Code-Breaking My Writing DNA
Why writing was so hard for so long
I once wrote few pieces for a local newspaper in Malaysia: what today I’d deem no better than the sophomoric stuff you’d expect of a seventeen-year-old. Who’d read only enough to figure out how to string words together prettily. Who hadn’t read beyond the locus of her years or situation. But life had turned out such that at that young age, I had enough recognition factor to be given some column inches.
In gentler retrospect, I probably had sufficient panache to get some of it moderately passable, though it’s still a challenge not to dismiss it as rubbish. The truth is that in an old-school learning environment I hadn’t been taught to read critically. I had no exposure to big truths or ideas. At university I produced work in elective creative writing classes, in hindsight this was flimsy at best.
If an inborn vein of perfectionism wasn’t enough to scuttle the pull of writing (let’s be honest, it’s more like a mother lode), I had also obediently swallowed a large amount of 1980s zeitgeist pills. We were the next generation of flag bearers leading women out of the prison of stereotypes. The shackles of domesticity were sprung, the gendered gates were open. We could grow up to be more than nurses and teachers. I had a head start. My father had been educated abroad and was modern-minded, my mother worked and eventually ran not one, but two businesses. We had a housekeeper to handle the domestic drudgery. It was a given that I would enjoy opportunities that never manifested themselves for earlier generations of women.
I see now how necessary those times were to combat the decades of gender disparity and bias. But how wounding they were too, as women beat a path towards working life, trying to make it in a man’s world. Knocking their heads against glass ceilings for less money while holding the home together. Perhaps we’d get further and accomplish more if we were Superwomen who could do and have it all - be wives, be supermums and be stars at the office, working twice as hard, as television’s Olivia Pope was taught by her terrifying father, to get half as far.
On top of that we were exhorted to do so flawlessly, seamlessly, to be impeccable on the first try. And it’s here, thirty and more years ago, I ran into trouble. What conditioned my teenage feminist self had hardened into a warped metric by which I assessed my writing. It boiled down to this: both process and prose had to be perfect on the first try. If they weren’t, how could I be a writer? Obviously writing should be as easy and fluid as reading. Somewhere I had fixated on the idea that the act of writing would be discharged as if it were an orchestration for the piano. I’d freestyle my gripping and compelling ideas on the keys, and execute them with a series of pleasing melodic phrases and harmonic chord progressions, some impressive arpeggios and finish with a buoyant glissando.
And if I wasn’t doing that, I wasn’t a writer.
Part of the reason for this misconception may simply be that I didn’t go to writing school, and hence skipped a lot of steps. As the pianist in me didn’t think of practice and rehearsal as inherent components of the performance, the writer in me didn’t understand that writing well is re-writing, again and again and again. And another part of the reason might have been that as a child talent in television advertisements from the age of five, I’d been conditioned to be perform and deliver the goods in as few takes as possible. I had plenty of ideas for books after I graduated from university but wrote hardly anything. Each attempt proved time and again, that by my own standards I didn’t have the chops. I’ve no need to milk the ensuing downward spiral of self-esteem here. I just didn’t accept then, as I do now, that it is all right to write whatever way that I do. Somewhat messy, sometimes unenjoyable and decidedly not Chopin.
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I do seem to get good ideas while standing under a hot shower, but I can’t conceive of writing like swimming in a sparkling, tropical blue sea. Instead it’s still akin to my first dip in the Mediterranean twenty years ago, which I was most excited about and then quickly and sharply disillusioned. From the first shock chill to the ankles, immersion progresses with the speed, but not the elegance of a submarine. When the water comes to the chest, there is an interval of manic prancing up and down if the bottom is within reach of the toes. And once that falls away, I break into an ungainly dog paddle, a risible attempt to keep the head above water just so I can emit squeals of self-pity. Yes, I could turn my back on this horridness, head for the shore and swathe the traumatised body in the comfort of a sun-warmed towel.
What this means is that I would close Microsoft Word and switch to Netflix.
But if I push on and really commit, the mind begins to relent and the body adjusts to the iciness. Then writing and I, we stretch ourselves in deep strokes that take us to another shore. We dance-dive like mermaids. We cruise the tunnelling waves on a surfboard. We kick up a frenzy of splashes and we chase the octopus that points us in the direction of sunken treasure. We fall off a skiff, drown and come back to life. Floating on a moonglade towards the finish line. Dreaming and composing, composing and dreaming, held by the water in her peculiar, invigorating embrace.
One day, writing and I, we might even go skinny-dipping.
Coming June 13: In 2018 I poked a tentative toe into the Penang Strait to write long-form captions for a book of drone photography.
Hi Bettina, interesting! I can see what you are grappling with. I am about to complete my 1-year advanced creative writing course (Cambridge ICE) - now writing a radio script for my last assignment (a simple adaptation of Paradise Lost). Quality writing will always be hard! I think you want that book. I do too. But, things work out differently - as we all know. Cheers OLI, Penang!