On Trusting Your Instincts as an Experimental Writer: A Craft Talk by Shze Hui Tjoa

Last summer, a friend and I were taking a road trip when Google Maps instructed us to follow a sketchy-looking detour off the busy main road. “Are you sure?” my friend asked repeatedly, as the empty, dilapidated off-ramp loomed ever closer to our windscreen. Then he finally swerved, onto it, as per Google’s instructions—and we both saw with some relief that our guide had been right. “I don't like going where there aren't many other people,” my friend confessed to me later. “When I'm the only one heading somewhere, I worry I might be wrong.”

That sentiment comes back to me now, as I reflect on how it felt to write my debut memoir The Story Game. At first, I rolled confidently down the well-travelled road of constructing what seemed like an essay collection, about systems that look beautiful outside but are deeply flawed within. Great! I thought, as I produced essays about colonization and tourism, interracial relationships, mental health and greenwashing–I know exactly where this book is going. Then something happened that deeply unnerved me: my book began to challenge my plans. By the two-and-a-half-year mark, each time I sat down to write, I felt overcome with the impulse to try something other than a first-person essay. But what? I had no clue. All I knew was that my book no longer required the form I’d become skilled at executing. 

After one and a half more years of experimentation, I ended up with what The Story Game became: not an essay collection at all, but a genre-bending memoir incorporating both fact and fiction, as well as a script-like dialogue between two mysterious sister characters. But it’s easy to forget the intense anxiety of that interim trial-and-error period. Until I had written the very last sentence of my book’s experimental dialogue, I had no idea what the point of the whole thing would be–how it would tie in with the essays I’d previously produced, or even who its two speaker-characters were. Each moment of writing it felt like walking in the dark–like putting      one foot down and then the other, while hoping for solid ground.

I spent the majority of that writing period wishing there were some sort of how-to guide I could turn to–to learn how to manage the uncomfortable emotions that experimental writing brought up for me, but also feel reassured that I was not alone, because other writers had travelled down this road before. With that in mind, here are five tips that I’d like to give you, if you are also pushing the boundaries of form and tradition in your work:

1. Look for inspiration across genres

This might sound obvious. But if you’re trying something particularly inventive for your genre, then it stands to reason that you will not find many predecessors within it. So you might have to leap across disciplines in your search for inspiration.

When I first started writing The Story Game, I spent a lot of time reading other essays, carefully analyzing the Best American series or other prize-winners. But the further I got into the experimental parts of my book, the less this single-minded focus within my own genre served me. Gradually, the scope of my inspirations widened to include fiction like Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi, movies like Celine Sciamma’s Petit Maman, or even children’s comics like the gorgeous Mr Wing by Jimmy Liao. My influences started to get more mainstream, too—at one point, I became completely engrossed by Agatha Christie’s detective novels and even watched the entire thirteen-series BBC run of Poirot.

It wasn’t clear to me why I was drawn to these objects at the time. But in hindsight, I can see that something was at work in my subconscious; however vaguely, my past self could sense that they were versions of the thing that she wanted to do, but didn’t yet have the tools or vocabulary for. With the detective shows, for example, it turned out that my mind was quietly absorbing new information about the mechanics of suspense—learning how to use it to sustain momentum, as well as to supply readers the comforting sense that someone is in control of a seemingly strange or even disorienting narrative.

Nowadays, I describe the feeling that I have for my obsessions as “creative heat”: an intense desire to get close to the thing and observe it from multiple angles, until I understand exactly how it works. It feels important for me to chase down this feeling wherever possible, without disowning any of my interests as too weird or uncool. I also am increasingly selective about who I talk to about my obsessions, since my priority is to safeguard my inner creative life from unnecessary judgment. 

2. Embrace the flotsam that returns from your childhood 

In some ways, writing a book is a journey through the substrata of your past selves. When I was writing The Story Game, this included child-me, tween-me, and teenaged-me–each of whom popped up again to guide my process. While struggling with the book’s experimental dialogue, I found myself unearthing earlier, half-remembered forms of play that I thought I’d left behind: I played bubble shooter games, doodled fantastical houses, and drew ballpoint maps of imaginary cities like I used to in primary school. At one point, I even logged into my old Neopets account again and was flabbergasted to see my decades-old virtual pet still alive and kicking.

The logic behind this, I think, has to do with something that my psychoanalyst once explained to me: that when children are growing up, they instinctively sense what is lacking in their home or cultural environments, and find inventive ways to replenish it through play. So it makes sense that as an adult, when you attempt a daunting project that might potentially destroy and rebirth your ego or sense of self, your psyche will try to remind you of how you once coped with turbulence via playtime. Doodling houses, for example, gave me an outlet to express my wishful visions of perfect domesticity—even as I coped with the sadness of unearthing the problems that had been simmering under the surface of my actual family life when I was growing up. Likewise, playing bubble shooter games reminded me of the pleasures of plodding on through repetitive tasks: the dopamine rush I felt after clearing each layer of bubbles was not, in fact, dissimilar from the satisfaction I felt after writing each new line of dialogue in my book.

There is so much stigma associated with playing, idleness, and resting in capitalist societies. But my advice would be to release this shame, to let your past selves bring back some old coping strategies to help you again.

3. Notice and honor your unique factory settings 

Pay attention to the specific material conditions in which you feel stimulated to write: when do you feel tapped in? When do you feel bored?

Writers are sometimes sold an airbrushed vision of what “The Writing Life” should look like: idyllic residencies, leather-bound notebooks, cute coffee shops, etc. So personally, I was surprised to discover that my best writing actually happened in far less glamorous settings: like when I was playing phone games on my couch at home or when I had just woken up from an afternoon nap. My biggest creative breakthroughs didn’t happen when I was parked in front of my laptop screen; instead, they happened when I was speed-walking through the London underground, dodging other people’s bodies and ambiently absorbing their aggression, while entering typo-ridden sentences into my Notes app. 

There’s a poem by Lucille Clifton that goes: “From the light of her inner life / a company of citizens / watches Lucille as she trembles through the world.” Nowadays, I try to do something similar as part of my artistic practice: watch myself from within myself and take real-time notes. I’m finding, for example, that while the version of me who wrote The Story Game preferred working in isolation, with my second book I need an ever-changing flow of people around to process my experiences. I’m trying to make choices that honor that need.

4. Sit with your creative dissatisfaction

When I applied for professional writers’ workshops and classes, they almost always needed me to define my project, so that they could assess its merits vis-a-vis that of other participants’. This meant that I had to keep presenting my writing as a complete-sounding product–even though I didn’t really know where it was all headed. And in some ways, having to come up with a polished three-line description made it harder for me to stay open to creative possibilities–to remember that the work was, actually, still in flux.

Carmen Maria Machado once wrote an essay that I love about this phenomenon. In it, she talks about the urge that new writers might feel to “go pro” too early, almost as a shortcut from doing the work still necessary for their book. With The Story Game, my personal north star question was: Would I be happy if I saw my name appended to this project on a bookstore shelf? And until I had discovered my book’s weirdest parts–until I could say a loud and confident “yes” to this question–I knew deep down that the work was not yet complete. It didn’t matter how smoothly I was able to describe its contents, or even make a sales pitch. 

Prioritize your feelings of creative dissatisfaction. Be patient and fully committed to giving the work the time it needs–even as you’re letting yourself play the professional game.

5. Let your fear guide you

Finally, as clichéd as it might sound, please don't be afraid of your own fear. David Bowie once said something I love:

If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.     

I agree with this. Obviously, fear is a horrible emotion to go through. But in my own experience, it has often been a signal that I am standing at the edge of my current self, with the potential to enter the “stretch zone” of my artistic practice. With The Story Game, the fear kicked in as soon as I left the realm where I felt comfortable but static—writing personal essays that centered only my voice and thoughts—and started taking my first, tentative steps towards a more polyphonic form that genuinely incorporated another person’s point-of-view. I felt such profound discomfort because I was about to try something felt just barely possible for me, at the time: letting someone else challenge the shiny, polished version of my life story that I had carefully constructed over the years, to protect myself from pain and trauma. But that willingness to keep going through the discomfort was precisely what freed me from the limiting confines of my own self-narrative, in the end.

Feeling fear usually means that you’re about to try something for the first time in your artistic practice—and in my experience, anyway, the spirit of discovery that accompanies this is usually what makes the work come alive for both me and for the reader. There’s a vital, dynamic feeling that comes from getting to watch another person take risks on the page–experiencing the wonder and discovery of their successful “first time” as they create something new that didn’t exist before. So my advice is: follow your fear. See where it takes you.

---

SHZE-HUI TJOA is the author of The Story Game: A Memoir (Tin House Books, 2024), named a best nonfiction book of the year by Electric Lit and Paste Magazine. She is a nonfiction editor at Guernica and Adi Magazine, and her latest author interviews can be found in BOMB, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Between the Covers podcast, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a new book about materiality, music, touch/distance, and motherhood.

Return to Online Exclusives