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The Sparrows Called Trưng (“Sparrows”) started off in late 2016 as an attempt of book-making instead of fiction-writing. By that, I mean that I was primarily interested in learning certain standard industrial practices that went into such a publication, including layout and graphics design, typography, the digital tools, printing technologies, and distribution. To be more frank, it was a humorous exercise in writing the front- and back-matter that got the ball rolling. The fiction (ostensibly the main content of any novella) came later. A sandwich was made because the bread needed meat.
The reason for my choice to present Sparrows with bathos is not to disparage the story or downplay any literary failings found in the main text. Rather, it is in the novella’s odd history, one that seemed set up for failure, that I see most clearly the surprising nature of writing. One does not always need to start off with the grandest of ideas and the burningest of ambitions. One only has to be quite serious when it comes to arranging one word after the next.
In hindsight, the fiction did not turn out to be such an afterthought (having spent some time wringing out one particularly personal inspiration), and the initial purpose of imitating industry-standard publishing was not all that successful. Sure, by 2017, a physical book was made (30 glossy copies - a mistake - and 50 matte offset copies), and it could pass as something not too unserious at a glance. But the DIY layout, typography, and graphic design left something to be desired; it was a mediocre pastiche of a paperback print by Knopf of Murakami’s The Strange Library. Still, what I had at the end of the process was my first complete substantial work.
I’ve variously wondered what would have happened if, for this book, I had picked a public-domain text and designed the various bells and whistles around it before printing. That would have saved a lot of time, and it would have been more in line with my initial purpose (as it turned out, I ended up doing exactly that in the subsequent years for short stories, usually horror). However, then I would have missed out on writing Sparrows, and I never would have had the confidence needed to go on to other original stories.
I don’t remember how it came to be. Perhaps the silhouette of a story had been there all along. It was something that (might have) happened in my life. But that was the point, wasn’t it? That it didn’t happen, that if it did, it wouldn’t be in my lifetime? I knew where the family kept its old photographs - love letters and postcards included. Every year or two, I would find my way back to that stack, and there it would be, that fateful postcard. It sent the imagination running wild. But most of all, it was a sense of loss.
Strange, how one could yearn for a scenario that would exclude one from existence. But it wasn’t so much non-existence that I wanted. Instead, it was that humbling sense that a certain sweetness can still exist, with or without my existence. That I was, rather than was not, and could feel regret was all part of that sweetness. I was, so the story needed to be written. There is little justification for being, but there is always a necessity.
I would be told that it was not all-too-real. I knew. That was why it was fiction. What was fiction then if not an attempt to feel, to momentarily be, something that was not? Else, I would have been a biographer. What an awful fate that would have been.
“Ian Quee” is but a name, and like any name, it can and has been retired. However, that doesn’t mean that those same hands won’t be writing other stories in the future.