By Yeow Kai Chai

Ken Liu's mastery of the short story is enviable.

1. What are you reading right now?
Mary Roach's Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
Feste from Twelfth Night. I think we have the same philosophical outlook: "For the rain it raineth every day."

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
I've often heard myself described as "prolific." I don't understand why, and the label seems to me not very accurate. Almost every writer I know writes faster and more than I do.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
I can't. I don't really believe that knowing a lot about an author helps with appreciating their work, and it's books, rather than their authors, that interest me. In any event, authors' literary personas are constructed artifacts that bear little relationship to reality.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I've never experienced full-on writer's block, but I've come close to it. When it seems like there's no inspiration and everything you write is garbage, what has worked for me is to just stop forcing it and go read something fun. Eventually, the joy of a good story will pull me out of the depressed state.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
The ability to generate in the reader the compulsion to find out what happens next. That seems to me the hardest skill to acquire.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
Giving out advice based on personal experience as though it is universal and applicable for everyone.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
This is from Pope's The Rape of the Lock:

To Fifty chosen Sylphs, of special Note,
We trust th' important Charge, the Petticoat.
Oft have we known that sev'nfold Fence to fail;
Tho' stiff with Hoops, and arm'd with Ribs of Whale.

I wish we had more mock epics. If you can write funny, you can write anything.

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I…
...have a sweet tooth and love bubble tea.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
Action thriller, for sure. The genre is often dismissed for not being "serious," but it's an excellent way to study how to properly generate suspense.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Favourite word: "sesquipedalian" – I've been trying to work it into a story for close to two decades now. I succeeded only once.

Least favourite word: "propaganda" – the word is abused now as a way to dismiss arguments and opinions without engaging with them.

12. Write a Singapore-based short-short story in three lines that include the following three items: chicken rice, MRT, Merlion.
One rainy day (is there any other kind?), the Merlion got up from his perch and wriggled, seal-like, through the streets of Singapore. Tourists and locals alike ran screaming from the monster, who spat chicken rice from his maw and cried out for durian. Finally, people reached safety by hiding in MRT tunnels—as everyone knows, the Merlion is incapable of descending stairs and the MRT is a durian-free zone.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
My computer. My handwriting is so bad that I cannot read what I've written a day later. If I have to draft long hand I might as well stop writing.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
For me, it's whenever I'm free! I get so little time to write that any available time is very much appreciated.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
Oh, this is easy. I'd invite the peerless strategist Zhuge Liang from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the wily Odysseus from The Odyssey, and legal eagle Portia from The Merchant of Venice. If any group can help me figure out how to make it so that it isn't my last supper, these three would be it.

16. You and your visual-artist wife Lisa Tang Liu are embarking on a fascinating fantasy epic novel incorporating East Asia-inspired elements. How is it coming along? And what did you learn about each other that you did not know before?
Though we created the world together, the novel is being drafted just by me. There's a first draft, but a lot of revisions remain to be done.

We both really enjoyed the experience of world-building together. Having a good collaborator is a rare treat.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
It is my hope that we'll discover the secret of living forever in my lifetime so that there wouldn't be a tombstone.

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