Archive for the 'YM's books and writings' Category

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been collaborating with another lawyer-turned-writer, Caro Fraser on a TV drama. While my books have been legal thrillers, Caro’s novels have focused more on human relationships and drama. I had never worked on a joint writing project before and at first, I was worried that with two strong-willed, highly creative people whose previous writings have little in common working together, we might end up in arguments and never speaking to each other again. I am pleased to report that we haven’t exchanged fisticuffs at all!

We have both in fact been invigorated by this collaboration. My action/ thriller approach to story brings thrills and spills and driving momentum to the pacing. Caro’s more detailed approach to relationships puts a brake on my more outlandish ideas, tempering them to fit the human drama. We’ve both also enjoyed talking over plot points and character motivation and trying out different angles and possibilities.

Writing a novel on your own can be a long, tortuous and isolating process. No-one knows your characters or story as well as you do so although you may discuss and explore certain aspects with a friend or another writer, their input is limited. Collaborating with another writer means you both own the project and we are both very keen to make sure the other person has a stake in each step of the process. We both have an in-depth knowledge of the characters and their motivations and a shared vision for the outcome of the story. We rely on each other’s focus and creativity as much as on our own input. It’s been a hugely refreshing process and I think, we’ve both learnt a lot that we can also carry on in our future individual writing projects.

Caro comes round to my place every other Friday morning and we work till lunch time, capturing our character sketches and story arc on a laptop. We both contribute mid-morning munchies – very important! – spring rolls, prawn toast, onion bhajis, quiche etc. We sit at my dining table or wander around the room going: How about this? What about if…? No, wait, scrap that, try this for an idea… Yes, yes, I like that… Mmmm, I’m not sure about this…

After Caro heads off home, I am usually completely shattered. This creativity business really is exhausting but I really feel a sense of achievement. I imagine that this must be how athletes feel after a good round of tennis or a marathon! We’ve now finished the character briefs and their story arcs, an outline for the six episodes and a rough sketch for the actual dialogue of the first episode. When I get back from KL in March, we’ll start work on polishing the script for the first episode and putting the treatment together to submit to the TV people.

Photo: thanks to accentinteractive.net

I will be flying out to KL at the end of this week. On Saturday morning 24 Feb at 11am – 12.30pm, I will be speaking at the LitBloggers Inaugural event with Sharanya Manivannan at MPH Bangsar Village Phase II.

Kenny Mah has created a great banner for the event – at the end of this post. Thanks, Kenny! Do copy it and put it on your blog or email it to your friends.

If you can’t make the Saturday event, I will be at MPH Midvalley on Sunday 25 Feb at 3pm – 4.30pm doing book signings and to chat informally.

If you have any specific questions or issues on blogging or writing you’d like me to discuss at either of these events, why not add a comment or email me this week. Please do so by Thursday 22 Feb 6pm Malaysian time – I will be offline after that travelling.

Hope to see you this coming weekend!

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

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On Saturday 24 February, I will be joining the inauguaral Breakfast Club for LitBloggers in Kuala Lumpur. The event is run by MPH Bookstores and will be at MPH Bangsar Village Phase II from 10am - 11.30am. MPH have invited me to speak about how blogging has helped me with my writing and give tips on how to get published in the UK. If you’re in KL that day, do come to the event and say “hi”. The other litblogger will be poet Sharanya Manivannan and I am looking forward to meeting her and hearing about the poetry scene in KL.

Eric Forbes, MPH’s book editor, has put up more details on his blog - click here.

How did this come about?

Well, just before Christmas, I made plans to go back to Kuala Lumpur for a week at the end of February. I emailed Sharon Bakar who blogs at www.thebookaholic.blogspot.com to let her know and ask if she would like to meet for coffee. Sharon is originally from the UK but has been living in Malaysia for over twenty years and is KL’s creative writing guru. I came to know of her through the global literary blogging community and we’ve been in touch via email and keeping up with each other’s blogs.

Anyway, Sharon suggested to MPH that they might like to involve me in an event and they emailed me to invite me to the Breakfast Club. I am thrilled to have a chance to meet readers, bloggers and other literary types at their event - and it will also be the first time that I will be seeing Sharon in person. It’s going to be a fun morning so I hope you can join us.

I hope also that they lay on a lot of coffee for the Breakfast part of the club - I’m arriving from London late the night before and I’ll need the caffeine to blast away my jet-lag!

Working on the Malaysian English of my third novel has made me think about that peculiarly Malaysian word “-lah”. It’s not really a word, I suppose - more a suffix used from time to time in colloquial Malaysian English as an emphasiser. “-Lah” is used only in Malaysia, as far as I know.

There’s a great entry in Wikipedia about Malaysian English with a section on the use of “-lah”. The entry implies that it derives from Chinese rather than Malay, although there is a suffix “-lah” used in Malay. I believe that the usage and context of the sound in Malay and Malaysian English are different - the “-lah” of Malay is a grammatical element that is integral to the language whereas “-lah” in Malaysian English can be dropped without changing the meaning. This is my lay person’s understanding - if there are any linguists or academics out there who would like to comment or deepen our understanding on this point, please do add a comment!

There’s also long discourse on Malaysian English - aka Manglish to afficionados - at Malaysia Uncut.

I speak in Manglish with my family and Malaysian friends and happily slip into “-lah” this and “-lah” that. If an English friend is also present, I can switch to full English English in the same breath as I turn towards them. My English friends who have visited Malaysia use “-lah” when remembering the fun times they had on their visits - but it sounds weird when tacked onto a proper English English sentence!

I’d love to hear from Malaysians living in Malaysia or abroad about your emotional connection with “-lah” and/ or Malaysian English. And also any migrants to Malaysia from other English speaking countries - have you got the hang of Lah-Lah land?

Photo: thanks to gamleys .co.uk

I’ve been blogging here at Fusion View since June this year - and before that at a blogspot site. In the few months since then, I’ve been very fortunate to have had many diverse visitors and contributors from all over the world, helping me build a cross-cultural community. I’m delighted to share with you some very generous reviews about Fusion View… See the links below:

“an incredibly rich and inspirational literary site that has gained recognition from fellow artists, writers and the literary web community in general” - 9rules Network

“A truly cross-cultural blog on writing and a whole lot more” - Imagined Community (http://imagined-community.com/blog/?p=29)

“Yang-May Ooi’s excellent East-West writing blog. Well worth a visit.” - Will Buckingham

Photo: from flickr thanks to Pete R

I’ve been re-working the draft of my third novel Tianming Traviata recently.

The novel is an off-beat family drama with a cast of quirky, colourful characters. The main character is a 70-year old cabaret singer, Evie, who is still going strong in her sequinned gowns and feather headdresses. She owns the only nightclub in a small town in Malaysia and sings old show tunes, with the “grand dame” air of days gone by. Her neice Kit-Mei works as software programmer in Kuala Lumpur, a blogging, city-slicking modern young woman who is very much part of 21st century Malaysia. The family are thrown into crisis when Evie’s daughter disappears and the clash between the old and the new generations are brought to a head.

I had been writing it in Standard English using a third person narrative structure. It was zipping along nicely - but it just lacked “oomph” and I was finding that I was getting bored. The dialogue bits were fine when Evie was in the thick of the action. But the narrative was just lacklustre. Now, if the author is bored by the novel, there’s no hope that the narrative will be able to grip others!

So I put it away for several months. Then a few weeks ago, Evie’s voice kept coming back to me. In the dialogue bits, she is in full flow, loud and raucous and full of energy - speaking in Malaysian English. In contrast, the third person narrative was in measured, proper, sensible full sentences with proper syntax, grammar and punctuation.

And I thought, why not try writing the narrative bits in Malaysian English? Yah, why not-lah? So stupid I was before. This one is Evie’s story-lah so, of course, got to tell it with her voice, isn’t it?

Since then, I’ve had such fun getting the narrative down in the voice of a 70 year old cabaret singer who will not let her arthritic hip stop her doing high-kicks and whose language is full of verve and peppered with “-lah”s.

When I’ve got a bit further along with the text, I will upload a podcast reading of the first chapter so you can see what you think. In particulary, I would be interested to see the response of Malaysians to the use of our form of the English language in fiction.

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To hear what Malaysian English sounds like in contrast to Standard UK English, listen to my podcast “Two Voices” about my “schizophrenic” relationship with language.

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I will write more next week about “-lah” and its use in Malaysian English.

I am thrilled that Sarah Yeh, the founder of DimSum, the British Chinese Community website, has invited me to write an article for them about the inspirations for my writing - and blogging.

You can read the article here - http://www.dimsum.co.uk/community/fusion-view.html

The title to this post - and the illustration - is misleading, I’m afraid. I have to confess that the article on DimSum is in English and not in Chinese. To my eternal shame, I can’t read or write Chinese - I grew up in Malaysia speaking English: my parents, grandparents and extended family all speak English as their every day language. I think in English. So you could say that English is my mother tongue.

I remember going to Chinese lessons where we learnt to speak Mandarin and had to write out words/ characters endlessly. It was sooo boring. Especially as I never had the need to actually use it in daily life. I guess it would have been different if we’d had Mandarin speaking friends or gone on holidays to China. But no, it felt as obscure as learning Latin…

Following on from my post Blind Date with a Literary Agent (Part 1), I had made dates to meet three literary agents.

On the appointed day, I went to see Agent No. 1 in her office in Central London. It was a bright spring morning and I felt like I was in a dream. Sitting in her booklined office, I realised I was “on the inside” now. I had got beyond the door that was closed to so many would-be writers and I was actually in a literary agent’s office meeting face to face.

She took out my manuscript and said, “Well, it’s not Wild Swans, is it?”

This did not sound good. “Ummm, no.”

“I was expecting another Wild Swans. That’s what’s hot at the moment.”

“Oh.”

How was I going to explain that the whole point was that this was the anti-Wild Swans. No bound feet, no sob stories: just a feisty, modern Chinese heroine in a battle of wits against gangsters in a John Grisham-esque plot.

“It would be hard to sell,” she went on. “But if you want me to represent you, I can do that. You’ll need to do some work to this draft, though.”

She thought Jasmine was unsympathetic and I needed to make some changes to soften her hard edges.

I left somewhat deflated. Could an agent who didn’t “get” what I was trying to do really represent me properly?

Agent No. 2 was more enthusiastic. She loved it, it was marvellous, I wrote well. etc. But Jasmine needed softening again.

“OK, what needs changing?” I was too close to Jasmine and the settings I had placed her in to see clearly what I needed to do. I needed someone to give me clear guidance - someone to say: here, in this scene, do this; over here, when she says that, show her emotions behind it…

I took out my notebook and paper, poised to take some notes. Agent No. 2 talked around the first few chapters in what seemed like a cloud of sensibility but there was nothing specific I could write down. I left with a blank notebook.

I had a couple of hours before I was due to see Agent No. 3. I went home and lay down on the sofa with one arm over my eyes. This was not turning out how I had imagined. I felt vague and befuddled by Agent No. 2’s suggestions - I had no idea what she wanted me to change. I felt depressed by Agent No. 1 who had been hoping to sell another Chinese hard luck story.

“It all hangs on Agent No. 3 now, ” I said to Angie as I left for Westbourne Park. The sky had turned grey. Spring had shrunk away.

Agent No. 3 had a clear, clipped voice and no-nonsense manner. She reminded me of a lawyer. She asked me precise questions about who I was, where I’d come from and where I was planning to go with my writing. She set out clearly what she was going to do for me and what she wanted from me. She told me I had to rewrite the whole of the first chapter and put Jasmine in context. We needed to see her feelings and her conflict about her past in contrast to her apparently gilded present. I took notes.

This was my kind of agent. A lawyer-type agent. It turned out she came from a long line of lawyers, including some judges. I left her office that evening with a jaunty swagger and a spring in my heart. This blind date was the one for me!

It was going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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If you take away one thing from this tale of blind dates:

Give yourself the chance to find the literary agent that clicks with you and your style.

Following the advice from UK literary agent Lucy Luck, I thought I would share my personal experience of the submission process for the manuscript of my first novel, The Flame Tree.

I was about three-quarters of the through writing the novel when I got a voicemail message from a friend. She had mentioned to some her friends at a dinner party that I was writing a book set in Malaysia with a Chinese heroine. One of the people there was a literary agent. The agent had said “Book by Chinese women are hot right now. Tell Yang-May to send me her manuscript when she’s finished.”

My friend’s voice crackled out of my answering machine, “So, are you finished yet?”

As you can imagine, I didn’t do anything but write like crazy the next couple of months till I had finished the book and polished and re-polished it. When the time came to submit the manuscript, though, I decided to send it to two other agents in addition to my friend’s friend. It was a risk because it might upset my friend’s friend (let’s call her Agent No. 1). But I wanted the option to see a selection of agency styles, personalities and portfolios.

So with the input of my friend, I chose two more agents. Agent No. 2 was younger and just starting to build a portfolio of her own within the agency where she had been a junior agent. She was likely to be “hungry” and work hard to promote my book. Agent No. 3 was a highly respected and influential name within the industry, specialising in high-brow literature and quality thrillers.

I sent out my covering letter, first three chapters and synopsis. And waited.

The calls came within two weeks. They all wanted to meet with me. They were all a bit miffed that I had submitted to other agents besides them. But that was good, because it put me in the driving seat. They all loved it but they all advised it needed work. “Fine,” I said, “Let’s talk and whoever I go with, I’ll make whatever changes you want.”

I made appointments to see them all, one after the other on the same day.

Who would I choose? Agent No. 1 who had come to me first? Agent No. 2 who was young and hungry? Or Agent No. 3, established leader in her field? Who would be my “Blind Date”?

Read more next week…..