By Sofiah Mariah Ma

Shamini Flint is a literary powerhouse with over twenty years of writing and publishing experience. Swapping the courtroom for the writer’s desk, she started her own company, Sunbear Publishing, to publish her popular children’s books, which include the Sasha picture book series.  Her ‘Diary of’ series, as well as her children’s novels, such as Ten are published by Allen and Unwin, Puffin, Scholastic and Houghton and Mifflin. Her Inspector Singh Investigates crime fiction series is published by Little, Brown UK, and is translated globally. In 2019, she published her first political thriller, The Beijing Conspiracy. In 2020, she published the children’s novel, Beastie and George to the Rescue, which sequel will be available later this year.  Many of her books have been translated into other languages.

Constantly evolving as a writer, Shamini is currently a PhD candidate at the University of York, working in creative non-fiction and a memoir of her father. Her dissertation will explore issues of gender and postcolonialism in Malaysian women’s fiction.

Shamini shares her thoughts on writing, the rise of artificial intelligence and its impacts on the publishing industry, and her advice to future writers.

ACWP: Congratulations, Shamini, on getting the Inspector Singh Investigates series optioned for TV with Britbox International. Could you share with us how it feels to have your book series adapted into a TV series? 

Shamini Flint: Overall, I’m optimistic. Before Britbox International, there has always been a strong interest to adapt Inspector Singh Investigates into a TV series – once, by the BBC. If I did have a bit of scepticism, that’s more to manage my own disappointment should there be any last-minute twist in the tale. But I do believe that Inspector Singh will eventually end up on TV. It’s too good a television product, from the point-of-view of being an unusual crime drama set against an unusual backdrop with a colourful main character. Even as I speak to you, I can visualise scenes from the book. I hope it happens. I’m optimistic it’ll happen but I can’t guarantee it’ll happen. 

Does this mean that filming hasn’t started yet? 

Filming happens almost at the last stage. During the pre-filming process – the scripting, scheduling and financing stages of the production – there’s a lot of potential for side-tracking. Once it reaches the moment of filming, it tends to go ahead as so much of the costs have been sunk at that point.  

Have you been involved in the TV series in any way? 

I’m published by Little Brown in the UK, they are the ones who sell the option to the producer and all I get is my cut. I’ve also managed to write into the contract that I’ll be consulted, and far more importantly, as it is traditional, it will have to say on the screen, somewhere in the beginning or the end, and for not less than three seconds, that it is based on a series by Shamini Flint, which is the bit I need to see so that I finally believe it has happened. Aside from that, I don’t have any authority over the script or the participants.  

That said, the producer does tend to call me once in a while to chat and consult, but it’s informal rather than formal. I had to give away that level of control. You don’t tend to have a lot of say once you sell international rights to a big publisher though, so I can’t complain. They’ve published a lot of my books and made them pretty successful. Nobody would say, Oh, sorry, I want to be involved or you can’t have my books! 

I would rather let the experts do their job. I’m the writer, not the TV person. 

Shamini Flint at Life of Crime, a public talk held at Lyf Funan. Photos credit to Nicholas Teo.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane next. Take us back to the beginning of your writing journey, starting from when you self-published the first of the Sasha series to your latest foray into the thriller genre, The Beijing Conspiracy. In these 22 years, how have you developed both your writing and your writing career? 

Okay, let’s say approximately 22 years!  And yes, my last adult novel was The Beijing Conspiracy. But I do have a children’s novel, Beastie and George to the Rescue, that has come out since – Beastie is my dog, and George is my nephew – and its sequel is coming out this year too.  The whole thing has happened by accident. In a way, I think that has made it easier. 

I often talk to enthusiastic young writers or hard-working, unpublished writers, and listen to the pitfalls they face when trying to get published. Someone recently told me how he’d sent out over 200 letters asking publishers to publish his novel, hearing back from a handful which were rejections, and not hearing back from the vast majority. When I hear this sort of story, I realise how lucky I have been to accidentally fall into a writing career without necessarily confronting so much rejection, for lack of a better word. 

I was a full-time lawyer and I resigned to spend some time with my daughter, Sasha, when she was born because we were living in Singapore. I’m Malaysian, while my husband’s English, so we didn’t have the sort of family support that might’ve kept me in my work. But I was also a little bit tired of my sort of ‘corporate, international firm, legal’ job that was very rigid in its structure.  

Prior to that, I had worked in Malaysia where the practice of law was very exciting. We did a lot of constitutional law cases. We did criminal and corporate cases. My firm was very liberal, and always willing to pick a fight with authority or power. I had also worked for a lawyer who, in my mind, was the best. He passed away last year, but he was the best advocate and lawyer in Malaysia at the time. To go from that to the very rigid international firm system, frankly I was bored. So when my daughter was born, I thought, Okay, I’ll stay at home with my daughter.  

That didn’t last long. My ability to sit at home and watch a child was limited.  

But one thing I did notice in those first couple of years was that there was a lack of books set in Singapore, Malaysia or Southeast Asia, or that featured Asian children or anything that is pertinent to their upbringing. That had been my recollection as well, growing up reading the Famous Five and Enid Blyton, and being genuinely puzzled, as a small-town girl being from Kuantan, Malaysia, about these kids with different names, different habits, different schools, different foods – without having enough of a geographical understanding to know why that would be the case. I remembered thinking: I’m not important enough to be in a book. Only white people get to be in books. My daughter was about to have a similar experience. Because my husband’s English, I actually felt even more strongly that my children should maintain their Asian roots because it would be very easy for them to be the white people in books. I felt they would have lost half of their identity. I decided to fill this gap out of a combination of noticing that there was still this problem 20 to 30 years after I’d been a child, and that I was bored, with time on my hands. 

Putting aside whether I could’ve found a publisher to put out these books in those days, I decided to set up my own publishing company and self-publish these books as it would’ve just taken too long to go to a publisher when I was really more focused on writing for Sasha. It can take one to two years between sending out your work to be published and seeing the book in print, but there’s no point if my daughter, Sasha, is 10 by the time the book comes out. I would have failed to create an environment in books that reflect her own life experiences. I had to arrange for the illustrations, plan the books, design them, write them, even argue with printers and distributors about the quality of paper and where it was sourced, because most local printers don’t really want to tell you about the provenance of their paper. I have always been an advocate of the environment, and I wasn’t going to harm a rainforest to print a picture book about the Botanic Gardens. I basically wrote one book for all the places that Sasha visited – the Botanic Gardens, Bali, KL, until she was about seven or eight years old when Beijing was the first town she had not visited that I wrote about. And she was very offended. She said, Mommy, I haven’t been to Beijing. I said, Well, the books have gone from non-fiction to fiction, so you’re just going to have to put up with it!  

Extraordinarily, the Sasha series became immensely popular, and I think I’ve sold absurd numbers over twenty years. I’ve probably sold half a million books in Singapore alone. Nevertheless, I think it goes to show that there’s a real desire for a product like that. Simple, realistic, and that it reflects the environment in which the child is growing up. In a small way, I guess by writing these books, I started being excited by the idea of, maybe not of writing, but of communicating ideas or values in a book. And then my kids got older and I realised that they were no longer of picture book age. I thought, Okay, let me catch up with them. So I started writing children’s novels. Hence, Ten and my other kids’ novels. At some point, I got a little bit frustrated because I’ve studied extensively, and I’ve worked in numerous countries. I’ve always been interested in adult issues of politics, culture and freedoms, and I took myself seriously as a lawyer. I wondered how I had suddenly become a writer of children’s books, abandoning a decade worth of study and interest. Malaysia was a very complex society at that point in time. Mahathir had deposed, and then imprisoned Anwar, and all our hopes for the future had been in some way, dashed. There was a crackdown on everything, from the judiciary to the press, and so I started to ask myself, Why am I writing children’s books in this environment? 

When I started on my first novel for adults, I didn’t want to fall into that pattern of writing the so-called great Malaysian novel – a sort of multi-generational, historical tale in which all the grandmothers have bound feet or are playthings of the fates. While I do think that our history in this part of the world is fascinating, with our experiences with colonialism, war, and immigration, what I find more fascinating is the way these experiences play out in the present, having left us with multi-ethnic, multireligious societies with complex language and economic issues, all relating to our history. I wanted to explore those experiences in a contemporary way and being someone who read a lot of crime, and as a lawyer I thought, Well, I’ll write a crime novel.  

After writing the first Inspector Singh, I didn’t look back.  

By starting with self-publishing, I wonder if that has informed you in any way about the more traditional route of getting a book deal and publishing with a traditional publisher.

That’s a good point. When I wrote the first Inspector Singh novel, I had written a novel featuring a 30-something female lawyer protagonist who was obviously modelled upon myself. When the book was done, I read it, and I thought it was one of the worst things I’ve ever written. Then my mother read it, and her feedback was not entirely positive either. But there was a small character in the book, Inspector Singh, who had a sort of walk-on part, and he caught my attention. I rewrote the entire book making him the hero and thus came up with the first Inspector Singh. Because I was already publishing, I thought, Okay, why do I have to wait for publishers for this novel? I’ll just publish it. But that’s when I realised there’s a huge difference between self-publishing picture books, and self-publishing a novel. For a picture book, someone – a parent – can walk into a shop, and read the entire book on the spot, thereby judging its quality immediately. Whereas for a novel, you can’t judge its quality immediately. You can read a page or two, but you probably won’t be that willing to spend your money or take a risk on something that hasn’t had professional validation.

By the time I started sending the first novel off to publishers, I had finished writing the second novel, so I was able to say to them as a marketing device, that I have the first two books in the series. I was very lucky. I immediately had three or four big UK publishers fighting over the books, because at that time, everyone was looking for the next Alexander McCall Smith, who is the creator of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. I’ve read his novels myself. They are set in Botswana, and they are very charming, offering a sort of an English person’s perspective of Africa. But the idea of crime set in a so-called exotic location was the ‘flavour of the month’ at the time that I was writing my Inspector Singh novels. Having a choice of publishers, I picked Little Brown and wrote seven books for them before a combination of waiting for the TV series and COVID-19 interrupted my writing process.

How do you write your stories? If there are any unique hyper-specific details about your characters, what could they be?

I always write from life.

The reason I brought up my old boss in KL, Dato’ Haji Sulaiman Abdullah, is that I based the titular character of the Inspector Singh Investigates series almost entirely on him. He was brilliant, but could be lazy, was very, very funny, had a biting tongue, and had no patience for any sort of injustice or any sort of authoritarian behaviour. He was his own man, and I modelled Inspector Singh on him. Therefore, it’s hard to say what or how he would be different, or unique, because in a sense, the characters come to me pretty fully formed. Mrs. Singh, for example, who is a very popular character amongst my readers, is based on all my aunts rolled into one.

Thus, writing from real life, I try to capture these rather traditional characters from the Indian/Sikh/Asian community, and though I sometimes worry that I didn’t do it well enough, the feedback has been good and the books are all in print now, so I can’t change my mind.

Across your many works, which was the most challenging story or character to write?

The Beijing Conspiracy is my first, and probably, last thriller. It’s a big geopolitical thriller where I envisioned a modern-day Cold War that sort of replicates the US-USSR War, but this time between the US and China. In it, I tried to bring out flashpoints in that original Cold War. For instance, the Cuban missile crisis, replicated in some form, in the Taiwan Strait. However, my hero was a white man. A very traditional thriller character, ex-military, alcoholic, divorced, who gets caught up in international events. People have asked, Why did you suddenly write about a white man? I said, Well, it’s cultural appropriation. It’s our turn to explore a character who’s not naturally ourselves, and the book was pretty successful, and it was published quite widely.

But first of all, I got the geopolitics completely wrong because it turned out that Russia was going to be the problem, and that Trump was going to be a Russian stooge. My projection of the future based on history turned out to be inaccurate, which annoyed me, because I had thought really hard about power, and about the interactions of global issues, the elements of competition and law, and international relations. I’ve decided that’s not my forte. While it was fun to try something different, it was also difficult to write while pretending to be an alcoholic, middle-aged white man, without it turning into some kind of joke!

It’s interesting how even as a veteran writer, you’re constantly thinking about the next thing that you want to explore and experiment with, to push your boundaries and really challenge or put yourself out there. I think that’s something emerging writers need to do in some sense, and not to worry too much about what others think.

Yes, worrying too much about what others think and also worrying too much about the viability of your project and its ‘sell-ability’, and whether it is publishable – my view is that you can’t second guess the market, and you certainly can’t second guess what publishers want.

In my opinion, what you really want to do is to write the absolute best work that you can, putting aside all thoughts of success and criticism. If you’ve done that, then you’ve been true to yourself, produced the best piece of work you can about a subject that interests you personally, in your authentic voice, and what the world thinks of it is up to them. If people don’t like that, that’s on them. You’ve done your bit. People often forget that publishing is not a reflection on how wonderful you are as a writer. Publishing is a business. It’s entirely driven by how many books the publisher can sell to ensure the product is profitable, and that’s a dynamic that you as a writer can’t influence, especially if you are a Singaporean or Malaysian writer because we don’t come from reading communities. We can’t offer the publisher the guarantee that you will sell 50,000 books in your home market. Instead, we have to sell our books to other people. In those circumstances, it’s difficult to make the leap.

To be a truly successful writer is to be able to write a book on your own terms, and not in terms of publishing, or books sales, or literary reviews of your work.

Interestingly, a student did ask me once about what it takes to be a full-time writer, and about how you might know that you’ve reached some level of success.

Whether you’re a full-time writer or not depends entirely on whether you can afford to be a full-time writer. Whether you have enough to be a full-time writer depends on what you consider to be a reasonable income threshold, so it’s purely a question of economics.

I’ve always made more money as a lawyer than as a writer even though I’m relatively successful, but it just goes to show that a traditional profession will still make you more money unless you’re a New York Times bestseller, or you have a breakout hit. Otherwise, it’s quite difficult to get steady royalty checks, but even then, these don’t necessarily get you the same level as financial success. I think whether you’re a writer or not, is entirely a matter of how you feel. If you write an email, you’re a writer. I suppose it’s just more about a sense of confidence that you have about your writing. For me, writing is about communicating social, political and cultural issues, and trying to shine a light on injustices in Asian society, so it’s important for me to have readers.

For my PhD, I’m working on a memoir. My family is going to hate me when they read it, so is it still important for the memoir to have readers? I don’t know. On the other hand, I’m also trying to shine a light on the cultural constraints and the impediments to your sense of self that comes from growing up as a minority or someone who has been excluded for whatever reason from the mainstream of society. Maybe it does matter to readers in those circumstances. So I can’t answer your question. I don’t know what it takes to call yourself a writer. In fact, I still think of myself as a lawyer more than a writer. I have impostor syndrome even now, after 20 years!

But there are a number of writers and poets in Singapore, and I’m sure in Malaysia as well, who are lawyers.

Yes, that’s because lawyers all think they can write a book because our currency is words, and writers and lawyers both use the same currency. I often find that this is why my first version of the crime novel was so bad because I wrote it very much like a lawyer.

Did Inspector Singh allow you to step away from law?

Yes, it did. I had to create a little bit of distance. Ironically, after all these years, when I look back at Inspector Singh, I realise that even though I based him on Haji Sulaiman, a lot of my own character comes through. When he speaks, I can hear myself. The tone he takes, the sarcasm, the dismissiveness, all of that has a little bit of my own voice in it. So having come full circle, I needed Inspector Singh to disguise my ability to project myself in a less boring way.

What about your experiences as a publisher? Has it given you insights into the kind of writing that you could pursue for adult readers too?

Did it make me realise that the entire thing is commercial? Yes. It doesn’t matter whether I personally like this book more than this other book. If this book sells more, I’ll put it in front of more bookshops. I’ll do more events for it. I’ll mention it in more interviews. I’ll do whatever I can to promote that product that is apparently doing well, even though I secretly think this other book is a more talented expression of my writing.

That’s very insightful actually, to remember that at the end of the day, publishing is a commercial business after all.

Yes, and there’s no need to take everything as a personal failure.

Of course, a lot of people don’t write particularly well, and then blame the publishing industry and the world at large for not accepting their work. Not every rejection is a criticism. Not every rejection is a function of the deep state publishing industry picking on you personally. There is still the business of you having to produce your best book, especially nowadays. Living in a culture of instant gratification, young people tend to think that if they’ve trotted out a draft, somebody else will do the heavy lifting of editing, rewriting, correcting typos, layering and texturing, and generally making it a better book. But I think, No, good luck, but that’s on you.

Shamini, you’re always exploring different modes and styles. Would you be able to tell us more about what you’re working on for your PhD at the University of York?

Yes. So about five years ago, I had quite a severe writer’s block.

Writing is a solitary experience. You need to be experiencing enough of life to create new experiences, which can then become the grist for your next novel, but I was tapped out. I had kind of milked my entire human experience and put it into books, and I had nothing left. I went back to work as a lawyer these last five years, and I also thought that with studying literature and creative writing, I could consider teaching or becoming an academic.

I started doing a PhD at the University of York, and I’m about two years in, working on its two parts: a creative project, which in my case is a memoir of my father, and a thesis on Malaysian women authors writing about the same time period as my memoir, which is from the time of World War II to the present day.

I’ve not written creative non-fiction before, but it’s given me an opportunity to explore a different style or genre of writing once more. I’ve also found myself really engaged with the academic side of things and enjoying it very much.

Has there been anything that you wished you did earlier in your writing career, or that you wished you didn’t take too seriously?

I sort of wished I had thought harder about my characters, about the setting, how people speak, what my voice was, instead of just sitting and writing and hoping something would happen. I could have been more structured. I also think I could have benefited from more technical knowledge. But I might’ve also gotten so frightened that I never wrote anything. So I don’t regret anything particularly.

Speaking about regrets, I wonder if you might weigh in on the issue of A.I. impacting writers today. In Singapore, for instance, NLB has been very open about its use of generative A.I. prototypes such as StoryGen. Kazuo Ishiguro, in a recent Guardian article, warns that A.I. will soon be able to manipulate emotions. What do you think?

First of all, I think there’s an obvious legal issue here, particularly in terms of copyright. Governments and legislators need to be protecting copyright by not allowing all our work to be shovelled into large language models just to cash in on A.I. If you can’t even be protected by your own book-related institutions, then the writer doesn’t have much hope.

Second, it becomes a question, I think, more for the reader.

A.I. may be able to churn out a credible product, because it’s basically copying and pasting on a grand scale, in quite a technically adept way. But is that even a book? Does it matter to a reader that a book was written out of the pain and experience of a human? If it matters that writing is an expression of a personal journey – be it crime, humour, or a thriller – that it conveys an individual’s worldview, that it holds intrinsic value. That is essentially art. Then buy that book.

We are going into a complicated time in creative history where what it means to be a creative person is being challenged. A machine might be able to write an Inspector Singh novel, but only I know the inspiration for it. It is my personal experience as a human being that made me write that book in that particular way. I think that has value because the lines on my face, the stress in my voice, the anxiety in my background, all went into that work. I suppose I’m a bit lucky to be able to write in a time when it was still valuable to write, but I’ll continue to write because I still believe that my human experience makes my work authentic.

I’m sure bookstores like Popular will be selling A.I.-generated novels for two bucks a piece. It costs more to capture human suffering in a book.

I would like to switch it up a bit and ask you a series of short, quickfire questions, and you’ll have to say the first thing that comes to mind.

Sure.

Morning person or night owl?

Night owl.

An hour-long run or an hour-long gym session?

Neither. I want to play one hour of football!

If you could drop everything right now without consequences, which country or place you would go to, and what would you do there?

South Africa. It’s a sort of Malaysia with lions. I’ve been on a safari a few times, and I just love everything about the country.

The first thing you’ll eat in Southeast Asia after being elsewhere for too long.

Chicken curry with potatoes.

A quotable quote for emerging writers hoping to follow in your footsteps.

Don’t give up the day job? Not yet, anyway! You have to live life first. Writing is a reflection of your experiences, so the more you live, the better a writer you’ll become!

Thank you, Shamini, for taking the time for the interview, and for your generous responses. It’s been a pleasure!