Eric Tian

Two months ago, I submitted two short stories to a small online journal called Backstory. After clicking ‘send’, I promptly began work on another project. I had been rejected five times across multiple prizes this year, and if history predicts the future, it would be unlikely these would be accepted. With such an abysmal track record, you learn to not have high hopes. You need to keep moving.

But this time, my stories were accepted. Both of them. When I found out, it felt like the sky parted its clouds and finally recognised me as a writer. I could now tell people that my stories were legit, that they could find my work online. I had a biography page! That was surely something not many people could claim they had. When I received notice that my stories were finally published, I dropped the day’s responsibilities and celebrated.

You might wonder what a win like this might do to a person. I’ll tell you what it did to me. It ruined me. I slowly developed a god complex, a sick sense of narcissism, and began thinking that my days of amateur writing were behind me. A publication meant I could practice less because I had made it. In my pride, I half expected people to exclaim on the streets, “Hey, aren’t you that guy that wrote for Backstory? Those were great!”.

If this reaction seems absurd, you are right. Since the creation of this blog, my writing has been for an audience of one: myself. A publication like this shouldn’t change anything. Also, nobody gives a toss about two short stories in a small online journal. Even I had never heard of them until a few days before, and I regularly consume media like this. Thinking back, it’s likely that the only stories accepted were the only submissions the editors received.

The saddest part of all this is that the stories aren’t even that good. Reading them now, faults stick out like thorns: inconsistent plot points, undeveloped characters, inelegant phrases. Yet with the external validation of a publication, I slipped into arrogance, and this stopped me from doing the one thing that would develop me further: continue to write.

People talk a lot about getting through tough times. Self-help books preach ideals to conquer adversity through tips to inspire action and motivating quotes like “tough times never last, but tough people do.” Not so many people talk about the dangers of success, and the difficulty of showing up when the fruits of your work have been realised. It leads one down the road to complacency, which is a journey into hell.

Today marks one month since my two stories were published, which marks one month since I have touched any fiction writing. It is sad day.

You can read my two stories, The Magic Cow, and The Golden Apple, here.

My coach once told me, “run fast or run slow, but not in between”. Run fast when to work on speed, improve strength, or feel like a bird (his words). But run slow for everything else. This is the only sustainable way.

I think a similar thing applies to life. We should either focus fully to get things done, or work leisurely to appreciate the beauty and nature of it all.

A moderate, default zone is when you are neither working nor relaxing – a great mode to let life pass you by.

A translated interview with Grandmaster Ding Liren, the new World Chess Champion:

“What is the meaning of playing chess? Ding’s answer is very realistic: “There is no better alternative for me”.

What about the meaning of life? Ding pondered for a moment and said, “The meaning of life should be in those special, those sparkling moments, not in the daily life, those ordinary days, but in living for those unique moments.” In Ding’s eyes, love is also very important because it is the happiness in this lifetime, and he likes to read novels and movies that depict love. “You probably want to get good results in chess, to be famous for ages, to be remembered by people in the future. Some people may have lived a miserable life, but they left something behind, wrote something down, and their goal was to be immortal. But I am not that great, I value happiness in my life as well.””

Some nights ago, I decided that I would not finish the day with my usual pastimes, but would sit down and listen to music. The piece that presented itself to me was a recording of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony on YouTube. And so it was decided. I boiled a cup of tea, changed into sweatpants, went to the toilet, put my phone away, and began to listen.

Halfway through the first movement it struck me how similar music is to reading. In each you realise that any exceptional score or book has moments of both elation and horror. They are not “happy”. And as you feel yourself carried across with the tide, you begin to lose your sense of footing, until you are in that strange place between your world and the artist’s you are beholding yourself to, floating in some dreamlike chasm. You remain there experiencing a journey, one unique to yourself. For all musicians in one symphony have the same score, and all copies of one book contain the same words, but no musician performs a melody the same way, and no reader is changed the same as another.

The role of the writer and composer is to present a tapestry, a story for the world; the role of the reader and musician is to take this tapestry and let it mould them into something greater.

Writers are composers, just as readers are musicians.

From Margaret Atwood:

“Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.”

Nearly 100 years ago, Canadian soldier and poet John McCrae sat in the back of an ambulance and began to write. His close friend Alexis Helmer had just been killed in the Second Battle of Ypres. As he was performing the burial service, John noticed how poppies quickly grew around those who had died. The next day, he scribbled down a poem, intermittently glancing over at his friend’s grave. However, he not happy with his work and discarded it, until a fellow member of his unit recovered the piece of paper and insisted him to publish. Today, “In Flanders Fields” is one of the most recognised and beloved war poems of all time.

The poem is written from the eyes of the dead. It gives voice to the fallen soldiers’ sacrifice and their final orders to the living. It lies at the the transition of death and life; it is a testament of courage, love, and great hope.

 In Flanders Fields
    In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow
         Between the crosses, row on row,
       That mark our place; and in the sky
       The larks, still bravely singing, fly
    Scarce heard amid the guns below.

    We are the dead. Short days ago
    We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
       Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
                              In Flanders fields

    Take up our quarrel with the foe:
    To you from failing hands we throw
       The torch; be yours to hold it high.
       If ye break faith with us who die
    We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
                                In Flanders fields.

A short story.

It took place at midnight, on the field across the bank.
        My acquaintance stepped out of the boat, restlessly grinding his teeth. He clutched his pistol by his side.
        On the other side of the field, I saw his enemy, and his second beside him. I recognised their faces: they were decent people from the town – I had eaten and spoken with them before – and then realised that we were the wrongdoers on this night.
        I met with his second in the middle.
        “What is this all about, friend?” I said.
        “For honour,” he replied solemnly.
        “Damn this honour,” I said, but he was already walking away.
        The duellists faced each other, with pistols primed. We stood in a clearing among willow trees and a full moon stood witness to the affair.
        Then the most unlikely thing happened. The man whose second I was, suddenly cried out. He pointed to something in the enemy’s hand. I looked and there I saw a golden apple, glimmering in the light. He held it in the palm of his left hand. His pistol still hung from his waist.
        My acquaintance was mesmerised with the object. He began to shake, then splutter, then began gibbering nonsense. The golden apple had poisoned his mind. I said:
        “For God’s sake, it’s only an apple.”
        “It’s beautiful,” he sobbed. “Look at it!”
        “Get a hold of yourself.”
        I looked at the golden apple again. It shone dimly under the moonlight but I couldn’t see the point. It was hardly different to an ordinary apple.
        His enemy stood staring at us while my acquaintance fell apart before my eyes. He could not look away from the apple and collapsed onto his knees. His pistol hit the ground with a thud.
        I looked away in disgust. I never wanted this damn duel anyway. Nobody told me what its cause had been and I didn’t care anyway. I was roped into it by honour, friendship and favours I owed. Damn honour, and damn the favours that people owe. They lead people down into hell.
        There was nothing anybody could do. With every passing hour, he became less human, and more of a mess. But still he kept his eyes on the golden apple.
        Dawn broke. Still, his enemy stood, holding out the terrible object, while his second observed. My acquaintance stopped responding to questions and demands long ago. He hadn’t spoken in hours.
        Eventually the doctor arrived in his coach and asked what had happened. He had expected a winner and a loser, the loser presumed to have been killed. I pointed to the two men and said:
        “He has lost his mind at that golden apple.”
        The doctor looked over.
        “But it is just an apple.” I shook my head.
        The doctor took out his tools and examined my acquaintance, still crumbled on the grass. After a moment, it was decided that he needed to go to hospital. We had to take the coach, the long way to the town. As we pulled away, leaving our boat behind, the enemy still remained, holding the golden apple. He stood as still as a statue under the morning light. I never saw him again.
        My acquaintance never recovered. We took him to hospital, where the hallucinations began. Then his madness. The doctors diagnosed him with a stroke. High blood pressure, they said. Terrible in stressful situations.
        I visited him often, then less over time. Whenever I visited, he would always ask me about the golden apple. I told him I hadn’t seen it again, but he refused to accept this and would become angry. I began to be more evasive in my answers. Eventually I stopped visiting him altogether. His instability was beginning to infect me. It doesn’t take much, does it, to break a man. Especially if, in a clearing, at midnight, under a moonlight sky, a mind cannot unfix itself from a distraction.

An excerpt from Someday Is Today by Matthew Dicks:

“I’ve written eleven books and published nine over the past dozen years because I don’t wait for the right moment to write. I don’t waste time on preciousness, pretentiousness, and perfection.

Yes, it’s true that in the summers, when I’m not teaching, I have much more time to dedicate to writing, but I don’t wait for July and August to get to work. I write all year long. I write in the early- morning hours before my kids tumble down the stairs. I write at lunchtime if I don’t have any papers to correct or lessons to plan.

I’m actually writing this very sentence on a Friday during my lunch break. I write while waiting for the water to boil for spaghetti. I write while the mechanic changes my oil at Jiffy Lube. I write in the first few minutes of a meeting that has failed to start on time.

Are these ideal times to write? Of course not. But unless you’re blessed with a patron who is willing to support your every earthly desire, you need to make the time to write. Even if blessed with a patron, I still might be writing in these cracks of my life. I’m filled with stories and the desire to share as many of them with the world as possible. Why restrict my creative flow to midmornings? Minutes matter. Every single one of them matters.

The problem is that so many of us discount the value of minutes and overestimate the value of an hour or a day or a weekend. We dither away our minutes as if they were useless, assuming that creativity can only happen in increments of an hour or a day or more. What a bunch of hooey.

The one commodity that we all share in equal amounts is time: 1,440 minutes — 86,400 seconds — per day.

I want you to stop thinking about the length of a day in terms of hours and start thinking in terms of minutes. Minutes matter.”

“Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, all in the thousand, small, uncaring ways.” – Stephen Vincent Benét.

Burnouts are rarely explosive. They are, at least in my experience, a slow death: a numbing of the soul, a loss of emotional capacity, an unyielding tolerance for pain. Sometimes it’s so slow that you don’t even realise you are on fire until you begin melting.

And like getting into it, recovering from burnout is rarely a quick fix, but requires gentle, patient work.

I heard the car crash before I could see it.

It was unmistakeable: the honking, screeching of brakes… a pause… then gnashing of metal on metal. The ingredients for a disaster. As I stopped and turned around on my bike to see, the cars were already in contact, the dents had been made, and the drivers, an elderly Asian man, and a younger female brunette, were getting out of their cars.

I grimaced a little as the drivers approached each other. I hate seeing strangers fight: there is so much goodness to uncover in each other, and choosing conflict is such a shame. Luckily, from what I could see, the drivers suffered no major injuries. There would be no ambulance calls today – at least not here.

The two drivers approached each other at different speeds. The elderly man kept his hands open and walked slowly. “Are you hurt?” I heard him ask. I noticed he walked with a slight limp. The brunette, ignoring the question, rushed out, giving her defence, explaining how she didn’t see, was in a hurry, that he should’ve seen. The elderly man again asked, “Are you hurt?” It was like watching peace and chaos personified.

Slowly the younger brunette realised the question. Oh no, she seemed to imply, then the elderly man went to inspect his car. Rubbing his hands over the dent, it seemed as though he were patting an animal, so gentle was his touch. The brunette was still talking during this time, gushing apologies, explanations, how she has insurance. But the elderly man didn’t match her energy. He simply gave her a smile, waved her down, and like magic, her anxiety seemed to fade. She slowed down, inspected her own car, which had some scratch marks, but was otherwise well, and scratched her head. The man said something to make her laugh. She began to smile more herself, and uncrossed her arms. They began to exchange details and I swear if the cars weren’t there, it would’ve looked like a natural exchange between friends. It was, to my surprise, one of the most anticlimactic crashes I had ever seen.

I thought of the elderly man as I rode off. I thought of his open arms, the concerned look on his face, not for the car, but for the woman, and his smile. How quickly the conversation became civil and peaceful.

A little warmth in a tense situation can go a long way.

From Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle:

“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?”