A Manuscript is a Half-Formed Thing
“Open to submissions on an annual basis, Sing Lit Station’s Manuscript Bootcamp is an intensive editorial programme that gathers writers, editors, literary academics and publishers together to critique and workshop a handful of the best manuscripts that Singaporean writers have to offer. Put through days of thorough analyses and feedback from industry professionals, the manuscripts are then revised and edited by the author. What happens next is entirely up to the author, after being given access to the support system formed during the Bootcamp.”
What is a book? I’ve been obsessing over this for the past few years, trying to generate an answer satisfying enough for me to justify the resources it takes to produce a book. Of course, this is a personal question, a puzzle I want to solve for myself. I’m supposed to share with you what Manuscript Bootcamp is, from my involvement as a participant in 2017, to co-organiser in 2019, and now, the primary organiser from 2020 onwards. To me, Bootcamp is a short intensive weekend where we hold our bound pieces of work accountable, to try and figure out how to make them into a book. Or even, if a book in its conventional sense is even the right medium for what we are trying to convey.
So why not we start from there? A brief Google search yields these definitions:
book \ˈbu̇k\
noun
a set of written, printed, or blank sheets bound together between a front and back cover
verb (used with object)
to enter in a book or list; record; register
verb (used without object)
to register one's name
to engage a place, services, etc.
Looking at this spread of definitions, I think of the act of engaging another in order to allow conversation. To register something is not just to convey an impression; it is also to allow oneself to be impressed upon. I think of writing a book as conceding the work into a separate entity, one that will be shelved into a larger register of literary creations. It’s different from simply writing. Publication is another thing altogether because we publish to be read by others; a friend once told me that we publish to find comrades. I almost want to mention Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author, but that doesn’t quite apply to manuscripts.
↑ Pictures of manuscript bootcamp 2017 (poetry)
In the Bootcamp, the authors are alive and well, so are the manuscripts. Books as objects are static. Manuscripts, on the other hand, are not-yet books. They are brimming, restless. I almost love them more than books, because I can never be sure if this is the form it will stay in. They are wilful, precious, prone to being lost. What if the next time I encounter this manuscript, it is no longer recognisable? Such mutability invokes a range of emotions—apprehension, joy, excitement, even preemptive grief. This is what Bootcamp carries, alongside the practices of all its participants.
The participants gather for their first meeting on Friday evening. Together, we touch base on what they want to focus on for the next few days, and have the judges come by to share their thoughts. These participants are here after a selection process: their manuscripts had been put through several rounds of blind evaluation conducted by readers selected by SLS. An eventual list of manuscripts is then selected by an external panel of three judges, all of whom are experienced writers or editors. Alternating between prose and poetry each year, the Bootcamp is a weekend to start giving process its due attention and respect. In a series of intimate and personalised critique as well as panels curated to create charged conversations, participants grapple with their manuscripts up close. But not alone—everyone in the Bootcamp is committed to the same thing: to find ways to expand their manuscript and practice, so that they become closer to what they envision it to be.
I see Bootcamp as an invitation for participants to wait for the words to tell you what they want to become, to leave our egos aside so others can gaze upon your half-formed thing. If that sounds idealistic, it’s because it is. In practice, it is difficult to truly lay our egos aside, to take the leap of trust and allow another person into your process. It is precisely this difficulty that necessitates Bootcamp’s existence: to create a space to let that which is half-formed remain half-formed, to allow their creators to learn alongside each other how to be comfortable with uncertainty.
In the short period of 2.5 days, we gather people who have sat with these manuscripts and have focussed discussion on how they see it, and how they think it may become. Not all feedback and conversations will be “useful” in that participants will imbibe them wholly, but they give frameworks through which questions can be formed. Questions that do not seek being answered as a final destination. The same way I don’t believe that Bootcamp is meant to be a production site for books to be published. It is more a space where your practice as a writer goes beyond what you produce, where you venture into the whys and hows. For we are more than just book-churning factories, are we not?