Monday, December 1
December's First Post
My professor, M.A. Quayum once told me something like this
'If you want to be a real writer, try not to enter journalism. Become a journalist, and lose that stylistic strength.'
In preparation for one of my Malaysian Literature in English course presentations, I wrote to Kee Thuan Chye, writer of that play We Could **** You, Mr Birch! and asked him what he felt about what Prof Quayum had said. Kee is a journalist, and is currently the editor of Section Two's 'Mind Our English' columns. Kee agreed: Don't go on the journalistic path if you want to become a real writer. The concept was this, when you become used to writing to reports, you just might lose your imaginative self, and it will take forever for you to actually finish a 368-page novel.
I had always considered journalists as real writers until those lectures and projects. When I sat in those classes, I had already been meeting up with youths and people in my quest 'to become a journalist', and I've always thought, 'What fun! What great joy!! This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.' And having two established figures telling me that journalism kills the writing bug, well... I certainly have some thoughts against that.
I mean, heck, journalists write, for the papers. They are real, unless those people I meet in the newsroom are all walking mannequins who just happen to walk and talk like real life people.... I just did not get the term, 'Real Writers'.
Mind you, it was really a wet splash on my bursting ego, wanting to have my very own book published someday and always thinking that I was on the right track, and then two important experts are telling me to 'Get The Hell Out Of Journalism!!'
So well, I got out of journalism for a while to concentrate on my studies. And then I started this blog thinking that, apart from the legal and perfectly excusable motive to gloat and indulge in how terribly clever I am
, I thought that blogging would be a very good way of practicing good readable writing because all that academic report work was molding my writing into a very mundane and boring academic-type genre.
Recently, as I returned to writing for the papers after a 1 1/2 year hiatus, several very boring academic submissions, daily scrutinizations of past year papers and book-blurbs, and almost-daily blogging, I found it extremely difficult to open my articles.
I used to be pretty good at writing article-openers. It was always the ending that gave me the problems. The openers would just appear like magic on my computer screen and my problem was always with ending the article... I usually wrote too long and forgot the original way that I had intended to end an article in. But this time it was the other way around, I could not even start my article. Every time I wrote a paragraph, I would look at it, and it looked merely bloggable, not readable. And it definitely was unpublishable.
Hence I have come to this conclusion. It is TERRIBLY, difficult to switch from one style to another as you get slowly accustomized to one method. And blogging may not necessarily be a good way to improve your style of writing, if you want to be a good real writer.
That is, if you take the definition of a 'good' and 'real' writer to be one that publishes good novels. Someone like Hemingway, Steinbeck, Bellow or darling Rowling.
But then, I think if that first novel is going to be something in the lines of Sue Townsend, Ros Asquith or Helen Fielding, blogging would definitely be a fantastic method of honing your skills.
On a lighter note, I finally met the notorious Edrei and his beautiful girlfriend Milee yesterday, along with fellow blogger Albert Ng. And you know what? Edrei doesn't look and talk notorious at all. Milee is amazingly petite and sweet, and Justine thought right; Albert is quite a looker.
That's very good news.
'If you want to be a real writer, try not to enter journalism. Become a journalist, and lose that stylistic strength.'
In preparation for one of my Malaysian Literature in English course presentations, I wrote to Kee Thuan Chye, writer of that play We Could **** You, Mr Birch! and asked him what he felt about what Prof Quayum had said. Kee is a journalist, and is currently the editor of Section Two's 'Mind Our English' columns. Kee agreed: Don't go on the journalistic path if you want to become a real writer. The concept was this, when you become used to writing to reports, you just might lose your imaginative self, and it will take forever for you to actually finish a 368-page novel.
I had always considered journalists as real writers until those lectures and projects. When I sat in those classes, I had already been meeting up with youths and people in my quest 'to become a journalist', and I've always thought, 'What fun! What great joy!! This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.' And having two established figures telling me that journalism kills the writing bug, well... I certainly have some thoughts against that.
I mean, heck, journalists write, for the papers. They are real, unless those people I meet in the newsroom are all walking mannequins who just happen to walk and talk like real life people.... I just did not get the term, 'Real Writers'.
Mind you, it was really a wet splash on my bursting ego, wanting to have my very own book published someday and always thinking that I was on the right track, and then two important experts are telling me to 'Get The Hell Out Of Journalism!!'
So well, I got out of journalism for a while to concentrate on my studies. And then I started this blog thinking that, apart from the legal and perfectly excusable motive to gloat and indulge in how terribly clever I am
, I thought that blogging would be a very good way of practicing good readable writing because all that academic report work was molding my writing into a very mundane and boring academic-type genre.
Recently, as I returned to writing for the papers after a 1 1/2 year hiatus, several very boring academic submissions, daily scrutinizations of past year papers and book-blurbs, and almost-daily blogging, I found it extremely difficult to open my articles.
I used to be pretty good at writing article-openers. It was always the ending that gave me the problems. The openers would just appear like magic on my computer screen and my problem was always with ending the article... I usually wrote too long and forgot the original way that I had intended to end an article in. But this time it was the other way around, I could not even start my article. Every time I wrote a paragraph, I would look at it, and it looked merely bloggable, not readable. And it definitely was unpublishable.
Hence I have come to this conclusion. It is TERRIBLY, difficult to switch from one style to another as you get slowly accustomized to one method. And blogging may not necessarily be a good way to improve your style of writing, if you want to be a good real writer.
That is, if you take the definition of a 'good' and 'real' writer to be one that publishes good novels. Someone like Hemingway, Steinbeck, Bellow or darling Rowling.
But then, I think if that first novel is going to be something in the lines of Sue Townsend, Ros Asquith or Helen Fielding, blogging would definitely be a fantastic method of honing your skills.
On a lighter note, I finally met the notorious Edrei and his beautiful girlfriend Milee yesterday, along with fellow blogger Albert Ng. And you know what? Edrei doesn't look and talk notorious at all. Milee is amazingly petite and sweet, and Justine thought right; Albert is quite a looker.
That's very good news.
