Discomfort and Boredom: How I Wrote my Debut Novel 

Discomfort and boredom: how I wrote my debut novel. 

Eva Aldea

My husband still apologises sometimes for dragging me to Singapore just as I was offered a permanent post as a Lecturer in English Literature in London, effectively putting the nail in the coffin of my academic career. He also knows how much I hated living there: he’s read my book. But I keep telling him not to worry, it is because of those two years I spent in Asia, without a proper job and bored out of my mind, that I am celebrating publishing my debut novel. 

I thought I wanted to be an academic, teaching and writing about English Literature, but I was wrong. I kind of knew I was wrong, but I guess I hoped that by knowing lots about literature I would be able to produce literature. That’s what I always wanted to do. Write a novel. I just didn’t know how. So, I studied books, and studied, and studied.

I got my PhD, and I still didn’t know how to even start. In fact, it had got harder. The more I knew about literature the more critical I was of my own small efforts at creative writing. I knew how to write, of course, but to be frank, academic writing had begun to bore me. I loved teaching yet having to produce articles and books on literature had started to fill me with dread. But then, staring at the white screen trying to produce that novel filled me with dread, too. I was pretty stuck. 

We’d talked about living abroad if the opportunity arose, so when it did, it was an easy decision. Who wouldn’t want an adventure on foreign shores, conveniently paid for by a large corporation. I hadn’t thought through what a position of a ‘trailing spouse’ entailed. It was a position of total privilege and complete dependence. Of incredible freedom and crushing restriction. It turned out to be just what I needed to get me to write. 

I was allowed to work, but only a certain number of hours. I had a ‘dependant’s’ visa, so my right to stay in Singapore was contingent on my husband’s employment. If he was fired, we had two weeks to leave. I also couldn’t open a bank account or sign a mobile phone contract without his signature. An anecdote in the novel, where a bank clerk writes down ‘housewife’ on my protagonist’s application form when she says she’s unemployed, really happened to me. A lot of the stories in my book really happened, but not all. I am not really interested in making the line between the true and the invented clear. The blurring of that line is part of what made me able to write. 

It started with discomfort: Singapore was too hot. Lying on a tropical beach is one thing, going about day-to-day life in constant heat and humidity is another. I was lonely, I hadn’t been prepared for not being able to meet likeminded people. I hadn’t realised that in a place like Singapore, with a large transient population, the only people interested in hanging out with expats are other expats.

As an academic I had been surrounded by people deeply interested in the same things as I. In Singapore, being a child-free expat woman of a certain age set me apart from the people I found myself surrounded with. Even if I had wanted to, I simply didn’t know how to talk about kids and schools and maids. Living in that strange bubble made me deeply uncomfortable. But now I look back, I wonder if it wasn’t exactly because I was taken out of my comfort zone, that I was able to get out of the mindset that prevented me from writing. 

It came to fruition because of boredom: I had presumed I would be able to find some work in Singapore, not realising the extent to which it was a small city-state that prioritised hard sciences and finance. The pool of jobs in English Literature was tiny, but I was lucky enough to find a few hours of teaching in a private university. That’s where I met Clara. Clara was a Singaporean and she was a writer. Talking to Clara changed everything. She said: write. Just write. So, I did. I had very little else to do.  

For some reason I had always thought that to write a novel I’d have to invent things. To make up a story. Here I had stories to write from my own life, and the time and space to do so. Stories of my discomfort, of finding this life strange, of being stuck with my own thoughts all day. I suspended the critical part of my brain and wrote them down, the true stories and the imagined ones. It was liberating to realise that I could write about things that had happened to me, and what I thought about them, and it was liberating to write things that could never happen. Things so dark I barely dared think them, but which made perfect sense on the page. 

I guess my husband will always keep feeling a little guilty about it, putting me through that upheaval, the discomfort, the boredom and the heat. But it turned out to be just the jolt I needed to switch off my critical brain, forget what I had learned about books, and actually start writing. 

Learn more about Eva Aldea’s work at www.evaldea.com

Follow her on Twitter @towritelikeadog, Instagram @to_write_like_a_dog or Facebook To Write Like A Dog

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Born in Krakow and raised in Stockholm, Eva Aldea lives in Greenwich, London. She has published on contemporary literature, philosophy and politics. She holds a PhD in English Literature and teaches on the University of London’s online degrees. She is Editor in Chief at W.R.K.S Games, building story universes.

Eva began writing Singapore during a two-year stay in the country. Her short story ‘Baba Ganoush’, now a chapter in the novel, appeared in The Epigram Books Collection of Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Three. She has just finished an MFA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck and is working on her second novel, Stockholm. 

When she is not tinkering with words, Eva is walking hounds.

Singapore

Bored and lonely, with hounds for company, she starts thinking about how it would feel to kill…

When she finds herself a ‘trailing spouse’, a woman attempts to make sense of a world that is both familiar and utterly different. Cooking, shopping, yoga, and the beauty salon: a mundane routine that alienates her from who she thought she was. Her only comforts are the dogs, but even they have lost their lust for the chase in the ever-oppressive heat. Discomfort turns into exciting fantasies of violence. 

Singapore builds towards grotesque scenes, where the boundaries of a woman who always thought she had a conscience are blurred and broken. 

In this disquieting novel, Eva Aldea explores the confusing ethics of living in a globalised society and the animal motives that lie just below the surface in us all.

Pre-order here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/singapore/eva-aldea/9781910688847

 

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