More about Single & Ready for an Arranged Marriage
Oh, hey! So, did you hear? I wrote a book and self-published it!
I wrote a whole post some time ago, telling you about my hopes and dreams of writing a book, the various concepts I got into and how I landed on the concept for Single & Ready for an Arranged Marriage. And now, I want to tell you all about the actual writing process.
When I first started writing, I kept waiting for structured chapters and a clear, continuous train of thought to come. I had a concept: a girl navigating the rigour and ridiculousness of arranged marriages. That’s my life, so I thought the book was practically going to write myself. Right? WRONG. I thought I would be moving flawlessly from Chapter 1 to Chapter 25 (fun fact: there are 25 chapters because Maya is 25!). Oh, boy. It never happened. Instead, I got caught up with nitpicking and over-editing the maybe 3000 words I had. I spent MONTHS like this before I realised I wasn’t going anywhere and that I desperately needed to change my approach.
So, I knew the average fiction is about 80,000 to 100,000 words. I set 100,000 as my target and chipped away at it a 1000 words a day. The timer app on my phone became my best friend during this time. 20 minutes, no thoughts, just writing whatever came to my mind. Doesn’t matter if it made sense, doesn’t matter if it flowed. Anything my brain thought of went on a Word document so long as they were words in the English dictionary. Once the 20 minutes was up, it was a 5-minute break AWAY from the keyboard and then 20 minutes of writing again. I tried to set aside an hour each day.
Now, this approach was not structured. I wrote my book as one-third of chapter 24, all of chapter 17, one-quarter of chapter 5, a magical sentence for chapter 13 in one hour. It was all over the place. But it REALLY helped with getting somewhere because it helped me figure out what works and what doesn't. It showed where I needed more material and it generated ideas. It helped me finalise the tone I wanted for the book (chick-flick, duh). So, it was really the practice of writing that helped ideas flow and come together. Not sitting down and waiting for inspiration to strike or a good mood or the Mercury retrograde to pass.
An hour a day from 2018 (YES, that’s how long it took me to figure out the tone, Maya’s end game and all that ish) took me till 2020 to hit my goal of around 100, 000 words. Then came the LONG chore of editing. I edited on my computer, I edited on paper (printed 4 pages on one sheet of paper, IYKYK), I edited on my iPad – seeing my work on different platforms gave me a fresh perspective each time. My first draft was very, VERY rough after all, but that’s what happens when you focus on number of words over quality. Editing was what truly brought my book together, shaping Maya’s character arc and all the subplots.
I won’t lie, though. Editing was my LEAST favourite aspect of the entire process. Despite getting more ideas – whether it was to inject some comedy, or plot device, or flesh out a character – it was ARDUOUS. Because of the voice in my head telling me “I’m not good enough.” Sometimes I wish this voice can be a whole person I can extract from my head so I can tell them to shut the fuck up. So, battling inner demons against what the book needed took ANOTHER two years. 2022 was when I truly felt like the book was done. And secure enough to read books by South Asian authors again without having my imposter syndrome act up.
I was submitting my book here and there in 2021 to get the momentum going and to show myself that this was something that was actually happening but 2022 was when I started spamming literary agents. I got nothing but rejections. Not even a request to look at my entire manuscript. This was soul-crushing and even that doesn’t feel like a sufficient expression of my feelings. I had tied my sense of worth and self to my debut novel and it was crushed faster than a bag of chips when I’m on my period. Call it naïveté, call it denial, call it what you want, but this incessant voice that someone NEEDS this book never went away. It was the voice that gave me the “AHA” moment in writing this story. And amidst my inner critic, the rejections, and the believe it or not – sheer laughter of disbelief from a best friend, this voice never faded into the background.
Maybe it’s the 14-year-old-me who so wanted to write a book one day. Maybe it’s the voice of an ancestor pushing me along (I literally have unfulfilled writer dreams in my genes). Or, maybe it’s just me and my desperate hope to claim the title of “author”. But whatever it was, it made me determined enough to put this book out in the world. More than I’ve ever felt for any of the blog posts I’ve written. So, self-publication it was.
And I know this is the right choice because I’m ageing out of my book. Considering quite a bit of it is my personal experience, the way I see things is evolving. I'm grateful for my personal maturity and growth, the way I see life as a 32-year-old is COMPLETELY different from the way I saw life at 25. But I can't have all that taint Maya's growth and character arc. She needs to grow in a way that makes sense, and she needs to make choices that don’t have to make sense to me but to her.
And maybe if I had written about a different topic, perhaps I could have distanced myself from my main character. But the depth of my involvement in arranged marriages, to date has made it a little difficult for me to separate myself from my character. Even if I did find a publishing agent any time in the future, I worry I won’t be able to produce something as authentic to the character, or that I would be swayed by their notes. Plus, I’ve sat on this book for almost 8 years now! EIGHT. YEARS. Even my last post introducing the fact that I’m writing a book was THREE YEARS ago. I mean, yes, the initial years were necessary to find my voice and develop different characters and plot lines, but now it just feels like it’s collecting dust. Or being torn apart by my hypercritical editor self.
I genuinely feel my book is done and it's time to put it out in the world. It’s still very much my dream to see my book in the Singapore National Library Board with the code “UTH”. But maybe at another time with another project. Meanwhile, I’m excited for you to meet Maya. I hope you enjoy her story as much as I enjoyed it.
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