The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 19 Jan 2013 11:52 PM PST THE next time you're in a bookstore, go to the fiction section and spend some time really looking at all the books on all the shelves there. Pay attention to the names of the authors, starting from the A's and right down the alphabet, as far as they go (are there any authors with surnames beginning with Z?). How many names do you recognise? I'm willing to bet that unfamiliar authors will outnumber familiar ones at least 10 to one. So ... most of these names mean nothing to you? Well, they're the names of published authors. Publishing houses took a gamble on these people and their books. The fiction these writers created made it all the way to the shelves of your bookstore. Yet, you might as well be reading names off the pages of a phone directory. Lillian Stewart Carl who? John Berger who? Actually, John Berger won the Booker Prize in 1972 (for G) and Wikipedia tells me he's published 48 books. Yet I'd never heard of him until I read Ways Of Seeing, his collection of essays, for a course I'm taking. However, never mind that John Berger, unlike J.K. Rowling, is not a household name. He, at least, is able to make a living from writing. There are not many authors who are able to write full-time. Many, despite being published, have "day jobs" that allow them to pay the bills, support their families and "indulge" their true passion: writing. I get e-mail from aspiring authors who tell me that they plan to make a lot of money with the books they have yet to even start writing. They say, "Look at Suzanne Collins. Look at Jeff Kinney. Look at Stephanie Meyer. Look at J.K. Rowling and Philip Pullman." These authors are the minority – the ones whose talent and hard work, combined with good luck and good timing, have resulted in huge sales, movie deals, fame and fortune. The majority have to juggle writing books with something else that guarantees a steady income. Despite the struggle and despite the lousy money, they continue to write because they love it. They can't stop. They have to write. They need to write. They'd write even if they knew that no one would publish their books. If they were asked, "Why do you want to write books" their answers would not include "Don't know", "So cool what", "Easy money, right?" and "Better than multi-level marketing". Unfortunately, those are the sorts of answers I get all the time from those who contact to me for advice about writing stories. They talk a lot about writing but don't actually write. Some don't even seem to read much. It seems to me that they just like the idea of being an author, and/or they really do expect to make a heap of cash. Sadly, most authors will never get rich from writing. It's even less likely if you're published solely in Malaysia. Books don't sell tens of thousands of copies here, especially not locally-published books, but even if you sold 10,000 (highly unlikely) copies of your book and each book costs, say, RM30, your royalties (about 10% of the retail price) would only total RM30,000. It sounds like a lot, but spread over a year, this would be just RM2,500 a month – still not enough to live on, especially if you live in a city and have dependents, mortgages, loans and other financial commitments. If you want to write children's books (or any kind of book), take money out of the equation. Don't count on it to enable you to feed yourself (and others). Write because you want to and need to write. Write because you have a story to tell. Write because the words come and have to be shared. If you get published and do, indeed, end up bigger than Rowling, celebrate – but don't count on it. > Daphne Lee reads to wonder and wander, be amazed and amused, horrified and heartened and inspired and comforted. She wishes more people will try it too. Send e-mails to the above address and check out her blog at daphne.blogs.com/books. |
| Author Imran Ahmad’s appearance Posted: 19 Jan 2013 11:51 PM PST Sunday January 20, 2013The Perfect Gentleman author Imran Ahmad will not be appearing at Kinokuniya Bookstores, Suria KLCC today as stated in our announcement on Friday (Meet a gentleman). Instead, you can catch him there this Tuesday (Jan 22) at 6pm. Look out also for our interview with Imran in Star2 on Tuesday. |
| Posted: 19 Jan 2013 11:47 PM PST Aspiration to become a writer continues. AS a child, I had always wanted to be a writer. I was mesmerised by stories, so at about 11, I started to write my own stories. And I thought I was pretty good at it. My father chuckled every time he read my little tales, all based on the same protagonist – me. He thought they were fairy tales, but he never knew they came from my imaginations, only through which could I elude real-life hardships and the bitterness arising from them. My imaginations, fluffily cloud-like and soothing, came to haunt me at night when I lay in bed. Rather than fending them off, I immersed myself in them, conjuring up other mute characters waiting for me to enliven. I wanted to be a writer for as long as I'd lived and each and every night when I snuggled up in the bottom bunk, where, with a torchlight in hand, I read, I saw myself as one. But in the derelict house we used to live in, my mother had endless chores to attend to than to encourage me to write. She thought I should learn how to cook instead. So, she insisted on teaching me. And I learned, imagining the spatula as my pen, stirring and whipping up colourful dishes as beautiful as any of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales. I concede now, as I so often do, that my dream of becoming a writer has yet to come true, but I have become a darn good cook. I have not made it to becoming a writer, and the farthest I have gone is being a columnist, but I can make any dish you fancy thanks to my mother's strict culinary lessons. So, tonight as I made the very first dish that she forced upon me to learn at the age of 12, I reminisced on the past. All those years of churning out stories secretly in bed, sneaking out to the library and coming home late to help out in the kitchen, and those lonely moments when rain came so unexpectedly that I did not have a book to read and resorted to making up stories, wafted before me like air carrying smells of those moments. Tonight, I thought of my passion for reading and writing, recalled my sequestered nook in my bunk bed and felt more deeply the serenity of words, each so seemingly miniscule but profound enough to strum the string of my soul. Where are all those scribbled notes, I now wonder. Someone once said, "Thanks to weirdos like poets, writers, musicians, misfits, rapists, criminals, corrupted officials and actors, we see the world in a different way." I cannot agree more. I am one of those weirdos who see the world slightly differently. During a speech in a business course when I proposed that we motivate employees literarily, I raised many brows. The professor, having cleared his throat as if to refrain himself from humiliating a poor student who chose literature over pragmatism, asked what title I would propose for employees to read? "Anything by Jane Austen," I exclaimed. The male students chuckled uproariously, my best friend included. Weirdos often try in vain to get others into their worlds. Just as now as an adult and a parent, my habit of using analogies to teach my children often is remarked as absurd. I call that creativity because it not only allows me to have fun quickly conjuring up an original proverb, but also enables my children to enjoy the thrill of random storytelling. I once told my son to be a friendly tree that grows branches wide and strong to allow birds of any kind and size to perch on. Not only did he understand that literally, he did as told and became one of the friendliest boys at school. The analogy stays with him, and I can imagine him telling his sister the same story when she attends school this year. I am a weirdo who sees the curtains of my home as strings of sentences hung temporarily for me to weave together a story. I am also a weirdo who bought a handmade second-hand lamp from a flea market and imagined it to have shone a light for a writer attempting to write his story. But I am not yet a writer. "What does you mum do, Jonn?" my son's friend asked, having come to our home for the first time for dinner and seen our bookshelves and noticed the couple of review copies just delivered by the postman. "She writes, though I think she had wished to be a chef," my son replied mindlessly. Dinner was hence served, and the friend thought I could have been an exceptional chef. > Abby Wong wants to write about her mother. |
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