New, or maybe not so new, book discovery

I caught part of a documentary on a contemporary Taiwanese writer named 王文興 last night on the television. The way he described the creative process of writing, the grappling with the words, the intensify at the moment of an idea/concept/impression/feeling being born, the violent chiseling away at excessive words, sentences, and paragraphs that failed at conveying the truth... all of which made my heart leap.

I must get my hands on his novels, including 背海的人.

Behind "Homecoming"

The story "Homecoming" had been in the writing for several months now, which included a long hiatus from writing between May and October. It started with a photo in a December 2010 issue of the New York Times, which showed a military officer sitting with his wife, and holding his new born son, just before being sent to Afghanistan. Their shared grief over the upcoming separation was only apparent in the photo. It was them who inspired the story.

The writing of Homecoming was harder than anything I had written. Before this piece, writing was simply a hobby.  Most of the stories are based on personal experiences and observations, and were of completely fictional,  flat characters who were merely there for bringing out the abstract theme and ideas behind the stories. Yet in "Homecoming", I care much about whether I could actually do the the experiences, views, and beliefs of war veterans justice.

I started taking an on-line writing course while working on the story. One of class assignment was to describe the writer myself from the perspective of the character of a story I was or had written. I chose to write about the interview between Jessica the war veteran and me in the setting of her kitchen from her perspective. Many doubts arose from doing that assignment. Who am I to write a story about veterans when I haven't actually experienced combat myself? How little do I know of war, but the snip bits I have read in books, or seen in movies? With all these doubts, after rewriting and rewriting, I finally came to a halt, and took a long break from writing stories for several months.

The above belong to the generic doubts that arise for writers of fictions who sometime in their life, undoubtedly will have to write from a point of view that is not their own, unless every story they plan to write are autobiographical in one way or another.

The current edition of "Homecoming" is built upon the helpful criticisms and suggestions of many classmates from the Writers' Village, helpful peers from a writing forum (now kind of defunct Valley Sun Sims), and the editors of Everyday Fiction (as included in the rejection letter).  Not many words, scenes, and ideas but the very essential ones from the very first version survived. Letting go is all for the better.

List

I am looking down the list of Nobel Prize winners in literature from 1901 til now, and thinking hard on how I should proceed in picking out a novel to read. Throwing a dice with nearly 100 facets? There are some familiar names, yet most are unknown to me.

My mother who is of the moment not into reading, and perhaps she never will, has often complained why I would rather stick my nose in the books instead of talking to her. Well, if one day she stops talking about where she has kept items 1 to 499 in her house so I can remember her list of household items, then we may really be able to have a conversation for real.

There shelf at the new apartment stands quite empty right now. I wonder what books I would fill it up with.
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Thanks to the invention of Excel program, I did manage to randomly pick out an author to read next. Orhan Pamuk he is, a prolific author of several books about the tension between the western and the eastern, a theme I am quite familiar with, for I have read through several of VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie's books, and am still living it even of now. Funny, I remember reading the cover of this book at a bookstore in an airport, waiting for my flight to take me from west to east. Though on that day, I chose to stick with the author I already know of, Barbara Kingsolver.

Can't wait for get off work and head home with the new or should I say old find.