How did your journalism career influence how you teach writing today?

Journalism taught me how to write and edit. Everything I learned as a journalist, I apply when teaching writing today. I don't think children are too young to be taught to edit their stories. I also teach them about plagiarism and how to research their stories and essays. They are taught to attribute facts and figures to the source. They're also taught to have a questioning mind.

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Growing up, did you always want to be a writer?

I loved to read from the time I was small. Other kids might have been outdoors, but I was always at home with a book in my hands. Naturally, I gravitated to writing. I loved watching Little House on the Prairie, Little Women and The Waltons, all of which had a writer as one of the characters.

As a child, I even made my own newspaper by drawing and writing stories about things that happened at home.

What motivated you to start a writing workshop for children?

It started with an event I was asked to speak at. It was for families and I was sharing my experiences as an author of a children's book series. After my talk, a family approached me. The eldest daughter liked writing and wrote all the time. Her parents weren't sure how to nurture her passion. In her, I saw myself as a youngster and I would say she started my journey into teaching. At the same time, someone else approached me to teach her child writing. I put the two girls together and started teaching them based on what I thought would help a child to write.

From there, I went into one-day workshops and then, as a way of sustaining my freelance career, I started having classes for youngsters.

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What are the needs or gaps that you're trying to meet with these writing workshops?

The biggest gaps would probably be getting kids who don't read to write well, and teaching the kids to think. Often when children write, they put down anything that pops into their heads. In my workshops and classes they are taught about plot holes and that everything should make sense and be believable. They are also encouraged to write non-predictable stories about different things and unique perspectives. I get the kids to write a story from the perspective of a homeless child, a child who is bullied by a teacher, a heroic grandparent, and whether a poor man stealing to feed his family should be imprisoned.

They are so used to the usual stories that they read and watch in movies. Asking them to think outside the box is interesting because sometimes you get to witness that lightbulb moment as they realise something.

What do you think is the biggest killer of creativity?

Overthinking. It will stop you dead in your tracks in the first place. A lot of people want to write but haven’t started, saying 'I don't know how to start'. So how do you start? Just sit down and write. Stop being in your head too much. Sometimes, the loveliness of storytelling comes in the imperfectness of your characters.

Is there anything you have learned from your participants in the process of teaching them?

They teach me a lot, of course. Each time you explore a new area of the written word, from writing to editing to training, you learn something new. A lot of things we do as writers are done subconsciously but when you teach writing, you find that there is a reason for doing what you have been doing for years. As editors and teachers, we should be able to explain everything. If you can't explain why you change a word, then maybe you shouldn't change it.

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What advice would you give budding writers interested in a media career in Malaysia?

Be disciplined in reading and learning from everything and everyone. Be humble to accept other perspectives and to be corrected. Be brave in writing the truth and from the heart. It's not at all as heroic as you see in Hollywood movies. Sometimes, the most interesting stories come from unexpected places and people, and not from the newsmakers.

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