Hot-housing

In the last couple of months, I’ve been collaborating on a TV drama with the other lawyer-turned-writer, Caro Fraser. We’ve been keeping things under wraps so we could hot-house the project and not dissipate our creative energy talking about it to others. We are now about half-way through and it’s going pretty well. So I got the OK from Caro to mention it on the blog.

We are still keeping the subject matter and storyline confidential – again, so that we don’t dilute what gets written down on the page with having talked about it endlessly to anyone and everyone. I have found this approach really helpful – it was how I tackled writing The Flame Tree: no-one knew the whole story but me and I didn’t express it anywhere but onto the pages I wrote. Since that time, I’ve realised that part of the difficulty I’ve had in making progress with Novel No. 3 is that I’ve talked to people about it and it’s as if, in telling others what the book is about, there’s no urgency or impetus anymore in actually writing it down.

Towards the end of this month, I’ll be in Malaysia for a week and I’ve been invited to a number of book events at MPH and also at Sharon Bakar’s “Readings” group for writers. I’m really excited about having the opportunity to read some of my work at Readings. I’ve been following the various events there on Sharon’s blog over the last year and thinking: writers in KL are so lucky to have that support network to read and discuss writing, I really would love to go along if I could. And now, Sharon has generously invited me along to the meeting on Saturday 24 February and I’m thrilled.

But now I have a dilemma. Having realised that hot-housing seems to be an integral part of my personal writing process and that I’ve dissipated my creative energy on Novel No. 3 by talking about it, including discussing it for The Star magazine profile about me and writing about it here on Fusion View, should I read an extract from the novel at Readings while the book is still a work in progress? Will reading it out aloud diffuse the energy even more? Or will having some feedback from Malaysian writers inspire me to get on with it with greater vigour?

I have a short story that I wrote in one sitting a few months ago. It doesn’t have a Malaysian theme and the ending needs to be beefed up. But it’s pretty much completed and it’s a story that is personal for me, about a turning point in my life. It’s called The Canyon, about a camping trip and trek in the Grand Canyon – perhaps I’ll read that instead.

Photo: thanks to fozylet from flickr.com