ManicWorld Magazine

Elly Veritas-A Life Shaped by Words and Imagination

I wanted to give other children the stories I always wanted to read. To explore deep messages and touch on darker themes.

-What got you into writing? Why do you think it is something so important to you now?
I first gained consciousness just on the brink of two years old, and my first memories were of my parents reading Enid Blyton’s Noddy books to me, and later, Black Beauty. They say I first spoke when I was a year and a half, and in full sentences too. There are videos on ancient Nokia phones since lost to digital evolution. I had the gift of hyperlexia, so I was literally almost born with the power of words.

I wrote my first (terrible, disjointed, but still a) story aged three in an ugly pink notepad with something like Hello Kitty on the plastic front. I reread it a year ago but accidentally left it in my now-abandoned ancestral house. An epic retelling of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, except everyone was human, and I was meant to be the Little “Bear”. It closely followed the original Grimm storyline; hence it became a story of cannibalism. My mum was and continues to be very concerned for my mental health.

Thus began my aspirations of being an author. But first and foremost, like every single one of us, I was a reader. Year after year I toiled away, reading sometimes twelve or thirteen two-hundred or three-hundred-page books a day, to the extent that I’d cry when my parents dropped me off at my friends’ houses. But not to worry. I would eventually sneak up to their rooms and sit on the rug to read all their books.

(I know this sounds crazily unrealistic, but I was homeschooled, so my education would take about two or three hours to complete way early in the morning, then I’d have the literal rest of the day to do whatever I wanted. Except for when they sent me to my friends’ houses. I’m exaggerating slightly, though. I never hated them. In fact, when I wasn’t reading books, because one eventually gets tired of words on a page, I was playing Lego Friends with them and then running around in the dusty street getting chased by each other, dogs, and ruining my knees, the usual thing.)

Anyways, by the time I reached the ripe old age of eleven, my obsession turned to the very art of words. It would be four years before I discovered the overarching art of storytelling, and most writers are always better at one more than the other anyway, so my real talent and skill does lie in the actual craft of emotive syntax and precise vocabulary. At this point I knew I wanted to be an author. Nobody, not even pesky Asian aunts, could ever dissuade me from my grand notions.

As for my writing style and its inspirations, I’ve accumulated and integrated aspects of so many that it’s probably impossible to pick out whom exactly do I take after most. I can try them on like dresses; I tried Horowitz’s blunt, dark-humoured style for a week before realising it’s actually too limiting for a young soul like me, and I might probably write a bit more like Holly Black or Cassie Clare, both incredibly talented with emotive language.

Poetry is a relatively new thing altogether for me. I vibe with Mayakovsky’s sudden, bursting poetry and Keats’ epic myths, and the cruel “Ozymandias” by Shelley, as well as both Tennysons’ works. And I’m still learning and growing in every way as I progress. My mum always says everybody stops going to school, but nobody ever stops learning.

Would you say writing is a way to express your emotions or a way to escape them? Or would you call it a mixture of the two. Do you think you do justice to your ideas in the way you write them?
“Emotions. What an extremely loaded word. For the longest time emotions have evaded me and even now I’m not entirely sure if I have them in my pocket.
They say writers are writers only because they feel so deeply, but I must beg to disagree. Personally, I find it somewhat difficult to consistently feel deeper than surface-level emotions and this is most probably due to my neuro-divergence. Many other NDs share similar experiences. But of course, this doesn’t stop me from being able to understand and write about deep emotions, which brings me back to why writers are writers: because they’re able to understand human nature deeply. I can’t really escape what I was never caged in. I write about happy things, sad things, angry things, painful and joyful things, and the stuff people will do or accept in tight situations. I write platonic relationships and sometimes true love but never lust.

My writing is always an exploration of human nature.

For example, my main character, Josh, is a teenage assassin, trained from an early age, but he battles with hidden anxiety and a lot of fear that presents itself as he goes deeper and deeper into the unknown, which is a major theme in his character journey. I personally don’t have anxiety, although I have felt anxious at many times and an overall sense of restlessness, which I draw upon to help me tell Josh’s story.

Do I do my characters’ stories justice? I have no idea. That’s why I’ll be asking for beta readers and getting feedback from people with expertise, so I can do my best to craft a good story worthy of being read.

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–Where do you draw inspiration from? Why do you think that person or thing has inspired you so much to create art? The last time somebody asked me this, I blanked. It’s a tricky question, because I genuinely don’t remember how I get ideas. They just appear, like pears hanging on an invisible branch, a light, flavoured breeze swinging it like a pendulum. And so I pluck them and I hunch over my journal or phone writing the idea down, often half-legibly (my greatest ideas grow at two in the morning or after lunch when I’m brushing my teeth). I also think I owe it to my characters to tell people their stories. My characters are almost alive; they sit within the folds of my brain and simmer and nag at me when I don’t write.

There’s no lone person that inspires me. It takes a village.

My dad’s always encouraged me to be creative in every way. He pops up every so often to see what I’m cooking up, and always, slightly reluctantly, is the first to taste-test my crazy baking concoctions. His scientific theories and experiments on plants make an appearance in my WIP, as well as the “mad scientist” stereotype.

My mum fed me my first words.

My friends beg me to write faster so they can read my work, and the thought of their eyes on my work is tremendously exciting and inspiring, because they believe I can do it.

-Through what medium do you think you express yourself most passionately and why?
I think it’s gotta be poetry! Poetry demands no rhyme or order, no plan and almost no thought. The words flow like liquid mercury from the brain to the page. Some of my favourite poems have been written in less than ten minutes. Some take longer, especially if I practice constraint, like a rhyme scheme.
It’s very different from writing prose, because with prose I’m tempted to cut and edit and polish over and over, and that’s why it’s taking forever to finish my WIP. Poetry feels more concrete straight off the bat, way more real. It doesn’t need to reach for perfection. It already is as close as it can get.

-Why do you think writing is so important to you?
It’s my way of processing possible future events and also weaving past experiences and aspects of my friends into ink and paper so I can immortalise them, at least, until the end of time. If I don’t do that, if I can’t do that, then a huge part of me is lost and buried forever. If I stop writing, my writing muscles will whittle away and the talent of words will be gone like clouds swallowing the sun. And unlike the sun, talent doesn’t often come back. It’s one of the few precious things I can hold onto that only require two things aside from the freshly oiled brain: a pen and paper. Every single other hobby I’ve ever had always demands something more.

– If there was a zombie apocalypse, do you think you would survive or would you quit early?
I would probably die either two days, two weeks, or two months in, mostly from personal stupidity, like forgetting to do something important or accidentally slicing my thumb and getting an infection. I actually have a go-bag ready in my room with period products and first aid supplies and the like. Being calm and collected is a requirement to survive, and I can do that fairly fine, especially alone. But if there’s a group, it’d better be tiny and manageable, or it’s all over. The situation would make excellent poetry though.

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