About | Gateway

so what's this project all about anyway?

I used to think I was a great writer, churning out essays really easily all through my first four semesters of college. A 1500-word essay on XXX topic? Done. I could sit at my computer, stare for a few hours, and suddenly, BAM, I found the juice to sit and write for 4 hours non-stop, and finish the paper. I “edited”, i.e. looked for typos and grammatical errors, or fixed certain explanations, but that’s all writing was to me. A start to finish process.

I did reasonably well like this. As long as I started a paper early enough, I could finish it within a few days. But I didn’t feel like a writer so much as a generator of font-size-12, double-spaced, Chicago-style-citation, 10-12 page papers. What was the point of all of it? Sure, I could be really proud of my essays, but I noticed the essays I was proud of were the ones I put my heart and soul into writing, the ones that felt the hardest to write, generate the thoughts and arguments, and laid out cohesively, and edited for clarity of ideas (still avoiding silly typos!).

Another thing that bothered me was that at the end of it all, such essays would typically only get read by the professor, and that would be the end of it. I couldn’t really show these to anyone, because the essays would be for really specialized classes or on a very specific topic, and without context, no one would really get it. I didn’t have the context in my writing to reach anyone outside the classroom.

So, I came to the Minor in Writing, looking for a chance to write something that went beyond the ivory towers of academia. Of course, I could do that myself, but how many college students would do that if it wasn’t part of a class? ;) I started learning about genres, rhetorical situations and contexts. I began drafting fictional works, small-scale writing pieces, basically the opposite of everything I’ve done.

In the Gateway class, we take a piece of writing we did in the past, and subject it to 3 experiments – take this piece and transform it into something new, in a new genre, perhaps new content. At the end of the semester, we choose one experiment to flesh out into a fully-realized, final project, which now lives here in this website.

I used to think I was a great writer, churning out essays really easily all through my first four semesters of college. A 1500-word essay on XXX topic? Done. I could sit at my computer, stare for a few hours, and suddenly, BAM, I found the juice to sit and write for 4 hours non-stop, and finish the paper. I “edited”, i.e. looked for typos and grammatical errors, or fixed certain explanations, but that’s all writing was to me. A start to finish process.

I did reasonably well like this. As long as I started a paper early enough, I could finish it within a few days. But I didn’t feel like a writer so much as a generator of font-size-12, double-spaced, Chicago-style-citation, 10-12 page papers. What was the point of all of it? Sure, I could be really proud of my essays, but I noticed the essays I was proud of were the ones I put my heart and soul into writing, the ones that felt the hardest to write, generate the thoughts and arguments, and laid out cohesively, and edited for clarity of ideas (still avoiding silly typos!).

Another thing that bothered me was that at the end of it all, such essays would typically only get read by the professor, and that would be the end of it. I couldn’t really show these to anyone, because the essays would be for really specialized classes or on a very specific topic, and without context, no one would really get it. I didn’t have the context in my writing to reach anyone outside the classroom.

So, I came to the Minor in Writing, looking for a chance to write something that went beyond the ivory towers of academia. Of course, I could do that myself, but how many college students would do that if it wasn’t part of a class? ;) I started learning about genres, rhetorical situations and contexts. I began drafting fictional works, small-scale writing pieces, basically the opposite of everything I’ve done.

In the Gateway class, we take a piece of writing we did in the past, and subject it to 3 experiments – take this piece and transform it into something new, in a new genre, perhaps new content. At the end of the semester, we choose one experiment to flesh out into a fully-realized, final project, which now lives here in this website.

origins.

My origin piece, the one from which all 3 experiments in the Gateway sprung from, was a FaceBook message I wrote to a local radio station back home in Singapore (yep! International student!).

I took issue with the way the radio dejays were discussing perfectionism on their morning show and throwing around the term "OCD" interchangeably with perfectionism. I was extremely displeased because I stake a strong stand against the trivialization of mental health issues through jokes and stigmatization. I wrote into the station’s Facebook page because there was no email information provided elsewhere.

I chose this topic because mental health and its related issues is something I feel very strongly about. It is such an invisible thing that can be so debilitating, and is often so misunderstood. I have so much more to say about mental health specifically at the end of my short story, so stay tuned for that!

the first experiment.

In my first experiment, I wrote a piece of chat fiction. Chat fiction, for the majority of you out there who are scratching your heads reading this, is a pretty new form of storytelling whereby a story (typically a thriller) is told via the medium of a text message inbox. Often displayed through online videos or through apps like Hooked or Yarn, we read through a text message conversation between two (sometimes more) individuals.

I wrote a brief piece on anxiety and trivialization, illustrating the issue of how often people tell suffering individuals “you’ll be fine” and don’t fully acknowledge how much they need help, resulting in sufferers starting to close up. It was a hugely challenging writing process. I had to revise and revisit the things I had written all the time, playing with spatial separation of texts and the storytelling modes.

My belief that you could write from start to finish was crushed to pieces. I learnt many things about the implications of genre conventions, and in this case, I felt that those conventions of chat fiction ran contrary to what I wanted to do in the end. I felt like my piece was too contrived at many points, and had to work really hard to construct an authentic voice. (construct authenticity, ha!)

But I guess the idea of an experimental writing process was really enlightening and a huge relief to me. We had the room to try things crazy and unusual, and not have the pressure of needing to turn out a final, polished, perfect, product at the end. This spirit of trying and being willing to fail, have written down evidence of imperfection, carried me through the rest of the experiments too.

the third experiment.

Microfiction! Again, some raised eyebrows? Microfiction is a super super short story that ranges between 300-500 words, and somehow manages to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end.

I challenged myself to write a triptych of microfiction, each with its own epigraph attached, and I honestly had a lot of fun with it! The thing about microfiction is that you have to leave a lot ambiguous, which manifests as a genre convention that I enjoyed exploring. It is quite the opposite of having to explain yourself dry with those long academic papers you typically write in college.

However, my most powerful lesson from this experiment was this: you write best when you have something to say. I was so stuck on this experiment for so long because I didn’t actually think of something to say with the pieces. I was too flustered by deadlines and school and just wanted to get it done. It was only when I sat down and thought about what I was trying to say, did something finally come. Not having something to say is something you might get away with if you fake your way through an academic piece well enough, but it just won’t fly with this genre, where there is so little fluff to be had.

It challenged my views on writing and I realized how important the person at the heart of the writing experience is, because what the writer wants to say informs everything, and what the writer wants to say is so much informed by their own personal experiences.

the second experiment.

In the second experiment, I tried a genre that I’ve been itching to try since I applied for the Minor in Writing – short stories! I was very much inspired by the concept of haunting, and being haunted by yourself and your past, and that was a huge theme I explored in the short story. Again, it was a challenging process, writing non-linearly. I wrote in scenes and fragments, inserting placeholders for when I didn’t have a real transition down.

I learnt something very important through this experiment. Not about writing specifically, though it is related, but something important about me, and it shed light on all of my writing processes from even before I started this Minor. I realized that I struggle with linearizing my thoughts, and what I used to do in all my previous paper writing was that I’d stare blankly at my “New Document 1” screen for a couple of hours, agonizing over how I would put down these words. I thought of it like a sprint from the starting line to the finish line, and the few hours I spent staring was me trying to organize my thoughts in my head, until it was acceptable for me to start writing the thoughts, like laying down a neat little footpath from beginning to the end. When I struggled with writing the short story, I resorted to writing in fragments, and it was so uncomfortable, but later in the process I found that I could work from those fragments, rather than get stuck at an unknown opening and never write anything down for the scenes that meant so much to me in the short story.

The main takeaway: It is better to write down something shitty, than to write down nothing at all. You can edit a shitty first draft, but you can’t edit nothing.

the final project.

But when I had to pick a final project, I decided to go with the short story experiment. There is something irresistible about short stories to me, and I also believe greatly in the power of short stories to create bridges between different peoples’ personal experiences, to create empathy. And I think that is so important, given how misunderstood mental health issues are, and how differently they might manifest from individual to individual. I hope that by reading my short story, you also might start thinking about your own mental health, and that of those around you, how events in life can affect the general state of peoples’ mental health for now and for the future. Be compassionate to one another, for we all struggle with our own emotional baggage, don’t we?

But for me as a writer now: I don’t think I’m a great writer anymore. No, I’m just a writer, and I’m just me. And that’s good enough.

I hope you enjoy the story.