WRITING ABOUT FOOD

Writing covers many areas including writing about our favourite subject: food!

There are more than several blogs by Malaysians whether dedicated wholly to this or only occasionally. There’s a whole gamut from recipes to restaurant reviews. You can visit Argus World or Julie Yee for a taste. But Rasa Malaysia takes the cake and from there you can hop onto her entire blogroll of food bloggers! Talking about gorgeous cakes you can also visit Just Heavenly (who are providing complimentary cream puffs for this mention!).

In Writing About Food, Jenny Linford says: “Saying you are a food writer is, for a lot of people, tantamount to saying you are greedy and spend your life with your hoofs in the trough.” News for Jenny – you don’t need to say you’re a food writer – just say you’re Malaysian!

Jenny later gives us writers some good advise: “…the art of creating and writing clear, usable recipes is a basic building block of most successful food-writing.”

Anyway, I thought I’d like to share with you a dish I sometimes cook. I hope it’s clear and usable enough!

HAL’S MINANG FISH CURRY

Mix 1 heaped teaspoon tumeric powder and 3/4 teaspoon salt in a small bowl. Add 2 tablespoons water and mix into a runny paste.

Heat 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil in saucepan. Add 1 cinnamon stick, 3 cloves and/or 1 star anise and let whole spices flavour oil for a minute or so (this is an optional step and gives the dish a different flavour).

Add paste and fry for a minute making sure paste doesn’t burn or get stuck to saucepan. If needed, add a tablespoon of water.

Add garlic (3 cloves), ginger (1/2 an inch) and about 2 chilies, all finely sliced. (Hotness from chilies can be quite variable, so how hot the dish is going to end up is always a mystery!) Add 1 tablespoon vegetable oil. Fry for 1 minute.

Add 1 onion, sliced up. Add 1 tablespoon vegetable oil. Fry mixture of paste, garlic, ginger, chilies and onion until onions are caramalised. This is a very important step that brings all the flavours out and should take at least 20 minutes. The longer the better!

Add 1 tin of coconut milk (Ayam is a good brand) and 1/2 to 3/4 cup water depending on thickness of coconut milk used. Add 1 stalk lemon grass (sliced into 3 or 4 pieces). Add 1-2 whole chilies (optional – for presentation purposes to garnish but delicious too)

Simmer for 40-50 minutes.

Bring to medium heat and add fish (about 3 fish fillets depending on size, each fillet sliced into 3). Will take about 5 to 10 minutes to cook. Test occasionally with fork.

Remove lemon grass before serving. If sauce is too spicy for younger children, remove children’s portion of fish and, in a bowl, rinse a couple of times in boiling water from kettle.

Enjoy!

THE ROAD TO THE IMPLIED VERB

I am currently engrossed in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

As Sharon Bakar has pointed out, the author has missed out the apostrophes for certain words like: didnt, wont, dont.

I haven’t done a thorough search but perhaps Mr McCarthy has deliberately done this whenever there is a contraction of the word “Not”.

But, as a reader, what I found quite jarring to begin with were the many missing verbs.

On page 5:

“Along the shore a burden of dead reeds.”

A good editor would rewrite the sentence as:

“Along the shore STOOD a burden of dead reeds.”

Here’s another taken at random: “At evening a dull sulphur light from the fires.” To be grammatically correct this would become: “At evening there SHONE a dull sulphur light from the fires.”

His sentence “On the hillsides old crops dead and flattened” would be edited into “On the hillsides old crops LAID dead and flattened”

As we know for a sentence to be a sentence it needs both a subject and a verb.

But Cormac McCarthy is a master. He has gone beyond the grammatical sentence. He misses verbs deliberately when it suits the writing. The verb is implied. He is not the first author to do this. When the verb is implied, the reader can slot it any verb the reader likes!

I suggest beginner authors not try this . . . until they become great authors like Cormac McCarthy. But that advise strikes me as being a little bit too safe, like a lawyer covering himself from a legal suit. Why not give it a go? Just to experiment?

Do you dare deliberately miss out verbs?

Dark Demon Rising meets Academia

I received an email a couple of day ago from a lecturer at the University of Sterling, Scotland.

I was rather chuffed by its contents.

You see, Glennis Byron is a lecturer in English at the University of Sterling. She has come across my first novel Dark Demon Rising and has written a paper on it. Her article is to be published together with a collection of essays. She’ll also be presenting the paper at a conference in Aix en Provence.

She has very kindly sent me a copy of the article entitled “Where Meaning Collapses: Tunku Halim’s Dark Demon Rising as Global Gothic”.

Here’s a small extract of her excellent article:

“A new gothic form is emerging, a form marked by the increasing cross-cultural dynamics of the past century which might be identified as “global gothic” . . . Dark Demon Rising attacks the workings of global culture: the false universalizing of the Western, and the silencing of other discourses through the imposition of its own “authorized” truths . . .”

My novel, Dark Demon Rising was inspired by K.M. Endicott’s book An Analysis of Malay Magic. When Ms Byron contacted Professor Endicott, he was most flattered that his work had inspired a novel. I’m so glad she told him about it.

By the way, this attention from academia is rather flattering for me too!

CREATIVE WRITING: CHARACTER BUILDING STUFF!

Let’s get back to the serious business of writing.

I wrote a series of articles for Quill on creative writing a few years back. I’ve posted the first instalment on Creative Writing: How Do I Start?

Here’s the second instalment and it deals with writing about character.

For me, creating and building a character can be one of the most difficult parts of creative writing, but it can also be the most rewarding. So, if you haven’t read the article, here goes:

CREATIVE WRITING: CHARACTER BUILDING STUFF

Last time we met, I said that we begin writing when we have an idea. A idea might just be a man leaving a cardboard box in a coffee shop and quickly leaving.

Let’s now look at this man carefully and show him to the reader. Let’s call him Jason Lam. Jason’s a thin man with pimples. With his metal framed glasses and long hair dyed blonde, he saunters around in his trendy T-shirts, tight jeans and his favourite blue slippers. Jason is twenty-four, drives a Yamaha motor bike and lives with his mother in a shop house in Cheras. His father died in a car accident when Jason was twelve. Jason works in an electrical shop fixing and mending electric appliances.

Now we have some idea of who Jason is. But we can discover more about him by looking inside his mind and in his heart. Although Jason appears to be a confident person externally, he is actually insecure. Jason is worried about his mother because she has a heart condition and he’s afraid that one day he’s going to come home and find her dead. She needs an operation but Jason has no money. Jason’s passion is writing computer games on his old computer. One day, he’d like to have his own business selling his games but, deep inside, he knows it’s going to be too difficult. Still, it’s his dream.

Now we’re beginning to know Jason as a person. Depending on the extent of your work, you can keep developing his character. Has he got any brothers or sisters? What does he do when he’s not at work or writing games on his computer? What does he like? His dislikes? What habits has he got? Does he pick his teeth? Does he smoke? If so, what brand? Has he got a girlfriend?

Now it would be great if we could let Jason’s character lead us into the story. For instance we know that his mother is ill and his desperate to get money for her operation. Suppose he’s trying to extort the towkay who owns the coffee shop. Maybe Jason took a smoke bomb to the coffee shop to scare the towkay and unless the towkay pays up, the next time it’s going to a real one!

Beware though! Characters should be well rounded, three-dimensional. When beginning creative writing it’s easy to fall into the trap of creating flat characters because these are the characters we’re familar with. Flat characters are usually stereotypes like the forgetful professor, the anorexic model, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the shifty-eyes thief. Flat characters are predictable. Avoid them!

Characters should be complex and giving them conflicting traits only shows that they’re ‘real’. They should be people rather than caricatures. Good characters breath life into the story and your readers should recognise their own selves in the characters you create.

With good characters your story can evolve, taking it in directions you never thought about when you first developed your ideas. This is part of the fun of writing!

My Letter to The Star

I wrote a letter to The Star regarding its review of 44 Cemetery Road and it was published today. Whilst the review gave the book a thumbs up, there were a couple of things I took issue with. If you’ve read my blog post on this, my apologies, as my letter is very similar.

By the way, I’m grinning right now as the review, my response and the subsequent discussion all helps with the publicity of my cherished child: 44 Cemetery Road! So again I want to thank Michael Cheang because if his review was positively glowing, I wouldn’t be able to write to The Star, now could I?

Here’s the published letter:

Shock and horror at review

MY book 44 Cemetery Road was reviewed by Michael Cheang (Alamak, goosebumps, Reads Monthly, StarMag, May 27). The verdict was generally good proclaiming that the stories are “pretty well written”, are “fascinating”, “intriguing” and my “style matured” with each new book and that the collection’s greatest asset is the “nostalgia it evokes”. I would like to thank him for his positive comments.

It is thus with some reluctance that I take Cheang to task on the negative aspects of his review. He has stuck his neck out and claimed that I use “very similar plot devices” and that some of the earlier stories are “predictable”.

This is a serious allegation indeed against any writer and I wish to state my case. Here it is and right to the point: the stories are NOT predictable, nor are they similar in terms of plotting.

If Cheang thinks otherwise, he should have elaborated, pointing out the offending stories and also to explain why. Such a flippant comment can easily be thrown in, particularly by a reviewer who readily admits from the start that he regards horror stories as often “cheesy”. Yet what he claims is “predictable” is extremely difficult to justify unless we do a test.

After reading say 25% of the story, Cheang should then tell us what exactly is going to happen. I doubt he can. This also leads me to the question of predictability or, its opposite, the unexpected ending. It is the journey rather than the destination that matters.

If you watch any Hollywood movie you more or less know the good guys are going to win. Yes, predictable. But how? The journey that gets them there is what counts. That’s what you enjoy. It’s the detail of the story, the suspense, the action, even if you know the outcome, is what makes for good entertainment. So predictability should not be an issue. Having said that, my stories are not predictable.

For an odd reason I cannot fathom, other than Cheang’s clearly stated prejudice against ghost or horror stories, he felt let down by the title story 44 Cemetery Road. Yes, it is a vampire story and this in itself tends to constrain the plot. You can just bet someone is definitely going to get bitten! This in itself does not make a story predictable.

But as I said, it’s good for us to remember, whether on holiday or when reading, it’s the journey not the destination that counts. With that particular story, Cheang sees problems in the writing – “Elaborate descriptions, overdone superlatives and textbook-style plotting abound” he pontificates.

Again, I would like him to please explain. Which paragraph is he referring to? Where are the “overdone superlatives”?

And what does he mean by “textbook-style” plotting? Again, comments are thrown in with no examples, no justification. Such criticism without elaboration is not constructive but rather destructive.

As a writer, I am willing to accept negative comments but these need to better thought out and justified rather than just chucked in because it sounds as if the reviewer knows something the general public doesn’t.

Perhaps Cheang had a tight deadline and had to produce a certain number of words before venturing out to the hawker stall, but this is no excuse.

Overall, Michael Cheang (if that’s his real name) was prejudiced by a rather negative view of the particular genre I sometimes choose to write in, and this led to his less than exemplary review of my book 44 Cemetery Road. It certainly would have tarnished his sense of balance and fair play. Surely local writers deserve better?

Tunku Halim, Hobart, Australia

n Michael Cheang writes under his own name and he stands by his review.

Local Writers and Local Reviewers

I was going to comment on my last post regarding the 44 Cemetery Road review but for some technical reason my comments couldn’t be published.

I was out of town for the past few days and haven’t been able to comment on your comments. But it’s truly wonderful to return to your messages of support.

Reviews don’t bother me too much. I’ve had my fair share of positive reviews and a few negative ones over the past 15 years. It goes with the territory. If you’re published then you necessarily have to be thick skinned. If the negative comments are unwarranted or not constructive then we as local authors should not, must not, change our writing just because of a review. We keep writing, churning out what’s in our hearts.

It seems to me, and I don’t think I’m far wrong, that local reviewers have a pre-conceived idea of local writers which is “it’s local, so it can’t be much good”. The reviewer looks through blinkers, searching for negatives, not the positives. This means the local author necessarily has an uphill battle from the start. He or she has to convince the reviewer that despite being local the work is great. But take heart, this attitude will change with time.

Michael Cheang’s review of 44 Cemetery Road was mostly good and again I’m grateful for it. But on reading the article, it seemed to me that the positive comments were hard won, given by the reviewer almost grudgingly. But it does, overall, give my book a big tick so perhaps I shouldn’t take issue with it. Perhaps if he had explained himself I may not have.

I do hope when Michael Cheang’s own book is published that his work is reviewed in a fair minded and balanced way with no pre-conceived ideas. I’m putting my hand up to do that review. No hard feelings, promise!