By Gwee Li Sui

I wish to thank the organisers of this seminar for inviting me to speak to you. This year's Creative Arts Programme has the intriguing theme "Always Becoming", and the organisers gave me absolute freedom to decide what to speak on.

That is a frightening thing to have: absolute freedom. You know it as a writer, whether new or experienced, sitting at your desk and staring at a blank page or a white screen. The paralysis of absolute freedom grips you – so what do you do? You look for the nearest thing to constrain yourself. Here I have your programme's theme, with which to decide where and how to begin.

Believe me, I am going somewhere with this.

The first thing I realise I need to say about becoming – becoming a writer, to be sure – is that you need to come up against something. You need to stall out, hit a wall; you need to come before something that resists you. If that thing does not exist, please look harder.

The understanding here should be pretty straightforward. It is because, without this element, you will just be rambling. And what is rambling but plain self-indulgence, even if you are not experiencing it as such? Self-indulgence is seldom conscious, by the way. You can ramble into a point or an idea, and many writers do that, in fact. But the next thing they do upon reaching the point or idea is to go back and edit away the rambling.

This is why I describe as necessary the inimical thing that resists you. A point or an idea is such a thing; so are a lot more other elements – depending on your creative journey. Finding this element immediately strips away the wandering-about you have been mistaking as writing. It gives you direction. Once you have found direction, then you are properly writing.

We may think of this in terms of an idiom that has existed in Greek literature. Euripides and others popularised it, and you must have heard it before: "to kick against the goads". This expression is taken from farming. Goads are long, wooden sticks which farmers use to prod their cattle along. As their tips are pointed, oxen that kick against them feel pain; yet, when they do, they are also moving in the intended direction.

The Holy Bible has made the idiom Christian today. The resurrected Jesus, appearing to Saul, that early persecutor of his followers, was actually citing Euripides when he said, "It is hard for you to kick against the goads." In other words, Saul – who would later become the great apostle Paul – was going against his destiny. But, until he was kicking, he did not realise this!

A more literary – and perhaps visually more familiar – variant of this dynamic comes from Miguel de Cervantes. In his wonderfully satirical novel Don Quixote, the eponymous hero who has read one too many chivalric romances decides to play hero, go in search of adventures, and fight for justice. The phrase "to tilt at windmills" recalls that famous episode when Quixote attacks windmills in the belief that he is fighting giants.

A theme such as "Always Becoming", what I am engaging now, is such a windmill. So is a prompt, something often used in a creative writing class to start an exercise. I am sure that, if you have not been challenged with prompts before, you will be encountering a good number of them in the next few days.

Both themes and prompts are simple windmills; they are also simple goads. They are simple because they are given to you and me, by your teachers and your instructors, or they are commonplace enough for us to be able to pluck them out of thin air anytime. We do not need to go far to find them. When I hear "Always Becoming", I know how to lecture. When you get a prompt like "A holiday experience in a monosyllabic haiku", you know what to write.

Ideological goads or windmills – what involves ethical or political motivation – are simple too. You just decide what or who you wish to champion and who your enemies are, and those decisions will guide you along. If I wish to write against war or racism, I will choose that wholeheartedly. And I will have also made up my mind about what my readers are going to get from me.

But this morning I wish that you learn something complex, specifically how to treat your own readers as such a provocatory thing. Readers! Do we even remember who they are? I can no longer assume an answer since established writers can also forget. Readers are a natural central component of what we writers do; yet you almost do not hear them being explored in writing classes. It is as though they go into a different framework.

Readers are complex goads or windmills because they are varied and hopelessly unsettled, because they are humans. They are essential even if we do not care about them when we write, much less internalise them in our processes. They will continue to affect the longer life of our creative work regardless.

There are several misunderstandings writers have of readers, of which I will mention only two here. The first is this: we commonly think that readers are mere receptacles of what we do, and so they do not play a role until the work is done. Readers are simply consumers of what writers produce.

But just ask the following question to realise how wrong this understanding is: why then should anyone read what we write? Why should anyone care about us? There is no answering this question without a betrayal of something problematically egoistical.

We may say that they should because our talent and skills entertain them. Or because our words bring them wisdom and ease the pain of their existence. Or because they need us to show them beauty and truth.

Really?

Then there is the inverse misunderstanding – and here is my second – that keeps us from factoring readers in. It is to think that, by doing so, we are somehow guilty of a form of sell-out. We are dumbing down our writing. We are compromising creativity and literariness as if we are at our purest when we look into ourselves in a yoga-like discipline that strictly trains our imagination.

These two misunderstandings have quick consequences, and we are always seeing them take writers into spirals of unhelpful, self-reinforcing delusions. This fate is real as much for first-time published writers as for seasoned writers who taste success once in a while.

So our writing lands with a negligible readership. We start to make excuses and say that our publishers and distributors did not do their jobs, that readers are shallow or misled, that our books are too sophisticated. Thinking so may make us feel exceptional, accomplished, sagacious, prophetic. In our heads, we reinvent our unsatisfactory reception as culture.

Yet, to do so is also ironically to trivialise the very life of literature which is more than us. And this we favour even as we claim to be engines of writing, in touch with all its deeper meanings.

Look, writers young and old: readers are not your enemies. They are not your projects either. You are not their beneficiaries, and you are certainly not their spokespeople. Readers are extremely important to each of your creative processes; yet, if they become too important, you will not get any real work done.

Now, that is a very complex kind of goad.

You may already know that my first published work was a full-length graphic novel – the first in English to appear in Singapore, in fact. The Myth of the Stone, which came out in 1993, was a fantasy story I had felt strongly then that I needed to tell in the medium of comics.

But the times did not agree with me. Sales were abysmal, and nobody bothered to take note. The work languished in the bookshops for weeks, and one day it simply disappeared. This sort of devastating disappointment for a young person – considering the amount of effort I had poured into writing and drawing – was profound.

A popular comic artist at the time told me that my mistake was not to have done what paid. I did not get on with what was trending then, which was humour strips, internationally dominated by series such as The Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes, and locally by Colin Goh's Orchard Road and Lee Chee Chew's Life's Like This!

Nobody wanted to read serious world-building with quasi-religious allegory and at the scale I was working with!

I remember honestly feeling offended because that was not why I was creating. I also was not so much exploiting the craft as working through myself – something I have since learnt that some books are meant to do. With such books, the writer does not fully understand why his or her book needs to exist, but this book, at a certain time, needs not so much a readership as an authorship.

So it is really alright to produce such works – if you wish me to say it plainly. But we must be prepared to accept that this sort of creation has a different relationship with its readers, wherever and whenever it finds them.

The sense of rejection I felt then nonetheless traumatised me enough to turn from comics to poetry. My first book of poems Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems? – can you hear the lingering trauma? – was published in 1998. I found with sheer relief that, compared to comics, poetry allowed me to express my inner life more immediately. I did not, for example, need to narrate into it.

But you understand that the opposite might be true for readers? Writers and readers do not experience the same form similarly. Readers feel interiority more directly with comics than they do with poetry, and so poetry is harder to consume in a practical way. It is a point of argument I am happy to pick up separately.

So it was that I had my fun and funny verse collection, and it came out as part of a three-volume series issued by Landmark Books. The other two books were Felix Cheong's Temptation and Other Poems and Alfian Sa'at's now-classic One Fierce Hour. We three were once young poets with very distinct first publications.

But, unlike the books by Felix and Alfian, mine did not secure funding from the National Arts Council because my publisher had not applied for it. When I pressed to know why, he told me that he was confident that mine would sell because it was not "that kind of book". I found myself thinking, "So now my second book has swung to the other stereotype – the mass-appeal product."

Who Wants to Buy a Book of Poems? sold moderately well, but, more satisfyingly perhaps, it had staying power. It went quietly from print run to print run, and I was approached first by kids who liked a poem or two, then by young adults, and then by kids who were read the book by their parents. A few poems entered the school curriculum and were read academically, acquiring meanings I never intended when I wrote them.

Seventeen years later, when I had the manuscript for a new humour poetry book, a resolutely darker and more jaded one, my publisher thought it good to issue it with a new edition of my first poetry book. That new book was The Other Merlion and Friends. My first book, now revised and expanded, became Who Wants to Buy an Expanded Edition of a Book of Poems?

But why revise and expand? You see, readership in Singapore had changed by that time in 2015. Lines that were initially edited down – because we had thought that readers might not take the jokes well – could now be restored. All the poems that were not included for structural and financial reasons – and they made up half of the new edition – were brought back in.

Why am I telling you all this? There are two reasons, the first being that every book you put out will have its own life. You, your book, and your readers – and I mean "readers" in the timeless sense – will go on an inexplicable journey. The least you can do for that promise is to understand that the relationship is threefold and never twofold. If you lock your book in the attic that is your mind, its meaning will be entropic. The book will grow smaller and older. But, if you keep engaging your readers, you will find that even your old writings will twist along and transform endlessly.

Secondly, expect such a long journey. This journey is one where you will keep remaking your relationship with writing and with your readership. It is not to say that you write for your readers, that you serve them. You do not need to do that because that is what AI is for, and it can do it way better than you can.

Rather, write knowing that your readers do hover around as living, changing engagers. Write to have a specific conversation with them across interpretations of a work and across the range of your books, what you have written and what you plan to write, keeping the conversation open-ended and mutually affecting.

My story with Myth of the Stone, for example, did not end with it vanishing soon after publication. When readers of a different time discovered it and finally understood what I had done, it sprang back into print. The twentieth anniversary edition, which is the current edition, was brought out by Epigram Books in 2013. Yet, at that point, I was no longer where I could be to make better sense of the work, and so, weirdly enough, now my readers are better placed to tell me about my work!

I therefore bring you all no grand lesson this morning – just the point that you remember your readers at all times. Your editor may professionally do this for you because that is his or her job, but you ought not to be offloading the whole of this relationship to anyone. The relationship is fundamentally and inescapably yours.

So write, acknowledging that your words will, and must, be read. Write to spur not just exchanges among readers but also their dialogues with you. Provide entry points into an understanding because your book is not a safe with treasures for you to enjoy perversely alone. Guide your visitors into such an understanding subtly. Reveal but also protect your best thoughts.

This is what I mean when I say, welcome your readers as goads that sting and windmills that provoke. A writer matures only as he or she learns to take such abstract responsibility for the reception of his or her writing. Again, to be clear, by reception, I do not mean commercial reception; I mean the call to develop the relationship that writing and reading create. By writing – if you have not heard it said before – you are in the business of creating relationships.

You see, writing is never a closed act even though this fact is far too easy to forget. Your readers and not you are where your writing ends, where it is homed. Therefore, once a book is read, it is truly no longer just existing between paper covers. And, lest we forget, the one who writes and the one who reads are also no longer strangers.

_____