Debut Spotlight: 5 Questions

Congratulations on winning the 2023 Penguin Literary Prize! Can you tell us about that experience?

Thank you so much! I wrote that manuscript pretty much all through the KYD Mentors Program with Melanie Cheng. At the end of it, I had a full manuscript, and Melanie and I made a plan together that I would pitch to unpublished manuscript prizes to start with. So I did that and I got lots of rejections—I think it was five or six prizes that I’d entered.

So by the time I entered the Penguin Literary Prize, I was already thinking this is another prize that’s going to reject me. When I got shortlisted, that was huge! Then when I won, it was an even bigger shock and I really am still so honoured, so grateful, still counting my lucky stars that I had such a great opportunity and that my novel is now out in the world.

You’ve written in a variety of styles including non-fiction, short stories and now a novel! Does your writing practice differ between genres?

For me, the writing practice between non-fiction and fiction starts and ends the same. I’ll usually start with a brain dump of ideas, or characters or settings if it’s fiction, and I’ll always end with finetuning sentences and checking grammar and punctuation.

The biggest difference is in the research. For non-fiction, you’re always trying to make sure you do enough research to back up an argument or find evidence to support what you’re trying to say. Whereas with fiction, the research is in trying to make the story sound authentic.

Also in fiction, there’s a lot more dialogue, so I would usually have fake conversations in my head, or sometimes aloud, to try and make sure that the dialogue sounded realistic.

You participated in KYD’s Mentor Program back in 2022. What was the best piece of advice you received from your mentor that you’d like to pass onto other writers?

I learned a lot in the mentorship! But if I had to pick only one piece of advice to pass on, it would be that similes can convey so much about a character or narrator. Previously, I really loved similes and I liked using them, but I think I didn’t know how to use them very effectively. Saying something is ‘pink like marshmallows’ is different to ‘pink like rose petals’ and different to ‘pink like flesh’.

Now in Jade and Emerald, there are a lot of descriptions where Lei Ling uses something from her existing life to describe something in her new life. For example, saying that the Chanel logo looks like an algebra X, and I think (I hope!) it’s an effective way of not only describing something but of conveying Lei Ling’s character and her history.

 

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