The Writer’s Journey: A Beginner’s Guide to Creative Writing

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Credit: Yannick Pulver, 2020

The Writer’s Journey is a practical, beginner-friendly creative writing course designed for anyone who wants to start writing—or return to it with confidence. Over eight focused modules, you’ll learn the essential tools of storytelling: character, setting, plot, point of view, dialogue, genre, and revision. Each session combines clear teaching with guided exercises and take-home work, so you’re not just inspired—you’re actually writing. The course is fully modular: sign up for a single class or commit to the full journey. No prior experience required, just curiosity and a willingness to try.

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Six-Month Mentorship Programme

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Credits: Krismas (2020), from Unsplashed.

Are you working on a manuscript and feeling stuck? Do you want honest feedback, practical support, and the guidance to finally bring your book to life?

I’m launching a six-month mentorship programme designed for writers who are serious about their projects and ready to take the next step.

Over the course of half a year, you’ll receive a balance of critique, guidance, and accountability—tailored to your needs and goals.

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The Key to Flambards by Linda Newbery

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Is anyone out there who remembers the ITV dramatisation of KM Peyton’s Flambards books? In Malaysia, the mini series was shown on RTM1 in the 70s and clashed with the weekly Chinese drama on RTM2. Therefore, I didn’t get to watch all episodes from start to finish. I had the books though and loved them. I still do and got this one, by Linda Newbery, because of the link to Peyton’s series.

In Key to Flambards, fourteen-year-old Grace Russell moves into the Victorian manor when her mother gets a contract to market Flambards as a creative arts retreat. They’re excited as they know that the place belonged to their ancestor Christina Russell.

It’s a clever and modern premise, a believable way to get the characters where the author (who knew Peyton personally) wanted them.

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Cloistered: My Years As a Nun by Catherine Coldstream

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I’ve borrowed several books about the religious life from the library here (in Christchurch, New Zealand, where I am on a working holiday and writing retreat for three months). Those I love know my fascination with convents and monasteries; others might read more into my research. Well, more will be revealed in time.

Is there a memoir about being a nun in which the author remains a nun? The books I’ve read have all been (apart from Isabel Losada’s New Habits) from the POV of those who have decided that the monastic life is not for them. For Catherine Coldstream, she walks away but her beliefs and the ways of the Carmelite order at which she spent many years, remain, by her own admission, very much a part of her life. Her time at the monastery is obviously something she values and appears to miss and even yearn for still.

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Bleeding Scars: The Calamity of Canning by Chua Kok Yee

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Bleeding Scars: The Calamity of Canning [Maple Comics, 61 pages] by Chua Kok Yee takes readers to the suburbs of Ipoh, spinning a haunting tale rooted in local urban legend. At the heart of this graphic novella is the story of a chee cheong fan seller, Uncle Chin, on whose life and livelihood the events of the story converge, in darkness and tragedy.

Chua Kok Yee weaves a story that feels grounded in the familiar, both in the sense of its setting, and also the tropes and features commonly found in the scary stories Malaysians love to exchange during social gatherings. The black-and-white artwork adds a moody, almost cinematic layer to the narrative, while providing dramatic contrasts that stress and intensify the rawness of the characters’ experiences.

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Rehana Maryam Noor

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RehanaDirector: Abdullah Mohammed Saad

Released in 2021

Dr Rehana Maryam Noor (Azmeri Haque Badhon) is a medical lecturer at a private college in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is also a widow, the mother of a young child, and the sole breadwinner in her extended family, which includes aged parents and an unemployed brother.

In the opening scenes of the film, we get the idea that Rehana is the one keeping things together at home. We see her stressful and frustrated attempts to juggle a career and motherhood. The dim, blue lighting, the closeups of Rehana’s face, her limp headscarf and drooping shoulders, the stark and sterile settings of featureless offices, classrooms and the corridors are gloomy and uninviting. There is a sense of heaviness, of claustrophobia and pressure, of walls, both literal and metaphorical, closing in on her. There is also the impression of intense but unacknowledged loneliness. Rehana doesn’t seem to have friends. She has no one to confide in, to talk to. Is this by choice or because of circumstances?

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Imaginur

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imaginur

Director: Nik Amir Mustapha

Released in 2023.

Those ciplak headsets! They are supposedly high tech equipment meant to aid in hypnosis, but look like they were purchased at ToysRUs or assembled from old washing machine parts. Perhaps their cheap and flimsy nature is meant to symbolise the fragility of the human body and underline how our physical selves are merely vehicles for the memories and emotions that will survive past the deterioration of flesh, skin and bone? What happens then when even memories fail, as happens in old age, especially to those unfortunate enough to fall victim to dementia?

For Zuhal (woodenly played by Beto Kusyairy), his body and his mind (memories) have betrayed him. And those clunky plastic crowns do nothing to add to the story Imaginur is supposedly telling about this man. They were just a terrible distraction, confirmation of the impression I got that Imaginur is simply a clever idea that the writer (Redza Minhat) and director (Nik Amir Mustapha) did not bother to fully explore because they did not, themselves, fully understand it.Read More »

The Accidental Malay by Karina Robles Bahrin

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TAMThere are some Malaysian topics and issues that need to be written about and not just in the form of essays and articles, but as stories that allow for thorough exploration and interrogation as can only be done through fiction. Hanna Alkaf’s The Weight of Our Sky is such a story, as is The Accidental Malay by Karina Robles Bahrin. It’s no accident that both novels centre matters of race that all Malaysians are familiar with, in one way or another. Hanna’s book is set during the infamous May 13 race riots of 1969. Karina’s is about a woman who is raised Chinese but discovers that her mother is Malay.

Race is a hot topic here; never far from the minds of Malaysians; it’s ever present in our day-to-day lives, and it’s also a topic that we are leery of discussing, especially in public, especially in (racially) mixed company. Karina’s novel is not just about (the Malay) race, but about religion, specifically Islam. In Malaysia, the two could be said to be one and the same as there is no separating being Malay from being Muslim. We’ve all heard of people referred to as having ‘masuk Melayu’ when in fact they have ‘masuk Islam’, i.e., converted. This is because there is no such thing, in Malaysia, as a Malay who is not Muslim. Therefore, you might as well have converted to being Malay if you embrace Islam as your religion. Furthermore, when a non-Muslim converts it is usually because of marriage to a Malay. So, when my children’s Malay classmates ask them what race they are and then add, ‘Kristian?’ their confusion is understandable since, in their own lives, there is no division between the two.Read More »

Moms by Ma Yeong-shin

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MomsToday I needed to write a paragraph on a book I’d recently read and it reminded me how long it’s been since I last updated this blog.

I thought I would use what I wrote here. I’ve bought many graphic novels in the last year, and been gifted a few. Moms by Ma Yeong-shin is one of them, and one of the few I’ve managed to get around to reading. 

Everyone who knows me well knows that I watch Korean dramas and listen to Korean pop music. I also like Korean films, not so much the commercial blockbusters, but the low-budget indie type by directors like Hong Sang-soo.

I’ve also been exploring Korean graphic novels. Hong Yeon-sik’s Uncomfortably Happily and Umma’s Table are two that have the feel of the K-dramas that I like best, the ones that aren’t about beautiful young women falling in love with even more beautiful young men, but about human connections and people trying live their best lives. Ma Yeong-shin’s Moms, on the other hand, is like a gritty, rather grim Hong Sang-soo film.Read More »

Translating Temple Alley Summer

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avery jpg

In January this year, I shared my thoughts about the English translation of Temple Alley Summer by Kashiwaba Sachiko, and I am now happy to post a Q&A with the translator Avery Fischer Udagawa.

Avery is an American but lives near Bangkok with her family. Her husband, who is Japanese, teaches music. They have two daughters.

Avery grew up in Kansas and studied English and Asian Studies at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. She was then at Nanzan University, Nagoya, on a Fulbright Fellowship, and the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies, Yokohama . While living in Thailand, she read for and was awarded an MA in Advanced Japanese Studies from the University of Sheffield.Read More »