My Writing Life: Alex Wong

"There are no practical revelations I wish I’d had earlier. I only wish I’d been able to save myself some worry."

1. What book should every writer read?

I wouldn’t want to suggest any universal prescription. But recommendations I most often give to literary friends include Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus (1980), because it is the most astonishing near-contemporary novel I know, and George Meredith’s Essay on Comedy (1877), which makes important distinctions between comedy, humour, irony and satire, and beautifully indicates what is at stake in a domain in which people often don’t think hard thinking is useful or desirable. They have both been life-changing texts in subtle ways.

2. What is your typical writing day like?

I don’t have a typical writing day, especially if we’re talking about poetry. If I’m working on poems, I feel it can’t really be a question of 2.5 hours every morning or 400 words per day, the way some novelists work (although I’ve done that for various longer prose projects, with mixed success). But for me, a day of ‘writing’ might fall roughly into one of the following types:

(i) I plan to do a very productive day of writing, but first start by polishing all the woodwork in the flat or rearranging the CDs, which expands to fill the whole day;

(ii) I plan to do a very productive day of writing; I open the document on my laptop, stare at it, become discouraged, feel very uncreative, delete anything I add, and eventually give up;

(iii) I have other plans for the day, but some small idea has occurred to me – how to improve a line in an existing draft – and I start tinkering with that, and several hours later I find I’ve written and rewritten quite a lot, one thing having led to another;

(iv) I have 25 minutes before I need to go to an appointment, and I might as well have another quick look at a draft of a poem … but in those 25 minutes, I completely rewrite the poem and meanwhile start another one or two;

(v) same as the previous, but I am late for the appointment or completely forget about it.

In other words, for me, it is usually not a ‘war of attrition’ but a guerrilla approach based on ambushes and snatched opportunities. I will pace up and down a lot while working. After I reach saturation, I’ll go outside for a walk.

3. Who has been an influential figure in your writing career?

Walter Pater, and here is not the place to apologise for it.

4. What is the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started your career as a professional writer?

Any answer I can think of would be a pearl of wisdom I wouldn’t have been able to accept anyway, had it come too soon. There are no practical revelations I wish I’d had earlier. I only wish I’d been able to save myself some worry.

Perhaps: "Just be happy if you get any reviews at all, dude." (But I suspect that people did actually say that.) Or: "The occasional misprint or lapse of grammar isn’t the end of the world; hardly anyone will notice, and eventually you’ll forget where and what they are and stop caring." (But people really did say this. And no doubt they’ll have to say it again.)

5. What is the best advice you've ever received about your writing?

It’s hard to give just one answer, so I’ll continue with my bad habit and give two.

Before I’d published a single line of verse, an editor (who later would be my publisher) looked at a stack of my abandoned and dormant drafts. I confessed that I hadn’t really been keeping up with contemporary anglophone poetry; I was worried that my poems would seem out of touch. He told me that I shouldn’t feel any compulsion on that account to immerse myself in the immediately contemporary and shouldn’t worry too much about fitting in with the prevailing styles. It was a given that I would wish to avoid unmitigated nostalgic pastiche; he said my poems could be modern in their own way. That advice (or permission) has been very important to me, and I gather that it's quite different from the advice most often given to young poets.

The other answer is that I once had the pleasure of being edited by the eminent literary critic Christopher Ricks. This was for a piece of critical prose. Among many characteristics of my writing that he made me more aware of, he pointed to those little words and phrases, almost subliminal much of the time, that exert a degree of coercion over the reader without providing good reasons and often without the writer’s even knowing it. I’m now much more careful about where, when and why I write things like ‘of course’, ‘naturally’, and ‘consequently’, and I try harder to distinguish assertions from arguments and not to present the former as if they were the latter. Effects like this can be subtler in poetry but are still worth considering.

6. What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?

I worry so much about whether what I’ve written is OK that it’s hard to identify with the feeling of ‘pride’ (he said). Most people don’t regard poetry books as ‘proper books’ or significant achievements. But I am vain enough, and I like it when my work is praised and appreciated by people who have read it carefully, so any candidate for a proudest moment would probably be a comment from an appreciative reader. Recently, another writer (and former RLF Fellow), someone I’d never met, wrote to me to say how much she’d liked a poem of mine that she’d read in a magazine. A poem about pigs. Things like that are what count the most, in my experience.

7. What are you reading right now?

More Women than Men by (RLF beneficiary) Ivy Compton-Burnett, as part of an intermittent but committed progress through her novels. I can’t think of any writer better at family conflicts and passive-aggressive bloodiness, at least within a British middle-class context. I’m also in the middle of Moby Dick and a poetry collection by Rachel B. Glaser called Hairdo, among other things. I’m a scatty reader.

8. Are you a bookmarker or page-folder?

I'm a bookmarker wherever possible when it’s a question simply of marking my place. I save tickets of all kinds for this purpose, and the fact that I need a constant supply says something again about my erratic reading habits – how many books I never finish. But if I want to distinguish a page that I feel will have a long-lasting interest for me, I will sometimes dog-ear the page. Or use a fancier postcard or a more significant ticket. And in any case, unless it’s a very valuable book, I’ll scribble in the margins.

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Alex Wong is the author of two collections of poetry, Poems Without Irony (2016) and Shadow and Refrain (2021). He has also edited selections from Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater and Alice Meynell (all for Carcanet Classics, the last title forthcoming in 2025). His poems, translations and critical essays have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies.

Alex is an RLF Fellow and an incoming Reading Round Fellow. He is also this week’s Collected: The Podcast guest. Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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