Aspiring Writer? Tips For Teens…

I have always wondered, in a back-of-the-mind kind of way, why so few of the young people who aspire to become writers in Singapore actually make it.  No, quoting the National Arts Council and its list of known writers at me does not count (and do you notice a typo or two on the page linked to?)

There are certainly a lot of people out there who want to write, especially novels, short stories and yes, manga.  I’ve met a number, most recently at the NaNoWriMo 2009 kickoff party just a month ago.  Most of them are still studying.  (Those who aspire to make a living from dry, real-life things like columns, advertorials and socioeconomic or political commentaries tend to be a lot older, or at least have been pigeonholed into it, like me.)

I keep asking, though: how many of these creatively minded teenagers will go on to actually become known writers?  Some will certainly find their way into SPH, where they’ll be thoroughly disillusioned to discover that a journalist’s work is only about ten percent actual writing—the rest is an unholy mixture of 24/7 ground-pounding and 7/52 corporate stuff.  And the actual writing itself is done within such a tight deadline that there’s no room to go on being creative…well, that’s debatable, but just look at the Straits Times.  It’s often very difficult to tell who wrote an article without reading the byline.  Most writers’ individual styles are subsumed by the twin constraints of time and the editorial pencil.

Then one day, I decided to scope out the competition here.  I opened up Writers.Net and had a look under “Singapore”.  As expected, I found an eclectic mix of professionals, part-timers and wannabes.  I was also horribly embarrassed to discover my own profile, grossly outdated and not in the least reflective of what I can actually do now.

My embarrassment was quickly killed, however, by the following discoveries of dozens of teenage profiles, possibly posted due to the advice of doting teachers or enthusiastic CCA seniors.  Most of them had pseudonyms that were…well…teenage.  Some posted personal information like their hobbies, their favourite books (usually fantasy novels) or their pets.  Others had set down very creative but still cringeworthy passages of prose that were meant to show their literary skills.

I winced.  Then I went to update my own profile in a hurry.  Then I decided to share some tips on turning literary aspiration into reality, at the risk of severely pissing off some of those creative teenagers whose names and details I shall not post here.  For young people only: three tips to make things, if not better, then more easily transited between your teens, tweens and thirties.

1) Evaluate Your Email

The first place to start is with your email.  You probably created a very cool email address when you first discovered the wonders of the Internet, and you might have a lovingly angsty nickname to go with it.  Sending your latest manuscript to a publisher, even an online publisher, with that cutesy pseudonym isn’t going to get you a serious evaluation, though.  Take it from me.  I used the email ID darth_mint for years, since I was thirteen in fact; got numerous puzzled questions and odd looks about it and am now quietly shifting all my work-related correspondence to a more professional-sounding Gmail address.  Think of your writing as a serious, ongoing thing that’s going to grow up with you.  Give it room to grow—don’t trap it in an eternal box of teenage interests.

2) Personalize Your Profiles

Exactly how many online profiles have you got?  Do you even remember them all?  What services do you subscribe to?  Do you really need them?  What on earth have you posted on them?  These questions repeatedly come up in news articles on digital privacy, and if you can’t answer them, you may be in trouble.  Information that was posted on the spur of the moment can come back to haunt you years later.  When you’re 40 years old, professional, dignified and earning $8,000 a month, do you really want a business contact saying “I saw your (insert website name here) profile, crystalline_mistlover_shadow is a rather…interesting nickname…” ???

Yikes.

I deleted a variety of online profiles some time ago.  Then I overhauled the remaining ones (Writers.Net, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) to display only the sort of information I thought I’d be comfortable with in ten years’ time.  And I bookmarked them all so I can keep overhauling them.  And I created a new profile, email and all, solely for the purpose of signing up for things like online games, socially suspicious networks and so on.  K.I.S.S.—Keep It Separate, Stupid!

3) Review Your Blog

Just what have you written on your blog?  Better look back through the archives and start throwing old posts out.  Even more than your online profiles, the content of your blog can give away things about your personality that you might not want people knowing.

It’s more than tidying up your image, though.  A blog is a very, very powerful tool for advertising what you’re capable of.  So what if you’re sixteen and haven’t got a portfolio to show anyone?  Your blog can be your portfolio.  Post your top-scoring essays.  Post observations about current affairs.  Post short stories that you wrote, and make knowledgeable-sounding comments on them so people can see you actually think about your work.  If you absolutely must have a public venting space for your personal emotional crises, make another blog for that and keep it private.

The same, by the way, goes for any personal website you might own (and do you even remember what web domains you have?)  I was actually relieved when Yahoo! Geocities went down and took my fiction-hosting homepage with it.  Not because the work there was bad, but because its presentation was still pegged somewhat to the teenage time loop.  I still remember my supervisor at MCYS, where I did my university internship, remarking that she’d found my website and read some of the juvenilely formatted stories…ouch.

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Now…I’m sure I have more work to do on all three of the above.  I’m a decade out of my teens, but that doesn’t mean I’m immune to teenage nuttiness…

 

Phone Calls And Common Sense

6535 6191.  Beware of timeshare and free gift scams if you get a call from this number.  Why?  Here’s a little experience I had yesterday.

While out on a job (attending a product launch, in fact) I got two missed calls from 65356191, within two minutes of each other.  Now when you’re a freelancer, you just don’t let calls go unanswered or missed calls go without followup.  It might be a job offer.  It might be a story lead.  So I called back, and got someone who had no idea why I’d been called.  He said he’d check with the person in charge.  Fair enough.

One hour later, 6535 6191 called back again – this time while I was interviewing someone for another job!  Not convenient to speak now, I told him.  I’ll call you back in two hours.  So two hours later I’d wound up everything and found a nice quiet place to chase down this persistent caller.  What do you know, line busy.

Eventually they called back, nearly six hours after the initial missed calls.  Oh.  They wanted to verify my details because I’d helpfully answered a phone survey last week.  Name, age, occupation, etc.  Fair enough.  People who do surveys are doing market research, and I know the value of that.  But instead of thanking me and ringing off after I’d confirmed that yes, this was my name, yes, I’m this age, yes, I am a writer – he said that I was being offered a free gift for having participated in the survey.  How nice.  Well, if you have my phone number, you surely have my address.  Send it to me.  Much appreciated.

Oh, wait.  He had THREE free gifts for me.  And the first one was $1,000 worth of shopping vouchers.  You’re kidding, right?  $1,000 worth of shopping vouchers for answering a phone survey?  Those were almost my exact words to him.  His response was to tell me I could collect all these marvellous free gifts if I came down to their product launch this evening.

I was annoyed by now.  This blathering idiot with his patently fake promises of oversized freebies was eating up my phone plan’s free talktime, and when your income is unstable from month to month, time, whether the phone’s or yours, COSTS.  I ought to charge him for all the time I’d already wasted trying to call him back!  I told him curtly, “Send me the details and a media pass.  I did say I’m a writer.  If you have my phone number, you ought to have my email.  Send me the time, date and venue, register me as invited media and I’ll cover your product launch for the papers.”

He uh’d, um’d and said he’d have to check with his supervisor.  Then he rang off.

I did a little internet search on the number my caller ID had registered as 6536 6191.  What do you know, linked to something about promotions, prizes and time shares.  SCAM, said my instincts.  Yep.  Especially as he hadn’t even given his name or his company’s name.  So on the off chance that someone else gets a ring from these fellows and has the common sense to run an internet search of their own, here’s the number and what I heard from it.

You know, I still haven’t gotten that media pass from him.

In other news, I am online uncharacteristically early today despite having been up till 2 a.m. last night, drafting out the text for a 30 Nov deadline.  Reason: the damn parrot shook me out of bed at 8 with an appalling noise.

A Leonid-Speckled Night

Shooting stars, shrieking astronomers and snail orgies.  After reading that this year’s Leonid meteor shower was going to be the most spectacular since 1998, I decided it was time I did the skywatching thing and went to see some shooting stars for myself.  As it happened, I wasn’t the only one with that idea.  The Singapore Science Centre and TASOS, the Astronomical Society of Singapore, were co-organizing a full-scale event to get people out in the meteor rain, involving stage games, a LED kite show, talks on astronomy, movie screenings and whoa!  They’d invited Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam as the guest of honor, which has me wondering if he’s an astronomy buff or something…

The Festival of Stars, as it was called, started at 8pm on 17 Nov and was held in the Japanese Garden.  I went with a friend and only got there at midnight, which was fortunate, because it meant that we missed the people who were only there for the games and light shows.  As it was, there must have been over a hundred skywatchers camping out on groundsheets, mats and even newspapers.  I promptly pitied the gardeners.  The Japanese Garden is a beautifully manicured park with thick, lush grass, and all the skywatchers were now flattening it.

We spent some time wandering around, looking for a dark place with a poor view of the path light and a good view of the sky, and got an eyeful of the local fauna in the process.  There were families with small children – still out despite the late hour – students in party groups, casual skywatchers like us and of course the professionals with their huge electronic scopes.  Oh, and at one point we came across a large cluster of palm-sized snails crawling all over each other in the grass.  Two in particular were snuggled body to body while several others were lined up in a neat row behind them, apparently waiting for a turn…

The snails weren’t the only fauna there to pak tor.  We saw plenty of couples cuddling on mats in the darkest places, and I bet some of them were seeing stars of a different kind before the night was over.

Eventually we found a good spot on a ridge and contributed our own plastic sheet to the flattening of the grass.  There was a lot of cloud cover, but patches of sky were visible with stars in them.  As the stage activities ended, some of the crowd started to leave, and the noise level went down.  Someone off to the right was lighting heart-shaped red lanterns and floating them off into the sky, where they receded to the size of  stars themselves – before going out and plummeting down to contribute to the litter already left by the crowd.  Near the stage area, the movie screenings started.  And all the skywatchers lay back to wait for the show to start.

It was nearly three hours before we saw anything that looked even remotely like a shooting star.  In the meantime, we entertained ourselves by spotting constellations and planets through the clouds.  (Mars, Betelgeuse, Orion!) Some other people were watching the movies, and in one particularly dark area the real astronomers were viewing Jupiter through their scope.  An ambulance had gone through that darkened area earlier, not to attend to anyone but presumably to set up a first-aid station in case anyone passed out or fell into one of the ponds (shallow, but lined with rocks that can give a nasty bump, and don’t forget bad-tempered monitor lizards that hide in the grass and bite!)

At one point I visited the washroom, and was disgusted to see the floor covered with mud and bits of grass and twig and one sink choked with the same debris.  The source?  Ladies who unwisely wore slippers, thongs or open-toed sandals and then had to wash their feet.  Climbing wet and grassy slopes in that sort of “shoe” is a great way to pick up mud.  Bringing the mud into a public washroom and leaving it in the sink is not great.

Around 3am I started having optical hallucinations brought on by staring at the stars for too long.  On the bright side, my friend had them too.  We compared notes and concluded that the momentary thin flashing streaks we’d seen were, in fact, shooting stars, parts of the meteor shower that were visible to the naked eye.  But we didn’t see anything verifiably meteoric until 4.10am or so, when a white ball of fire flashed into the sky trailing a corona of green-tinged flame and then went out with a flare so tangible it seemed audible, leaving a swathe of smoke that stayed for nearly ten seconds!  Down near the exhibition area, the astronomers cheered – men yelling, ladies shrieking, clapping and whistles all around.

That was the biggest meteor we saw all night.  After it came larger versions of the thin streaks we’d seen earlier, some with noticeable fireballs at the end.  Each one was greeted by shrieks and cheers from the skywatchers.  The noise was more annoying than it sounded, largely because my friend and I couldn’t see what they were cheering.  Each new outburst was a cue for us to swivel vainly around on our plastic sheet, peering this way and that and seeing…nothing.  I did see, to my amusement, two meteors that crossed each other’s paths in the shape of an X.

Time passed, meteors flashed by (seen and unseen), occasional winged nocturnal fauna swooped overhead and the joy of skywatching isn’t in the fun of staying up all night or in seeing pretty light shows or even in the numbers and physical laws that make up stars.  It’s in seeing something that comes from so far away, originates in a reality so profoundly different from the one we know, passes through a world so utterly alien to ours, and then enters our purview – just for those moments when our vision can intersect with its path, when it impinges upon our reality at the very end of its existence.  It’s in looking beyond the here and now and touching the greater cosmos, just for a second.

Dawn arrived and the meteors faded away like dreams in the morning sunlight.  We packed up and quietly made our way out of the Japanese Garden, past the litter left by skywatchers who were, after touching the greater cosmos, too indifferent to our small world to clean up after themselves.

“The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”

The Leonids had gone on their way, not to return for another year.  Time for us, too to come back down to earth.