But something exciting has come out of it for the memoir.

I had been struggling for some time now to find my personal narrative voice. The Flame Tree and Mindgame were both thrillers and I wrote those in the particular narrative voice that seems to be required of thrillers. That voice has a terseness and urgency about it. It’s all about verbs and action. Short staccato sentences. Direct, punchy descriptions. I remember being asked by my editor to take out huge chunks of philosophical discussion about the nature of personal freedom and individual choice in Mindgame and essentially, to “cut to the chase”. There are lots of breathless chases in that novel and I had hoped to squeeze in more on the deeper issues that underpin the storyline - but, nope, they had to go, sacrificed to the gods of plot and pace!

So over the past few years, it’s been an interesting struggle, learning to allow myself to take more time over the contemplative passages in my writing. I’ve worked on a couple of novels in the last few years since Mindgame that have been more personal but I’ve not been able to move beyond the first few chapters. The narrative voice is flat and the pacing is uneven. Or, it can’t decide whether it’s inside a thriller or a Henry James novel. I’ve also had difficulty with plotting - in the thrillers, something dramatic happens every few pages and you are pulled along, gasping for breath. I was not used to writing pages and pages where nothing externally dramatic happens (no car chases, no men with guns leaping through the window). It felt scary, taking my time in exploring and inhabiting the emotions and psychological drama within my characters.

What writing this blog has done for my writing style is to enable my own personal voice to come through. In writing these short posts about my family or recipes or what’s been happening in my week, I am learning to speak as me. This is not the voice of the omnipresent, omniscient narrator of the thrillers, nor is it the measured, self-conscious voice of a literary auteur. It’s just me, telling a story, plain and simple. And by speaking like this in my posts every day for the last few months, it’s become natural and comfortable - and not at all scary.

I’ve split the memoir into two books, Bound Feet Blues being the second volume. I am now working on the first part, which I’ve called Iced Tea and Laksa. This weekend, I’ve just finished Chapter One, which weighs in at just over 5600 words. It’ll need some work and editing but that will come later when I have more of the finished book so I can see how it all hangs together. Laksa, for those of you who have not yet discovered this dish, is a Malaysian speciality of noodles in a red curry and coconut soup, served with chicken, bean sprouts and fried tofu. You slurp it with chopsticks and a Chinese L-shaped soup spoon, preferably at a roadside or market stall in the sweltering tropical heat. Do not wear a white shirt!