S2E4 Bonus: Neil Humphreys
Summary Keywords
Writing, fiction novels, non-fiction, children's books, unique voice, AI impact, reading habits, audiobooks, creative writing, Singapore, storytelling, education, literary voice, audience engagement.
00:03 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Neil Humphreys is a name that is likely familiar to you. You may have read his books, including his numerous non-fictions takes on Singapore, Notes from an Even Smaller Island and Return to a Sexy Island: Notes from a New Singapore. His first fiction novel was Match Fixer, set in the world of what the blurb calls “murky underbelly of Asian football”. Neil has since gone on since to write even more fiction. For example, The Inspector Low series with titles such as Bloody Foreigners and Marina Bay Sins and the Abbie Rose series for children, all available as print, digital and audiobooks. And to cap his list of talents and interests, Neil is also a popular school speaker, created documentaries and hosts MONEYFM89.3 on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. I don't know if he sleeps in between.
I’m Loh Chin Ee and welcome to the How We Read podcast. In this bonus episode, Neil Humphreys speaks to us about writing.
01:14 Neil Humphreys
My name is Neil Humphreys. What I do is complicated. Even my therapist would struggle with an answer for that, so would my wife. I suppose I'm a writer. That's generally what I call myself. It's taken 32 books and probably 50,000 columns to acknowledge that is what I am. That is my vocation. I write for TV. I write for radio, podcasts, children's books, adults books, fiction, non-fiction. So I am a writer by default. I started writing when I was 10, 11 and haven't really stopped.
01:49 Host, Loh Chin Ee
It's not painful to write, is it? I have to write research articles. It's painful.
01:54 Neil Humphreys
It’s a good question. It's painful if you're not writing what you want to write. And we all do that, we have to pay the bills. Of course, I'll occasionally take on commission work. I try not to take it on too often, but occasionally I will, but you have to pay the bills, and there's absolutely no shame in that at all. I say this to young writers all the time, we all want to write Oscar winning movies or Pulitzer Prize winning work, but writing is a craft. It's a muscle that needs to be practiced every day, so you have to write every day. So whether I'm writing a football column or a blurb for somebody else's book, or I'm writing a chapter for my next book, which I did yesterday, I'd like to think I apply the same diligence as I would to all of them. I may not have quite the same levels of enthusiasm, but you still got to be professional.
02:44 Host, Loh Chin Ee
You write books for children and adults. How do you approach them differently?
02:49 Neil Humphreys
Good question, and the answer is exactly the same, and I would apply that to any genre. Certain rules, loose rules that I follow. Write what you know, I'm a big believer in that. What can I do? I can do gritty social realism, I could do social commentary, I can do humour. Those were the things I grew up loving as a reader. Those are the things I try to do as a writer. So whether it's non-fiction books about Singapore, middle grade chapter books for children, my crime thrillers. I can do gritty urban realism; I can do social commentary; I can do humour. I can't do Dungeons and Dragons. I wish I could, they seem to sell well, I can't. I write what I know. I write what's around me. But even the best elements of any genres still have those things. Game of Thrones was not successful because it was Dungeons and Dragons. It was successful because it talked about human behaviour, greed, our basic vices, you know, greed, corruption, whatever, human relationships. That's why Game of Thrones was an international juggernaut, not because there was fire breathing dragons. So even for George RR Martin, he's writing what he knows, he's writing characters that he can relate to. So that's rule number one for me. Any genre, write what you know. Don't insult the intelligence of your reader, whatever the age. I try to punch. I try to write up rather than write down for whatever the age.
So I always have a reader in mind when I'm writing that. And the key point, and I cannot stress this enough – write something that you would want to read, not what you think your audience wants to read. I have gone down that road before. That is classic second album syndrome. You have a first successful book, it does very well, my book did ridiculously well, I'm humbled to say. Then you start second guessing yourself, you try to recreate the lighting in the bottle. Well, if they like that, I should just do more of that. It's sequelitis. It's franchise syndrome, whatever you want to call it, you can't do that. My second book is not very good, and then my third book is okay. But then after that, I've got to want to read it. Right? I've got to want to write it. If I'm not excited about the next chapter I'm about to write, why should a reader be? So write what you want to write. And the key point that I stress to every student, every teacher, particularly in Singapore, and we can get into this, try to find a unique voice. Now I say unique voice, I don't say the best voice, I don't say the most literary voice, I don't say the most poetic voice, the most whimsical voice, the most unique voice. I can't write like you. You can't write like me, nor should we. Don't try to be the next anything. The worst thing you can say to me is, oh, you're the next Sue Townsend, you're the next Nick Hornby, you're the next Bill Bryson. I don't want to be any of those things. I just want to be the first Neil Humphreys. He may be an inferior writer than all of those I've just said. But if you go down that road, I want to whichever genre you like. I want to be the next JK, Rowling, the next Jodi Picoult, the next Mick Herron, you won't be. You can only write like you, and at the risk of sounding like a hallmark greetings card, be the best you can be. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is, if we're going to have any chance against AI, we've got to have creative, unique voices. You and I will not see the world in the same way, and nor should we, but AI will. So the only chance we've got, and I say this to students from the year from five years old upwards, nurture your own voice.
06:28 Host, Loh Chin Ee
How did you get into the audiobooks?
06:30 Neil Humphreys
I wish I could say there was some really profound reason, but it was financial. In the sense that we're a small market in Singapore, there were not that many audio books locally, and then Storytel, came on board, and they made me a kind of ambassador for the first couple of years. Storytel, I think is Scandinavian. I'm going to say Swedish. I could be wrong, but it's definitely Scandinavian. They launched in Singapore about five or six years ago, set up an office here, brought me in as a kind of ambassador, and said, “we want your books front and centre on our Singapore homepage.” So they set me up in a wonderful studio out in Jurong, wonderful bunch of people. And it was very hard. I have to say it was very hard, I don't have Barack Obama's wonderful Chicago tone. And also because my background is teaching and creative writing and public speaking and so on, and I do radio shows myself. I am always aware of codes of communication. I wish I wasn't, because in a way, I'm compromising myself. I'm talking to you right now at about 20% of my usual speed. That's just the trained instinct of a native English speaker who's been in Asia for 25 years. If I spoke at my regular speed in my regular accent, my East London Cockney accent, I'd be lucky if anyone outside of my family understood me. So you're always aware of that. So when I was doing the audio books, I was speaking a bit too slow, initially. I was too self-conscious, but I explained to them, you do not want me speaking at my regular pace. You just don't, you wouldn't be able to keep up. And so we had to get this weird kind of hybrid. It was kind of fascinating. It was me, I wanted to be as natural as possible, but at half the pace, because you're always communication 101, right, your audience analysis. I want my auntie, my lovely Auntie fans, my piranha con fans in the east coast to listen. And I want my aunties, Auntie Tay in Toa Payoh to listen. And yes, I want my PMEBs, and I want my international crowd. I want my cake and eat it, basically. So to do that, I'm going to have to be as natural as I can, but without losing sight of my audience. Does that make sense? So it's not a compromise. It's not a compromise at all. It's just codes of communication, basic code switching.
08:59 Host, Loh Chin Ee
So what were the things that you had to do in order to accommodate your audience?
09:05 Neil Humphreys
I think it was just reaching a certain level of pace that we were all happy with, where I still sounded like me. To give you the most obvious example, I would say, as a kid, I would say butter instead of butter. And if I really want to exaggerate, I'd say bottle of water instead of bottle of water. I'm not going to say bottle of water in a recording of my own book, right? Because no one outside of East London is going to understand me. So yes, I would pronounce most of my medial consonants, but I wouldn't, but I would not sound like that either that I sometimes hear people read in Singapore. I wouldn't over enunciate every consonant, so we would find that happy middle ground for that. But if I'm doing dialog that was pretty much normal. I didn't compromise on that. If I'm having exchanges with men and women on the street, I would just do it as natural as I could. And even my Singlish, of course, is not going to be anywhere near as authentic. I accept that, but that's part of the fun. It's me like I would in real life, like I do when I go to schools. Let me tell you about this Auntie I met, oh, you won't believe it, Toa Payoh or whatever. I would do it the best that I could. It's an impression, rather than an accurate representation of say, Singlish. It's me recalling a story that happened to me in Toa Payoh.
10:32 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Just wondering you were talking about readers. Do you think that Singaporeans read?
10:36 Neil Humphreys
Oh, that's a loaded question. Singaporeans read more now than at any time in human history. So when people say, and I know you talk about, what's the future of reading. The answer to that is actually very simple, the future of reading is just fine. More human beings are reading more now than at any time since we since Homer wrote the Iliad, right? We're reading, go on any MRT or bus, we're reading non-stop. What we're not doing is paying for it. That's the difference. We're reading free content. Okay, what's the big deal? Why is that a problem? Because as publishers decline, as bookstores decline, as other education providers decline, you're going to be increasingly dependent upon state funded media, or capitalist funded media, or lunatic funded media like Elon Musk and others. So we are reading more than ever, but it's what we're reading and who is feeding us this reading material. There's a recent article that went viral. You probably saw it that this, I think, was an American University professor, said he couldn't believe that his bunch of undergrads had never read. This is the first generation where this has happened, meaning they can get all the way to university without reading. They'll read paragraphs and excerpts of maybe Shakespeare or Chaucer or whatever, Hemingway, whatever it is, but they don't read in the way that previous generations did. Every generation read, right, whether it was your Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl or fantasy as you got older, but every generation read. This is the first generation that just doesn't have to read. Do you see the difference? They can still do very well in their coursework and their exams, but they don't have to read anymore. They can read paragraphs. They can read excerpts. They don't have to read.
12:26 Host, Loh Chin Ee
So maybe this is like an obvious question, but what should people be reading? Because they're reading a lot of words, right?
12:32 Neil Humphreys
It's an obvious question with an obvious answer, which is, read what you want to read. Now that is a loaded question answer as well, because if you're being fed crap on Facebook by their algorithms, then racist people are reading more racist content, and sexist people are reading more sexist content, and so on and so on. The algorithm will feed you whatever junk food you want. So I come back to you wonderful guys. I start at the beginning with the parents and the teachers. Now without getting all hippie, my daughter was read to when she was still in the womb. My wife is an early childhood teacher, and so they can hear voices, so she would read when she would read to her lump, and then she was read every single day onwards by either my wife or myself. My daughter was born in Australia. We lived there for the first three years, and then we came back, and we never stopped that, even when my daughter, people laugh at this. But even when my daughter got to 10, 11, 12 years old, she would still like us to read. After that, she took over, and she still reads roughly around exams and things about a book a week. And she has a massive, a very extensive book collection. It entirely hers. It's nothing to do with me. Preachy dad would love her to read Jane Austen and Brontë. She's not interested; she wants to read young adults. She wants to read Anna Huang and all that. Terrific. As long as she's reading, I don't care. That was because it was instilled in her from the very beginning. She genuinely loves reading. Doesn't like ebooks, only like physical books. Nothing better to her than sitting on a bed or sitting in the back of the car, flipping the pages. Then you get to school. Now, I go, I've been to more than 100 schools in Singapore, good, bad and indifferent, local schools, neighbourhood schools, 'atas’ schools, international schools. I've been to them all. You'll get generally two types of teachers, HOD, Principal. I do the same talk, and it's how to read, write funny stories. How to read, write and find funny stories. And I do this for primary school students across the country. Assembly talks to 1000 students seven o'clock in the morning. I tell lots of funny stories. Now you'll get one kind of teacher or go, that's great. I can see what you're doing. You're using the humour as a gateway to try to slip in these other important messages. Then you'll get the other one little bit literal. Humour is dangerous. Humour is dangerous. What are you going to say? Are you going to tell jokes? Are they going to be offensive? Is anyone going to be upset? Is anyone to be offended? Okay, so this self-censorship has started before I've even spoke. The reason I say this is critical is because all I'm really trying to encourage students is to create a unique voice of your own. That's all write what is amusing, interesting, fascinating to you. Read it and write it. That should be the only criteria. There should be no other criteria. Find read and write what is interesting to you and take it from there. Don't over complicate it.
15:29 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Yeah, that's great. I love that reading and writing connection. And I'm going back to your AI, and this will be the last question. You talk about reading and writing and finding your unique voice, so it almost seems like writing and reading is very much connected. Of course, most of our students are not going to be full time writers, but they will write at some point. What are your thoughts on AI and how it's affecting reading and or writing?
15:54 Neil Humphreys
Okay, I'll give you a quick example that I often share. I saw two examples. I saw a model essay that was written in the tuition centre in the East Coast. This student went to this centre and produced this paper and got an A grade. That paper would stop me sending my daughter to that tuition centre because it didn't look like it was written by a real person, it looked like it was written by AI before AI became what it is today. Number two, on Facebook, I saw this example. A tutor, I'm not picking on tutors. I've been a tutor. I can see, of course, I can see the merits. But he said, this was the piece written by this 10-year-old boy when he handed it to me, this is the piece when I'd finished with him. You know what I'm gonna say? I preferred the first one because the first one wasn't a realistic, visceral experience of a 10-year-old boy. It was raw. It was a little bit inelegant. The language was simple, but it was real. It felt real to me. It got me in the gut. Second one was AI, it might as well have been written by AI. I could even see, I could even join the dots, I could see the cogs turning. I could see where he said, “you need an adverb there, you need...” I could feel it, I could seal it, I felt nothing, I felt cold, I felt detached. If...see, I'm getting passionate now, if this is the way we are raising our children in Singapore, we have already lost, we have already lost the battle to AI, except the fact that all your creative endeavours will be done by Ang Mohs or Japanese or South Koreans if you do not change now, if you do not allow young people to explore, to make mistakes, to fail, to try and find their own voices, to try to write their way, not the AI way, not the way that's going to get them a A plus plus plus plus plus, like it's a bloody restaurant bill. They've already lost, because AI will wipe them out like a tsunami. Give me an original, creative, quirky, funny, emotional, human voice, and I'll give you a career.
17:58 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Thank you to Neil for the reminder that while AI can create summaries and do some of our functional writing on our behalf, it cannot replace, I quote, the original, creative, quirky, funny, emotional, human voice. I declare that this script was written without the aid of AI, although it did help with a very quick and accurate transcription of the original interview. You heard the original quirky and funny Neil in this podcast. Thank you for listening to the How We Read podcast bonus episode. Swipe on the cover art to see show notes with links and references. We are available on all major podcast apps. Please subscribe to be notified on new episodes, and for more information, please visit lohchinee.com.