Posts Tagged ‘literature’
Freelance life under lockdown
I am home in the family abode in Sussex and England is under lockdown. It will end in December but, for now, most things are closed, and many are working from home.
When I left Japan, in September, and finally returned home I did not expect that the situation, in Europe and England, would get worse. But it did.
For whatever reasons [widespread mask use; good hygiene; differences in social customs], Japan never really experienced huge spikes in cases of Covid-19, despite being a densely populated archipelago of 126 million.
From March to September, of this year, a hostel in a shopping arcade in Fukuoka, the biggest city on the southern island of Kyushu, was my home. And I made it work. I would shop at my local supermarket, often venturing there late in the evening to snap up bargains. I cooked in the hostel’s kitchen. I worked in the common area. I even entertained guests (Hi Heloisa and Debs!) at my hostel, cooking for them, or just drinking away splendid evenings.
I wrote articles for the BBC in the evening, while hostel guests chatted with me, and I had to politely tell them “yeah, I’ve got to finish this” and the next day I’d wake up and the article would be published for millions to read around the world. I filed stories about China and about Japan, for the likes of Business Insider, BBC, and The National.
Anyway, all that is now in the past. Usually when I go on one of my stints of travel, I am wistful and nostalgic about them afterwards. And although I do miss aspects of living in Fukuoka (mostly these aspects are derived from the fact Fukuoka is a city of many people and I have finally realised I enjoy city life) this time, even though I am under lockdown in parochial England, living a quiet life of rural runs and PlayStation, I do not feel so nostalgic about that time. Mostly because there were periods of stress, pressure, and misery in that hostel, while pandemic lockdowns bloomed around the world.
Over the past weeks, I’ve been busy, falling into a mostly satisfying schedule of pitching, reporting and writing my freelanced articles. Very recently, however, my productivity has plummeted. And I think this is because I’ve been straining against my real inclination. Recently, I’ve wanted to concentrate on working on my own writing. My creative projects: essays, nonfiction, and fiction. That’s the stuff I’m truly passionate about.
Journalism is great and I’m so grateful that I’m still employed and earning, doing a job that is varied, interesting, and full of feedback (even if it is not the most remunerative in the world). But we all have our true obsessions and literature happens to be mine. I just couldn’t get to it as much as I could recently; I couldn’t dedicate my time and attention, my sole focus, to it; and I raged at having to finish the work I had to do, on time, and as close to the lofty standards I set myself. Perhaps it is this friction that can lead to some form of burnout.
Lockdown is boring, of course, but with these restrictions and limitations I don’t feel it’s a limitation on creativity per se. Having a sheltered time to read good books and to think about writing is ideal for me (although obviously I wish I had the option to do other things as well).
For now I can only bide my time and work on the things I care about, write the things that earn the money I need and save up for the travel that will, eventually, be open again. Patience and forbearance have always been virtues. While angst, resentment, and despair have never been very useful emotions however “appropriate” to the current situation they may be.
My writing life
It’s been some time since I last updated this blog. I just haven’t felt the need or energy to do so. I focused on paying gigs and the secret writing I do in my spare time. And the blog inevitably took a backseat.
I’ve been enjoying reading, ripping through Tolkien’s The Children of Hurin (a good yarn), finishing Rachel Cusk’s Outline (deep and precise), and enjoying Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography (clear-eyed and illuminating). I’ve also been gaming a lot, completing The Last of Us Part II and starting Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. And watching a lot of movies and shows. Hashtag lockdown life.
Bylines, bylines, bylines
I was delighted to debut in my first literary journal, a piece of nonfiction for nature writing journal The Willowherb Review. I wrote about videogames, the nature within videogames, my journey from China to England (and vice versa), and traveling to the Philippines:
I spent two months while I was in Japan interviewing the right people, getting endless feedback from my editor, researching and learning about wind turbine design, the energy situation in Japan, climate change and typhoons to write this 2,000-word piece for BBC Future Planet:
The wind turbines standing up to the world’s worst storms
I also spent an ordinate amount of time researching and interviewing for this in-depth feature for Business Insider, exploring why Japan’s software industry kinda sucks:
I had fun writing about how I got hooked on Call of Duty: Mobile’s mode ‘Attack of the Undead’, while I was living in Japan, for UK publication GAMINGbible:
The Undead of ‘Call of Duty: Mobile’ Got Me Through Lockdown
Writing 20,000 words
There was a time when writing 10,000 words seemed like a major undertaking, an academic slog, a marathon. Writing the dissertation for my journalism degree, around 10,000 words, seemed quite a big deal. And it doesn’t ever become a tiny thing. Yes, as a professional writer I regularly accrue many thousands of words. But these are for separate articles. One sustained piece of writing that clocks up 8,000 words or more is not a piece of cake.
It is doubly hard when you’re writing a piece of creative nonfiction, as opposed to journalism with its formulas and expectations. Writing a reported feature about expats living in Paris, to take an example, poses different challenges to writing a personal exploration of what it is like living in Paris as an expat. One requires research and interviews: reporting; while the other is memoir and creative nonfiction.
Obviously, if you wrote bad memoir, a long rambling piece that no one wants to read, then the task would certainly be a walk in the park, but to write originally, compellingly and atmospherically requires considerable attention and skill.
I wrote 10,000 words over a few weeks, while living in a hostel in Taipei, Taiwan, in June this year. It was for a nonfiction book proposal. I also wrote an outline and a chapter-by-chapter breakdown.
I sent it out to a few agents. I got a rejection by one. A couple of non-replies. And one expression of interest. The agent that got back to me asked me a question about the project. And the question was a useful one.
But it took me a while before I really understood the nature of the question. The question concerned the vision I had for the book. And how I answered would determine my success with said agent.
To cut a story short, I am now rewriting the book sample. I am writing another 10,000 words, from scratch. Now the whole project has a different prospect. It is a slow process, but I try to put in the work on a daily basis. Every day I try to get words down on the page.
Some days it’s only 300, 400 words. Some days, it’s 700, 800. I rarely exceed that. But taken over 30 days, a month’s work, that racks up to 15,000 words (assuming an average of 500 words/day).
I can’t write much more than 1000 words a day – in this form – because I just find it really hard. But maybe there will come a time when this changes.
There was a time when I would’ve thought writing 80,000 words for a novel, or 10k words for a nonfiction book sample, an insurmountable challenge. I wouldn’t know where to start, and, more significantly, not know how to create anything approaching original, interesting to readers, or compelling.
But this rings true for many things. Back when I was still a journalism student the idea that I could turn in a 1000-word news feature about a complex subject, with a range of reporting and research, within 24 hours, would’ve seemed outlandish — but that’s what I did recently for this news feature for WIRED. These are within my capabilities.
It takes time to hone that craft. But actually, more than practice, it takes a kind of inner development to really push through to take on challenges you never thought you could take on successfully.
Reconnecting with an older self
Literature, not news, was my first entry into the power of language and story.
I remember when I was a teenager, going through school, and being given assignments by my English teachers.
Read Macbeth.
Read Of Mice and Men.
Write a poem. Write a short story. Write a persuasive essay. Analyse this novel for how it builds atmosphere thought its use of language.
From about age eleven or twelve (Year 7) I found I was good at these assignments. It didn’t even need a great deal of effort on my part. Like how some kids are naturally good at maths or art or French, it was just one of those things.
It wasn’t a certainty, certainly not obvious, that I was going to become a journalist, at that age. When I was a kid my dream was to play football for England. Quite the dream for the son of a political asylum seeker. (My father was granted political asylum by Prime Minister John Major; I wrote about his journey here.)
I was born in a non-English speaking country and moved to England aged five and didn’t speak English as my first language until about eight or nine years old.
But, for whatever reason, my brain moulded itself to English at a rate and capacity that made this adopted language my core of self-belief. That is, because I knew I was quite good at English, I had this core, iron-clad, of confidence. It’s not even confidence; it was just a calming knowledge that I was quite good at something. At least this one thing, I was very, very good at.
It wasn’t until much later that journalism came into the picture.
When I was 17 or 18, I was considering which subjects to study at university. English literature and photography were my top picks. Growing up, I didn’t know much about journalists. I read magazines (mostly gaming ones), and newspapers sometimes, but I never really considered that they were written by people whose positions I could envy and emulate.
Journalism, at some point, entered the picture, and that is what I chose. I took two gap years before I started my journalism degree, and in those two years I read two books that whetted my appetite for the game of journalism.
In the first year of my degree I was published in a national newspaper, which made me very happy. Unfortunately, that was also the first step, I now recognise, to forgetting my older self. The one who was enjoying writing classroom assignments and discovering that I liked writing.
Journalism has its own ideals. It lionizes reporters. It lionizes those who “speak truth to power”. It admires hubris. It admires articles and bylines as badges of status. All that stokes ego.
The ego of journalists is a very dangerous thing. Ambition is a dangerous thing.
Somewhere along the way, I forgot what it was that originally drew me to writing.
And I am glad that I am rediscovering that original joy.
The literary dream of Beijing
When you’re young and ambitious, keen on literary adventure, the idea of moving to a new country and becoming a writer is hugely romantic. You may not be the next Hemingway or Graham Greene, but the ghosts of those greats –- men who drank, chased women and saw their art as their masculine fixation –- leave long seductive shadows.
Beijing is not London or Tokyo, Tangier or Rome. It doesn’t have the transparent allure of LA or the colourful chaos of Mexico City. And it sure as hell ain’t Paris. It doesn’t look beautiful in the rain and the architecture lacks all grace and subtlety. Beijing is unrelenting in its grayness, and filled with poor decisions about infrastructure and basic city planning. It’s a city so mired in reality that any charm pours straight into its drains, which are too few and badly designed. Yet journalists and writers have flocked here. Why?
I was born in the southern city of Guilin in 1989. Before I was born, but after I was conceived, my father swam from China to Hong Kong. Well, almost swam there. He didn’t quite make it. He was picked up by Hong Kong water police after nine hours in the water, trying to reach the fabled British colony. If you want to read more about this family history, you can find it here. Suffice to say politics was involved in his decision to escape China. I moved to England, and met my father for the first time when I was five. At the age of twenty three, I reversed his journey and moved from Britain back to China.
For anyone who decides to move abroad, it’s impossible to fathom how much you learn, how much you experience, the amount of misery you endure, but also how much optimism sustains you.
I landed in Beijing in 2012, just as autumn began its brief spell. I had vague plans to improve my Chinese, get more bylines, explore job opportunities. The first two months were miserable and lonely. I had few friends –- I think I had one, maybe two –- no job and a small rented bedroom to live in, where I could touch both walls at the same time. I went to cafés, read the internet, sent a few emails. Sex, literature and food were the three preoccupations orbiting my imagination. Late at night I would write in my mind, dreaming up plots and fine sentences that describe but move no story, like a red ribbon bowed upon nothing.
Eventually I landed a paid internship at a listings magazine, which, in retrospect, was the perfect gig when you’re new to a city. There’s almost no pressure and it’s your job to attend events, explore new areas and meet new people. The editor there, a loud and rambunctious Mancunian, took a liking to me and gave me some breaks. The internship became a fulltime gig, albeit only marginally better paid. I supplemented my income by writing economics and education articles for a student business magazine. I didn’t make a lot of money.
There have been times when circumstances were dire. For one week in my first November, I survived on sweet potatoes bought from street sellers for breakfast, lunch and dinner while I waited for some money to hit the bank account. I roamed the streets, walking blocks sometimes, in search of the rural migrants who sold them from three-wheeled trikes, oil drums on the back turned into makeshift ovens. Sometimes I haggled over the price, then realised I shouldn’t. I picked the potato I wanted and ate all of it, the crispy caramel skin and the soft, warm flesh.
After a year, I had learned so much. Within two years, Beijing had become a second home and the start of a career. I had created a life for myself, in a city far away from home, and the knowledge of that will always redeem my pride. For anyone who decides to move abroad, it’s impossible to fathom how much you learn, how much you experience, the amount of misery you endure, but also how much optimism sustains you. How you trust that eventually everything will be alright, and in the end it generally is.
Beijing is a city full of memories that burnish your twenties into an elegant nostalgia, ready to plunder when you settle down elsewhere. When you’re dancing in some sweaty disco and the lights are green and crazy and the Chinese girls are swaying to those odd personal rhythms slightly out of sync with the music and you’ve drunk several pints of cheap Chinese beer, warm and watery, your mind inexorably drifts toward wondering how you arrived at this bizarre moment. You know it’s an illusion, but also your immediate reality. You want to write, but don’t do it enough. You want to seem well-read, but don’t have the time. You want to go everywhere, if you only had the money, but don’t want to work in some crappy job.
Your twenties fly past like a blizzard. Beijing is a vessel into which we pour our ambitions and desires. It’s a landscape where foreigners can skim the cream, make expedient connections and live out their choices free of the expectations of home. It’s a wide canvas, and adventurous souls have always come to paint their projections upon it. When later the dream sours and you’ve drunk away yet another afternoon in a Sanlitun bar, you come to realise Beijing has corrupted you. Worse still, you’ve gotten used to it, and thoughts of Dayton or Hastings or Frankfurt, or wherever you’re from, have diminished into a box that you’ve tucked away under “life back home”.
If I sound jaded after less than three years, it’s because I’ve fallen out of love with that first sense of discovery. What initially seemed novel and wondrous has become habitual and muddy at the edges. The distance between foreign and local lifestyles is cavernous. When I’m in Jing A, a popular microbrewery teeming with Americans enjoying craft beers in the sun, I can’t help but feel disillusioned. I’m not going to do anything drastic like move away, but Beijing can mar the soul. The city is straightened by huge roads and grid-like blocks, with few pockets where you can just sit and be. I have a theory that you can tell how cozy a city is by the proportion of benches to people. London has benches galore, and corners overflow with accidental pockets of respite. How many benches are there in Beijing?
Still, there have been moments of clarity. A star-pocked night, revelry in the air and the Great Wall of China lit up by lights. Sneaking into the VIP section with a couple of friends at a music festival. All the sitting in cafés. How we kid ourselves with coffee, the ritual of it mollifying the metallic glare of the laptop in front of us, while we think of what to write.
*
This post originally appeared on The Anthill. It was written while I was in some despondency in the summer of 2015.
How I became a novelist in Beijing — by Carly J. Hallman
Carly J. Hallman has a degree in English Writing & Rhetoric from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. She lives in Beijing, China. Year of the Goose is her first novel.
Later this year, through some mysterious cocktail of luck, hard work, and sheer determination, my first novel will be published in the U.S. ‘Year of the Goose’ is a dark comedy about the Bashful Goose Snack Company, China’s most successful fictional corporation. The novel weaves together tales of a deadly fat camp, a psychopathic heiress, a hair extension tycoon, a Tibetan monk reincarnated as a talking turtle, some witches, and an anthropomorphic diary-penning goose, among others.
I dreamed up the original idea for the novel back in America, sparked by a short story I wrote while still a student (about the aforementioned fat camp). I’d traveled and lived in China before, and, hailing from a boring small town in Texas, found it to be a treasure trove of inspiration — China is a place where things are happening, present continuous tense.
After I graduated I lived in Los Angeles for a while, where I worked as a glorified babysitter, sent out endless “real job” applications and resumes, and struggled to find my way out of a bad relationship. At twenty-four I gave up and got out, and moved back in with my parents. Depressed, disillusioned, directionless. The only thing I knew I wanted — needed — to do was to write that novel.
October 5th, Beijing
It is a Sunday afternoon in Beijing, in the middle of Golden Week, a national holiday here in China. The weather is cooling down, days are mild but the nights are drawing in. Autumn is the most beautiful season in Beijing, but the briefest, casting its warm glow before the harsh, bare winter.
Lately, I have found writing and pitching somewhat difficult. Freelance has been slow, very slow. I had been pitching but I found no reply from editors who have previously commissioned me. This is the worst; worse than rejection, it is the anxiety of not knowing that enervates the soul of a freelancer.
More than that, motivation is weak right now. And I am not sure exactly why. Maybe it is homesickness, maybe it’s a slight boredom with the whole affair of freelance journalism. Writing requires energy and I’ve found that energy to be depleted. The ambition is still there, but the actions required to reach it seem harder to take.
Life seems to get in the way too. Unlike before, I realize how important it is to just enjoy the moments that accompany a day and to look forward to those times where you can wallow in the luxury of doing things that you want to do. Hanging out with friends in Beijing, eating and drinking, playing poker, getting wasted in clubs is fun, sure. But it means the important work gets left behind. But that’s okay. But equally, it is absolutely no excuse whatsoever.
Of course, there needs to be balance. I find solace in the fact that this blog is going from strength to strength. But the desire to read all the articles I should be reading, to pitch editors, new and old, to send out emails, to sit down and plot out the essays and articles I know I’m capable of writing, is diminished. It worries me because the feeling is deeper and longer lasting that what I’ve felt before. But it doesn’t unnerve me. Writing is what I love to do the most.
I am also trying to get started on a book proposal This gives me something to be excited about, even if book publishing can be a long and arduous process. Book writing is what I’d really like to do. And although I love journalism, I know that literature will always win out. Journalism can be literature of course — it’s literary nonfiction that really compels me to be a better writer. Perhaps this is time out towards that end.
Lu-Hai Liang 