CONFOUND EXPECTATIONS
– Yang-May Ooi, bestselling author of The Flame Tree
Confound expectations. It intrigues your readers and draws them in. Start with the expectations of a genre and then turn things on their head, subvert conventions and be a bit of a tease. It keeps you on your toes as a writer so you don’t slip into clichés and stereotypes. And what can be more fun than to flirt with your readers as a way to invite them into the world of your novel?
It could also give you a stand out book to make agents and publishers to sit up and take notice.
At the time I started out writing, stories about three generations of Chinese women suffering with bound feet and hard luck at the hands of men were all the rage. But I had just read John Grisham’s The Firm and was wondering why the world of thrillers was populated by strutting young white men and why were there no kickass Oriental heroines taking on the Mafioso in a modern, urban setting. So instead of playing to expectations and writing a saga along the lines of “me, my mother and grandmother”, I decided to have a go at my own legal thriller. The hero was a feisty, Chinese lawyer caught between her Western role as a hotshot high achiever and her Eastern past. This meant I could conjure with both the conventions of the thriller genre and the expectations of the Chinese generational saga.
Not only that, I wondered what would happen if I changed around the romantic dynamic. My protagonist Jasmine channels the qualities of masculine drive, ambition and power. Whereas the hero, Luke is an environmentalist who embodies the qualities usually attributed as feminine – compassion, enduring love and tenderness. As the author, I had fun playing with the tensions this created for the story and I hope it resulted in a fresh take on the convention.
And as for the sweet little old lady, Jasmine’s mother, Mrs Fung, she might appear at first sight to be a stereotype from those Chinese novels like Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club – but then you discover what she’s capable of…
This became my first novel, The Flame Tree, that had three literary agents vying to represent me and was ultimately snapped up as part of a two-book deal by Hodder & Stoughton. It became a bestseller in Malaysia and paved the way for my second novel, a lesbian legal thriller, Mindgame, with an explosive James Bond-like ending…
So my writing tip for 2013? Take a look again at the novel you’re working on. Look at your storyline or your characters and ask “What if…” – and fill in that question with something opposite to what you have, something you’ve not seen done in your genre before, something intriguing that could tease your reader and leave them breathless…
And it might be just the thing to give your book the edge.
Yang-May Ooi was a lawyer and now works in social finance. Her novels, The Flame Tree and Mindgame, were first published by Hodder & Stoughton. The Flame Tree was a bestseller in Malaysia, outranking Ken Follett, and is now available in its second edition (Dalgarth Press) on Amazon. Her co-authored business book (published by Kogan Page) was nominated for the FT Goldman Sachs Business Book Award. She is currently working on a personal development book, bringing together insights from both Eastern and Western cultures. Her website is www.yangmayooi.co.uk