Limpeh's reflections on the writing & blogging process

Hello again, my reader John has a rather interesting question which is on the topic of writing and blogging:

john8 April 2015 at 19:17

I agree with Norham, your writing style flows well from point to point. Is this inborn or with a lot of practice? Would be great if you could write an article on how you formulate your thoughts and put it down on paper, and other writing tips.

John, it would be my pleasure to answer your question. Let's start with the first part: I think I had a good start when it came to writing because of my two older sisters. When I was a young kid, they loved sitting me down and telling me stories. Now these were their own stories and they would take turns creating stories to tell me: some were silly, others were epic and I still remember some of them. There was one about a bus driver who decided to drive around the world with his bus and it was all about the adventures he encountered in different countries. You get the idea, we didn't have fancy toys, computers or mobile phones back in those days, so we used our imaginations to amuse ourselves as children. I'm sure that's far more beneficial than kids who spend hours playing Angry Birds.

My sisters would use things they came across in the newspapers or everyday life to create these fascinating characters and I suppose, the way they retold the stories to me involved them repackaging up the information in a narrative and colouring it with their judgement or opinion. They always made it an effort to wrap some kind of moral into the story, but most of all, there was a running theme in their stories. They loved to use comedy to entertain me, so there were always jokes in the story, even if they sometimes resorted to slapstick humour. I remember back i the 1980s, when Malaysia first brought out the Proton Saga car, my sisters created a series of jokes about a car called the 'Ali Mahathir' and the jokes were all about how it would break down or blow up in different ways. Their stories covered a wide range of themes: peer-pressure, self-image, friendship, racism, politics, romance and the generation gap.

Who needs toys when you can play with your imagination?

So that was my childhood in kindergarten and primary school - my sisters indulged my imagination: I would ask them all kinds of questions about these characters, these fictional worlds they created and they always had the answers for me. I read plenty of books but plenty of people read a lot when they were kids, it was this nurturing that my sisters offered me that really gave me the edge when it comes to writing and my command of the English language. They taught me how to express myself and make sense of the world around me through the means of language and they showed me how we can have so much fun simply by expressing ourselves and using our imaginations. So I wouldn't use the word 'inborn' per se, but I must give a lot of credit to my two wonderful sisters for nurturing my creative side from a very young age. They taught me much more than all my primary school teachers ever did.

As I grew older, the story telling reduced but we still kept it going from time to time - but it was something that we did less and less as we got older. My sisters both went to university then got jobs and they became more and more busy with their professional pursuits and had less and less time for their younger kid brother. I got interested in other things as well: sports and music consumed my free time and I was less interested in participating in story telling with my sisters. Ironically, one sister became a journalist and the other went on to co-write a children's book, so I guess this creative streak and command of the English language ran in the family - though you would never know looking at my parents. My dad doesn't speak English and I'm afraid neither of my parents never did anything vaguely creative.

Where does creativity come from?

My mother's idea of participating in the arts was playing the piano, something she insisted that we all did as a children. She wanted her children to be cultured, to be able to play great pieces by Chopin, Beethoven, Bach and Debussy. My sisters were so much better at piano than I ever was and they were so brilliant that they could just sit down at the piano, make up a tune in their head and start playing. My mother was mortified at them playing the piano without reading sheet music - she would scold them, "you don't anyhow play-play liddat, cannot anyhow one!" That is a very sad reflection on her very Singaporean mindset and her inability to understand the creative process - so even if she had the natural talent somewhere, it had long been snuffed out of her by the Singaporean system. Hence I believe that it is not enough to have any inborn ability: that talent needs to be nurtured over time if it is going to be of any use.

I had the confidence to express myself at least with my two sisters from an early age: they were happy to listen to me, answer my questions and in turn they challenged me to come up with my own ideas, they asked me many questions and made me think hard about the answers. That kind of experience early in my life allowed me to find my voice as a writer, to be able to confidently express my views of the world, to know that if I have something interesting to say, people will listen to me. This is why it is important to start this kind of nurturing from a very young age, so that young people can grow up to be articulate and able to express themselves. It is not just about your command of the language(s) you speak, it is far more about feeling confident to speak up and finding your voice to express yourself.

The creativity you see in my blog today was nurtured a long time ago.

I have been blogging since August 2011 and in that first month I got a grand total of 22 pageviews. I've come a long way since in having written 982 articles so far, attracting 6.87 million views and over 10,000 comments on my blog. There is an element of trial and error when it comes to my blogging - clearly some posts are far more popular than others and when I wrote the article about how Singaporeans reacted to Jeraldine Phneah's opinion on LKY's death, it went viral in a matter of hours, I was getting about two month's worth of traffic in a period of 24 hours. I have found out that my most popular articles are the ones when I write about other people rather than myself: LKY, Jeraldine Phneah, Anton Casey, Alvin Tan/Alvivi, Xiaxue/Gushcloud, Amos Yee, Roy Ngerng, Kong Hee and Sun Ho are amongst the reasons why people have come to my blog. My readers are interested in the perspective that I can give to these people who are making the headlines, they are not interested in me (the writer) per se.

I was quite bemused recently when one of my readers left a comment on one of my Amos Yee articles, telling me that I had failed to mention that Amos Yee's mother had made a police report against her own son. And I'm like, dude, please, this is an opinion piece, this is a piece of social analysis: this is not me writing down everything I know about the Amos Yee case. This reader clearly has no idea what it means to create a piece of social commentary like that - the fact is, Amos Yee has been all over the news for weeks and there are thousands of news articles online about him. Come on. A simple Google search would get you more information on Amos Yee than you have the time (or energy to read) - so what is the point in repeating all the facts that are already out there on other websites already anyway?

Do you have anything to say about the Amos Yee case?

To write a good piece of social commentary that people will want to read, you need to offer a personal perspective on an issue - this perspective should be unique and different from what is already out there. Perhaps you have some experience dealing with the issue in your professional life, perhaps you have some personal experience dealing with this issue in your past. Maybe you are able to interview someone who is a witness or closely associated to the event, or perhaps you are able to speak to an expert who can answer some of the more complex questions associated with the event. It is a huge challenge to come up with a unique perspective like that: journalists are paid to spend time and money finding that perfect angle for a good story but for us bloggers, it is more a question of being at the right place at the right time. I would love to interview a Californian legal expert and quiz him/her about just how about just how much trouble Ouyang Xiangyu is in and what she can expect from the American justice system. But I ran through my contacts and just don't have someone I can speak to. That would've made have made a really awesome blog piece but unfortunately I have neither the contacts nor the resources to do it at the moment.

When you're dealing with a topical issue like the Amos Yee saga, you have to be very clear about what angle you're using. If you are too ambitious and try to cover too much ground, then you are unlikely to be able to do the topic justice even if you write a very, very long post. My preferred method is to identify a clearly defined theme that I can analyse and explore within a short piece, that should take my reader no more than a few minutes to read. I have this "page down x10" rule: when I complete a draft, I always make sure that I can scroll through it by pressing the page down key no more than ten times. Sometimes I just have to allow myself to break that rule if I have a really good story, but I don't want people to get impatient and give up when they start to read my article. I know what I am competing with on social media these days, so I use graphics and videos to break up the wall of text to make sure it looks visually attractive and it should feel like reading an interesting glossy magazine with nice photos, rather than a very tedious textbook.

I have a lot of competition in social media.

As for the writing process, most of it goes on in my head actually. As I am walking down the street or cooking, I am always thinking about my writing - I rarely write anything down until I am ready to start an article. Once I do, I may write down a few bullet points to make sure I cover everything I have thought about but even then, I find that once I start writing, the ideas just flow and other ideas will pop into my mind and I am never really too rigid when it comes to sticking to a structure. When I complete an article, I usually prefer to leave it for at least 24 hours so I can revisit it a day later with fresh eyes, in order to edit the piece and see how it comes across. This is not always possible if I am rushing out a piece covering a topical issue that is making the headlines, but ideally I like to have plenty of time to edit my own work to make sure I iron out any mistakes or add some new ideas to the piece.

And finally, if you wish to test your writing skills, blogging is an excellent way to do so. The problem with asking a teacher or a mentor to check your writing is that you only get the opinion of one person and there is a limit to how many people you can realistically ask to read your work that way. But when you start blogging, you can monitor the traffic to your blog and you can see which articles are getting more hits and which ones are less popular. Even for me, there is a huge variation in terms of the volume of traffic I get to my pieces - I'm not really chasing readership numbers to be honest and I don't expect this piece to get a huge number of hits, but I have enjoyed sharing my writing experiences with you and perhaps that's what it is all about. I blog because I enjoy writing very much and I hope writing will bring you as much pleasure. So, that's it from me on this topic for now. Many thanks for reading!