Writing ProcessTag

When old ways, thoughts, beliefs, and people no longer serve you

“Every moment is a fresh beginning.” —T.S. EliotLately I have been thinking about the act of releasing the things in my life that no longer serve me. When I revise a piece of writing, the first ...

Writing Beyond the End of the World

We spend our days scrolling through countless words. Many of us are fixated on screens from the moment we awake until the moment we return to the same bed to sleep. And from day to day, not a whole lot ...

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 ...