We all gather each afternoon in the Ren i Tang bistro to hear writing and to talk about our writing. We each have an hour and we present in whatever way we see fit. The fans are set in place around the tables to cool the air in a swim around us. We are offered iced water or gather cool watermelon or ginger drinks to sip. We nibble on samosas and Xiang Si prunes as we listen. And we talk.

We talk about story structures, narrators and narrative strategies, and the possibility of silent narratives – you know they’re whispering but you’ve no idea what they’re saying.

We talk about having no answers, questions of time and how to pace that on the page. Also dramatic irony. Don’t tell the reader too much. We hear confessions: This is harder than I thought; I’m so nervous reading. And: I’m scared of my protagonist. We share ideas about how grief can be passed on down generations. One of us names it epigenetics.

You can pass down memories indirectly.

We encourage each other with useful rules of thumb: when there is a moment of discomfort, sit with it in the writing. It is in that discomfort that you can make discoveries.

We cry and we laugh with the work. We wonder at the way emotion can be funnelled so successfully in story. And on questions of racism, how the mind can be so easily colonised – layered, profound, real. We agree: writing is a way of digesting the world.

We reveal ourselves and question as we go:

There’s no such thing as fiction.

Ecstasy was prayer.

I do not expect to be found.

We lean in, concentrate, wince and sometimes write notes.

Later, and into the night, in the cool, after eating grilled fish and drinking iced nutmeg and walking and watching Chinese New Year firecrackers go off across on the esplanade we say to each other: This is so good. We should do more of this. We need to continue talking to each other about what we do. 

 – Francesca