The week is finally over and with that so is Singapore Writer’s Festival 2011. Every year SWF has something different to offer but I sincerely believe that this year had the best variety and also the largest line up. With the authors coming from everywhere across the globe, the US, UK, Australia and also less conventional literary destination like Sri Lanka and of course, Singapore.

As the event wraps itself up I thought the organization was fantastic and kudos to the festival director and his team for putting together something that I truly enjoyed.

I think also, this SWF has changed my view about writers.

One of the things that made me want to stop writing was my belief and observation that many of the writer’s were quite self-centered. Their works mainly focused on ‘I’ ‘I’ ‘I’ and it seemed an entire collection of self-exhaltation pretentiously titled by some obscure name and then put on the front of the book and sold. That was my view of most (not all) singaporean writers and subsequently my view of writing that was done here. Of course there were always the one or two great down to earth books that executed well thought out self-deprecating jokes but I found much of the literary discourse to be very high-brow and self serving.

Hence I stopped writing. Few writer’s wrote about the common man’s plight, most choosing to express the beauty of a moment, a flash of indignation, passion, envy, lust, joy, but not the feelings of the common man. So I picked up photography instead.

But perhaps, this writer’s fest has rekindled some of my faith. a belief that there are people out there who write for the lower classes, whose work can be enjoyed and appreciated by all and they genuinely reach out to everyone. Writing itself is a very high-browed art form, it used to be accessible only to the literate, but once we are wise enough to step away from long words, step out of our own self-fascination and begin to observe the world around us in a larger sense of the word, writing soon appeals to a lot more people.

Listening to the international writers speak, their work highlights a lot more of other people. They become interested in society and it’s workings and inner function, they portray everything from the highest man to the lowest beggar and their work loses it’s long wordy structure, their prose becomes simpler and their works lose the artificial airiness that ‘published writing’ has assigned to it when uttered by one who considers himself a ‘professional’.

Honestly I have nothing against writer’s and the tools that they choose to use, but I don’t really understand why their purpose sometimes has to be so skewed. Back in the days when bards weaved fantastic tales of heros and legends literature was open to the masses and appreciated by all.

Thinking wryly about 吃风 and how it’s censored obscenities at the beginning and the subsequent story that it weaved would be appealed and understood by everyone, to some of the strangest, seemingly meaningless things that appear today. I believe that writing has to relate to the people, it exists to serve it’s audience and by extension, so do the authors. Time to get down from the pedestal boys, singaporean writing must grow and it should grow among the locals who can understand it and can chuckle at things that they remember. Perhaps after this SWF we will see more work that will be more relatable to the masses. I certainly hope so. With the proliferation of popular fiction now, more than ever, we need writing that can still appeal and be relevant to the locals and hold meaning to them in our own sense of culture.

This little talk has gotten a little rambly and unrelated so I will end it here but I have hope that the writing scene will change and I’m confident that it will.

Time to start writing again.

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