Siang Lu, a Brisbane and Kuala Lumpur-based author, is having something of a moment if moments can be measured in lengthy library request queues. I was about 20 people away from a copy of his new novel, Ghost Cities, and after some weeks, have crept up to seven.
I first heard Siang's voice on the podcast Of the Publishing Persuasion and began to follow him on social media where I got familiar with his schtick of substituting his own name into his writerly friends' book covers and jacket copy. It has created some memorable sentences:
"Everyone in my family has killed Siang. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed Siang more than once. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth." — from Everyone in My Family Has Killed Siang, (née Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone).
Having done this a lot, (see here, here and here for more examples), he's made something of a Siang cinematic universe, if you will. Being John Malkovich? No, Being Siang Lu.
Siang Lu's latest book, Ghost Cities
Siang Lu is the 39th in my series of creatives to take five questions.
When my creative process is stuck, I reach for... my headphones. Over the course of many years I've found that the feeling I typically used to ascribe to 'writer's block' has never really in fact been a creative block at all but rather over-stimulation — the brain being pulled in many directions at once — and that by shutting down outside distractions, I'm better able to focus on the creative task before me.
The weirdest thing about being a creative human is... there's a weird narrative progression to being a creative that is a little bit fucked, I think.
You begin as a person who receives the art, and it does something to you, turns on that switch to make you think, wow, yes, and also, 'Maybe I should/could do this'.
Next, you apprentice yourself to the form: this part's fun, you explore what you're capable of, experiment relentlessly. Eventually, and it may be months, or years, or more, you declare yourself kind of sort of maybe good enough to give the thing a real shot.
But what is 'the thing'? Many of us — myself included — go into this without really defining what 'the thing' is (something something capitalism, surely) and you can really find yourself, years later, in some extremely unwelcome corners of artistic compromise/disappointment/despair without quite knowing how you got there. Waiting for the thing you made to be sold, or signed, or embraced, validated by an audience or peers, and forgetting the first principles that it was the creative practice itself that was 'the thing', the worthwhile thing, the entire time.
The most unusual object in my house is... the Chinese seal I use for book signings. A Confucian scholar gave it to me many years ago, and it's one of my most treasured possessions. When I travel to writers festivals, security staff at the airport almost always pick it out of the x-ray scanner and ask me what it is, which has led to some pretty weird, but weirdly fulfilling, conversations at airports about art.
I celebrate my achievements by... Well, that's private. But I will say that the rituals I have in place to celebrate achievement are, for intentional reasons, near-identical to the ones I have to process failure.
Something in the world that already exists that I wish I had created is... a picture of Michelangelo's David. I don't mean to say I wish I had created Michelangelo's David, but there's a picture of the statue on the Internet, where, instead of holding the slingshot, David is holding an iPhone.
This is going to sound like a joke but it's not.
I wish I'd created that.
Find out more about Siang Lu on his website Ghost Cities | Siang Lu (siang-lu.com) and follow him on Instagram Siang Lu (@sianglu_author) • Instagram photos and videos. Ghost Cities by Siang Lu is out now, published by University of Queensland Press.
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