On writing

I love writing. This comes up as a strange fact to talk about, but actually, I started off as a writer before I became a computer programmer, the latter of which had become my default persona that I adopt.

It all began a long time ago, when I loved reading fiction and non-fiction books. Learning to read them was one thing; I found that I could understand what the items were written inside the books, which was pretty wonderful. My writing "career" kicked-off properly when I was in Primary Six, where I had the most wonderful English teacher that anyone could ever ask for: Mr Lin Min.

Mr Lin was the head of department of English of my primary school. A mild-mannered man, he was unlike most of the teachers in the school. For one, he treated us like adults (even though we were at least 6 years away from being anything remotely like an adult). For two, he was completely into English, taking every opportunity to teach us/correct us on proper English usage. His notes for the class were unique; they didn't cover the primary school syllabus, but was based on the standard of English that was in existence in the real world. As such, the information that was contained in the hand outs were of immense use, and I do refer to them at least once a year after that to refresh myself on the proper usage of certain English terms.

His total devotion to teaching us the English language the way that the English language was used can be seen in the way that he metes out punishment. Unlike other teachers who use uncreative means of punishment like staying back after class, or even to write lines, Mr Lin would provide a topic and set a word limit, for which we would need to write an essay pertaining to the topic and meeting the word limit at the same time. Most of the time, the essays were to be completed either on the day itself or at the latest, the next morning. The most interesting thing about this exercise was the fact that he actually marked each and every essay that we write, regardless of it being class work or punishment. Needless to say, that was where I had most of my writing training from, for I was always finding myself in some situation of sorts where I would be "punished".

The word limits started off innocent enough. A couple of hundred words, maybe three or four hundred words, which is roughly the number of words that a decent essay written by a primary school student should have. However, as the days went on, the word limits increased slowly, first to five hundred, then to eight hundred (roughly the number of words that the A-level General Paper essay should contain), and sloowly exceeding a thousand words. All these writing training meant that I could easily write anything under the sun under any word limit that was set, and at a decent speed too. I was so caught up in all these writing that even for my final examinations (the PSLE), I wrote something like a two-thousand-word essay or something; all I could remember was that I used two booklets of writing paper, even though the usual number of booklets used is under one.

I daresay that Mr Lin Min has taught me all that I needed to know to communicate effectively in English. The subsequent years' English lessons were mainly to enrich myself; I never strayed far away from his teachings. I usually best the time limit and word limit of all the essay-based English papers that I ever took. I guess my intuition in the English language was strengthened over the years, but the initial push was done by Mr Lin Min. That I can say without a doubt.

But of course, when I was in secondary school, I found a higher calling in the field of computer programming, which was really another form of writing, except that this time, it was a clearer and more concise language than the English language. Though I was still good in English, there were others who were significantly better than me, so I kept a low profile on my language skills, and stuck with my programming persona for the rest of my years.

It was when the blog came about that I had the chance to reignite my passion for writing.

My first blog was on poetry. Poems are writings that I feel passionate about. Having taken English Literature at the O-levels, I've come to better appreciate the nuances that co-exist with the compactness of a poem. I find that writing poems are more liberating, as it could really stretch my self-imposed limits on vocabulary and expressiveness. Unlike prose, which can get too wordy in order to bring about a nuance, poems are more succinct. Each line of the poem carries substantially more information than each line of prose. And poems are beautiful works of art; in it you can feel the passion of the poet, about the things that the poet feels strongly about, about the things that the poet is writing on explicitly, about the things that the poet is implying through the inobvious writings.

I like writing prose. It is more base than poems, since most of the time you have the luxury of using many more words to bring out the ideas and thoughts that you want to say. Prose can be beautiful too, but they lack the compactness and the Aha! factor that poems bring about to the reader. And to pull off nuances in prose is just disaster-prone; too many words means that the nuances can be easily lost in the cataclysmic avalanche of words.

I gain inspiration for my poems based on what my mind is thinking about. If you've read the flagship blog, you'd realise that most of the time, the poems are written either at night or in the dead of the night. Sometimes, they come during the day, but those that I consider among my best works are usually inspired when it gets dark outside. I guess that when it is dark out, that's when my mind starts to relax into its best state, and that's where the creative juices just flow on unhampered. It also helps that in the dead of the night, there is hardly any noise from the outside, and that makes concentrating so much easier to accomplish.

That's all I have on my writing, for now.