Making and Believing
Conversations on the Craft of Writing
“Consider the furniture!” screams a countertop sign at Journey East. We do.
ONE.
Step into a furniture store, a real furniture store, and the maker is invisible and yet everywhere. His fingerprints are in everything, on everything.
You see them in the knobby edges of the solid walnut tables, the weave of the linen seat covers, carefully ferried from loom to room. Even the placemats, factory-made, want you to know there is an art to their placement, the precise way they invite you to imagine breakfast on this bench, this countertop.
Stores like these are meant to overwhelm with tangibility, the sheer fact of six to eight chairs around a table, several tables, or if you’re lucky, shelves and shelves of tables, legs folded away to reveal the grain from every angle, show off how intricate they are when stacked atop each other. Across the shop floor, materiality multiplies. Not the cheap materiality of a downtown mall – the sort that makes you want to learn how teak is oiled and sanded, the minimum width for maven legs, what grade of lacquer sets off the evening light.
All of a sudden you are not in one single, dreamily furnished living room but several at once, living all your possible lives. Running a finger over one table-setting or the other, you pair the self that has a reason to pour a drink from this impossibly clear carafe with the one that would melt into that easy-chair, given the chance. How you long to be given the chance.
On an early visit to Journey East, Terence tells me many of the items that have caught my eye are restored treasures, displaced after decades of service in wealthy Javanese homes. The years have hardly dulled their craftsmanship, and each is still marked in the secret language of its master carpenter or tukang. “People who come appreciate the art,” he says, with a deferential nod towards a small gathering of rejuvenated sofas. “Some of these pieces are meant to outlast you. You might even pass them down, like a painting.”
I make a mental note to take better care of the tea-table in my own hall, bought ages ago by my parents and frustratingly easy to nick with glassware. Terence is, after all, the sort of guy whose eye contact convinces you he can map every scratch on a table he has never seen.
Just sitting and looking at the masterpieces in his store, a pang of remorse fillets into my heart. I buy a bottle of orange polishing oil on the way out.
TWO.
Driving home, I worry away at a thought. If craft is something so tangible to these masters, what does it mean when writers use the term to describe, well, whatever it is we writers do?
Next to a hefty oak chest or headboard, the work of our hands resembles nothing so much as scratching at the air. How many can even still claim the materiality of pen and paper, in an age where so much of the writer’s life – from first-draft anxieties to the high of a launch reading – can play out across the pixels of a shrinking screen?
Not to mention the readers in whose name we polish our metaphorical tools. If reading was not already the most abstract of pleasures, how much more so when the light of a Kindle has come to displace the glow of the page?
Yet when I am standing at the front of a creative writing class, or trying to explain to my wife, who is often infinitely more patient than my students, why the skill of this or that writer has reduced me to slack-jawed admiration, I still fall back primarily on ways to describe the effect of their words on a reader as a built, bodily experience.
How a sentence, cinched to varying degrees of tightness between uppercase and period, can hold the weight of a body or jolt you upright.
How a paragraph or poem, unspooling across the bare steppe of the page, can configure the place as they go, summoning a terrain replete with depth of field and pace of life, horizon and kerb, birdsong and tea, a geography large enough for anyone to dwell in.
I become attracted to the idea that the writer, like the master carpenter, is there in every room, his handiwork patterning the space, furnishing it as furniture might. A piece of writing could, for instance, draw people around it, grazing and making small talk, like a kitchen island at a party. Or it could wrap itself around a solitary weeper, exceeding in this act of comfort all but the most accommodating of armchairs.
And the writer?
Invisible except for his craft – which like the tukang’s touch, might be found in that marriage of form and function where dull material is cut against the grain, splinters smoothed away, and each piece fitted to a leg or back that will not only be easy on the eye, but firm enough to steady the next stranger, stumbling through the door.
THREE.
Early in 2025, I am invited to be part of a show taking place at Journey East, part of a series called Supper House that brings artists and their work into unconventional spaces. For the show, designer Ashley Chiam has constructed a snug black box complete with doors and windows in a corner of the store – more than a room, if not quite a house.
Each of the invited artists has free rein, more or less, to install our work within the set-up for the month we have been assigned. I am the only poet in the line-up, a fact that brings me no small anxiety. On the day I come to check out the box’s dimensions, the ceramicist Genevieve Leong has arrived before me and is already busy measuring the space.
I look apprehensively at the furniture crowding cheek by jowl around the little square: a profusion of wood and leather. How could I possibly transform this space, and with something so immaterial as words?
It is a question I cannot escape. In the first two months of the show, the space is taken over by a family of miniatures inspired by classical sculpture, then a whimsical cartoon installation. My intervention, such as it is, will have to try and give shape to the shapeless, or better still, tackle this question of writing as making head-on in some way.
Yet the mechanics of form and style are so little talked about outside the creative writing classroom that I immediately begin to doubt my own characterisation of the writer as craftsman or carpenter. Am I mistaken (or worse, alone!) in ascribing some material quality to what is essentially the work of make-believe?
I seek safety in numbers. Perhaps by finding friends to talk to – that other way by which our words take up space in the world – I might find some basis for seeing my craft as I do, while illuminating an equally tangible part of the writing life, other writers.
But who?
There are writers who are not interested in making, not really. Many young writers, captivated by their ideas, are like carpenters whose workshops are filled with new and fantastic designs, but not a trace of sawdust on the floor. Heady with early praise, I too was once this variety of teenage writer, starting and abandoning drafts in a ring-bound notebook that I chose because it felt like the ‘right’ sort of receptacle for inspiration.
You find others too, old and young, who are less engaged in making work than in building a career or carving out a reputation, which takes a different kind of craft altogether.
I decide to speak to three writers who, whether over the course of long friendships, or in what I know of them and their work, have struck me as genuine students of their craft. Not only are they all consummate stylists, writers whose every line makes me wish the words had disclosed themselves to me first. They are also thoughtful, funny people, in whose company such existential questions about our work might hopefully seem less fraught.
The starting point for each of our conversations is the same: What does ‘making’ mean to you as a writer? In its broadest sense, the question is meant to embrace their different genres and approaches, and go to the heart of how they see what they do.
But I also ask each of them to send me, before we meet, one or two pieces of writing that they think of as ‘well-made’. An artefact, if you will, salvaged from the antiques store of the mind. Something they have read that, like a beautiful stool, we can place between us and study from every angle, then weave our rug of words around and under it.
The black box constructed for Supper House at Journey East - spot the (fake) pigeon, part of the August show.
FOUR.
Whenever I am asked how I found my start in writing, I tell students about the Lego Room, a low-ceilinged attic where my parents allowed me to hoard what seemed, growing up, like an inexhaustible supply of those smooth small figurines and the stackable bricks that made up their world.
I wasn’t especially architecturally-minded as a kid. In fact it was Dad who did the bulk of the building, quietly patching the walls of forts and castles I planned but never finished. My fun was in assembling a cast of characters to traipse through this world on one quest or the other, spurred on by blood pacts and petty quarrels. All while armed with tools and weapons which, naturally, served as shorthand for the personalities I gave them.
Looking back, the genius of the Lego Room was that it allowed me to try my hand at different kinds of making, a safe laboratory with the raw material of plastic pieces scattered at my feet. Though an only child, I was rarely a lonely child. On long weekday afternoons where I couldn’t count on my parents or cousins for company, I found solace in stories of my own invention.
It took me years, of course, to learn that life itself would one day supply the raw material, and that the bricks are simply what we have at hand.
I see myself as a much more conscientious builder these days, reaching for the dull bricks of language to make something that can hold all whatever life throws up. “The material,” says the poet and essayist Mok Zining, “is not just what I’ve gleaned through research, but what I’m thinking about at the current point in time, and how I’m able to think.”
In other words, “not just the content I’m working with, but also where I am right now”.
Where we are is a homespun bakery a stone’s throw from where we both live, on a sweltering Friday afternoon. Zining and I met in 2020 on the same safely-distanced, pre-recorded panel at the Singapore Writers Festival – also when I was first blown away by her book The Orchid Folios, a genre-bending journey through decolonial history.
Having just returned from the US at that point, she was forced to navigate a locked-down city she’d left behind more than a decade earlier, including the burgeoning literary circles her debut thrust her into. Today, nearly everyone encounters her as the impeccably put-together editor of Singapore’s iconic literary imprint, Ethos Books.
“I think I’m developing a new understanding of craft”, Zining says, “as being specific to the material”. Just as a sculptor’s art changes with their medium, her own shifting sense of who she is in relation to each newfound obsession has led her to conclude that “each topic has its own story that demands its own craft”. If it seems risky, this constant search for new ways of handling meaning brings pleasure, too, in figuring out its limits and free-falls.
FIVE.
“I think I’ve become that kind of writer, Theo”, says Larry when we meet. “In my own work, and in my circumstances. I’ve been moving around a lot.”
My coffee with Lawrence Lacambra Ypil – Larry, as he is universally known – takes place just months before the next big migration of his life; from Singapore, where he has for the last ten years dispensed wisdom to a generation of young writers, to Hawaii for a new university position. Movement is clearly on his mind. Larry writes poetry and nonfiction, but refers to himself throughout our conversation as part of a “mobile readership… one that is more dislocated, who are on the way to somewhere or not really in permanent spaces”.
What does it mean to write with this itinerant readership in mind, I ponder aloud. Is the writer less a maker of sturdy set-pieces, than a sort of sketch artist of the soul, whose quick impressions become mementos for us as we travel?
In response, Larry brings up Robert Creeley, a poet of “beauty in impatience”. In contrast to those who seek permanence or longevity in their work, it is Creeley who best embodies what Larry calls “magnanimity in a minute form”, by finding a language in his understated, colloquial poems for the blur of rapid change.
This, too, requires painstaking craft. What Larry so admires in Creeley is not carelessness, but the opposite of it. It takes a special kind of patience to be able to record the changing of one’s mind at speed (“the swerve of thought”, to use Larry’s inimitable phrase), and Creeley’s greatest achievement is an impermanence worth paying attention to.
If Larry’s debt to Creeley feels appropriate to this crossroads in his life, the influences that Fairoz Ahmad brings up in our conversation are more evergreen.
Reading his novel Neverness, one is reminded of Salman Rushdie’s best storytelling, and the way tales heard in childhood can lend their structure to the epics of our lives. For Fairoz, who like me hails from a background in public policy, Rushdie’s approach to magic realism, including in books like Haroun and the Sea of Stories, has become an escape and a reference.
But it is one of Rushdie’s essays that he chooses to discuss, ‘Autobiography and the Novel’, which is concerned with how much of a novelist’s life should find its way into their work. I sense it is a perennial question for Fairoz, who begins by telling me about the “dissatisfaction”, borne from his experience as a minority in Singapore, that lends an impulse to his fiction.
Much of the hour dwells on the rich tapestry of his influences, from Malay rock legends like Ramli Sarip and Sweet Charity to the speech patterns of village life in the 1970s. Like Zining, he has had to find way to bend his craft to this material, a mix of careful research and slow, repeated polishing that he compares to “sandpapering a table”.
His other touchstone is an unlikely one: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, which he discovered fifteen years ago as an undergraduate. It’s a book he has returned to again and again, mining its secrets for the best way to deliver revelations in a novel, for instance, or how to handle the finnicky habits of an unreliable narrator. Yet what leaves the deepest impression is how Ondaatje foregrounds seemingly insignificant characters, allowing them to become the indispensable “fulcrum” of his story.
In Fairoz’s telling, his own characters have surprised him too. By demanding to be let into the heart of his book, and even for him to risk a bit of his own autobiography on them. “What will Miriam do next?” he asks towards the end of our interview, genuine puzzlement shining in his eyes. It’s this surprise that brings him back to his desk at the end of each long day, something he’s convinced those who don’t write will never believe or understand.
SIX.
In some ways, that is what all these conversations come back to, the secret language of being a writer. I find myself wondering if carpenters think of their trade this way, too. It’s hard to believe that woodworking would not have its own language and reward, or the elements of risk, pleasure, patience and surprise that come with it.
From where do we acquire this vocabulary, this fluency and stutter?
As I listen to Zining, Larry and Fairoz unpack the pieces of writing they admire, what becomes clear is that each has had their long slow apprenticeships, whether formal or self-taught, their seasons of trial and error. This is something any writer knows – or any craftsman, really, who has studied at the foot of a master. Some of us are privileged to call these masters our mentors; others choose their masters from afar, and spend years trying to emulate their handiwork.
Like in all forms of magic, the best examples of the craft do not give up their secrets easily. One’s apprenticeship can be arduous, during which what is learnt is not only how to be a better writer but how to read, and observe, and wait.
But craft has another source too, and one I suspect even the most curmudgeonly of writers would acknowledge. For we cannot help but find our ways of shaping language to be nourished, undone, provoked, affirmed or challenged by each other.
I should know this, married as I am to another. My wife, a journalist by profession, often asks me to read drafts of the pieces she’s written. Occasionally a phrase, or fragment of a phrase, will appear among my unread messages; a grammatical puzzle, or a subeditor’s tin-eared suggestion parlayed into an inside joke. Likewise, I send her drafts of poems, still rough around the edges, essays (like this one) in various stages of completion.
The ask is always the same. I want her, as one versed in the same craft, to look at the thing I have built and see if it is sound. In turn, she wants me not to fix her drafts but at least to point her to the right tools. It does no good to sandpaper a stool whose legs are still oddly joined together, missing a few bits and struts. There are also pieces which, already finely made, require only a spray of varnish. An overeager second opinion might wreck the handiwork.
Even where this isn’t quite as deliberate between fellow writers, I do not think any one of us – despite our solitary reputations – could truly say we worked alone.
We are always reading and absorbing, thinking and tinkering. When we hurt, or when we rejoice, it is to other writers (and their work) that we turn for comfort and cheer. In the same way that every carpenter is always surrounded by and responding to the handiwork of other carpenters, every writer finds themselves always in conversation with another’s craft.
Every table, every chair a reply to all the others.
xxx
Reader, as you immerse yourself in these conversations,
enter the space that we have made,
who are you speaking with,
and who are you listening to?
Won’t you spend
a while
with the work of our hands?
Introduction to the Supper House installation at Journey East, Sept 2025.
