Writing ProcessTag

Poets Becoming Novelists: On Trusting Leaps and Fragments

I finished the first draft of my novel in mid-March – in the first week of isolation. I hadn’t grasped the gravity of the pandemic then, so I was grateful for the sudden reprieve from the real world. ...

How writing rituals saved me from quitting as a writer

I define my writing ritual as a series of unique actions taken that tells my brain it’s writing and creation time. This is part preparation, part boundary-setting, part protective aura. I know that ...

The Nature of Truth in Art

For my final post as writer-in-residence, I’d like to devote a bit of space to one of the subjects I love to chew on: the nature of truth in art. (As a friend of mine recently noted: ‘You always go ...

Should Memoir be Considered Non-Fiction?

One of the things that makes this question so interesting is that the answer isn’t as obvious or cut-and-dried as it first appears. It varies from country to country, for one thing, changes from culture ...

Memoir is Not the Story of Your Life

The funny thing about memoir is that it is not the story of your life.It is true that memoir deals with and includes stories from the author’s life, but therein lies the distinction. For while autobiography ...

Making Time: Blueprinting, or How Durga Chew-Bose Showed Me the Kinship Between Music and Writing

On the first day of social distancing due to COVID-19, I woke up with my synthesizer beside me. I sat up in bed and stabbed some keys for an hour, fed it into my laptop, put it all aside, and returned ...

On Consolation

1.It’s early February, as I write this in my journal. I’m in Hong Kong at the peak of the coronavirus crisis. At least, it may be the peak. A week ago, I saw in the news alerts on my phone that a ...

On Research

I can be nerdy, at times. I love exploring libraries and getting lost in the archives, as one might expect of someone who’s written two historical novels. My first novel, After the Bloom, focuses on ...

On Family Secrets

Why does my writing tend to focus on family secrets? In particular, on children trying to unearth secrets tied to their parents’ pasts? I’m often asked these questions during interviews. The first ...

On Hanging Laundry

I have an obsession with laundry hung on lines. The image literally stops me in my tracks. There’s so much thought put into the way the sleeves of shirts are pinned just close enough to the hem of a ...