Author: Michelle Ng

It was the mother of a primary school classmate - a woman of uncommon good looks - who gave me my first inkling of the kind of power female beauty can command: every time she came to school; a sea of heads would turn towards her as she glided through the corridors as though on… Continue reading A beauty who aged like fine wine

The scene is to be filmed in a diner in Los Angeles, but the story is set in Manhattan. Solution? Place neon signs outside the eatery and drizzle down artificial rain, so that the illusion of being in the Big Apple is created by bright shop logos glimpsed through wet windows. This is the kind… Continue reading Setting the scene

“A rope is made up of a huge number of fibres, but not a single fibre goes through its entire length. It's the way the fibres overlap that creates the rope’s strength,” the 20th century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once reflected. Conclusions are usually so difficult to write that even producing one that’s half-decent can… Continue reading Writing conclusions that work

“A writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him,’  The New Yorker editorial writer E. B. White once counseled.  I lack the nerve to knowingly throw myself at writing situations that are beyond my abilities, but still, often, I end up passively going along with White’s exhortation: I’ll… Continue reading Writer as acrobat

It was only after My Fair Lady was showing in the cinemas that its set designer Cecil Beaton noticed a mistake he had overlooked: towards the end of the film, in the scene where Eliza Doolittle sang “Without You” while watering plants, the jug she was holding was too modern-looking to be from the Edwardian… Continue reading To write well, sweat the small stuff