About my writing
Pheww! I’ve been writing a lot lately about tips to start and continue to write. Now I just want to share with you a brief episode in my writing experience. When I was writing, I remember how much I enjoyed it that oftentimes I forgot to eat!
I started to write in high school, mostly essays and I also wrote a diary where I documented my observations. When I went to the National University of Malaysia to get my first degree in Arts I was assigned to three courses – Mass Communication, Malay Literature and Psychology. I failed to perform to their standards in Mass Communication, but excelled in Malay Literature and Psychology.
When I took a course titled Creative Writing IV in the second semester of my third year, this was the turning point for me to get into fiction writing (I don’t remember why the IV at the end). The professor taught us the elements of the novel and the course’s main assignment was to complete a novel! Imagine my excitement to finally be able to just sit down somewhere and not to worry about all the theories that I had to cram into my head like I had in other courses. All I had to do was to just write – and I had the best time in the world.
I enjoyed this course the most because there was so little class and all we did was to submit our novel at the end of the course. I don’t know what happened to my young adult novel at that time, but I received a grade of B for it. Not bad for the first timer and I was not really thinking about publishing.
That was it at least for the next year. I never wrote any fiction in my fourth year. I decided to major in Psychology in my fourth year because I am fascinated by all the theories about human behavior. I wrote my thesis about adolescence psychosocial development and focused my research on one part of this development – attractions to the opposite sex.
That was the only writing I did besides numerous paperwork I submitted as part of the requirement to graduate.
Only after graduated with a BA (Honors) in Psychology did I resume my writing. I decided to write about writing from a psychological perspective. I wrote many articles related to this theme.
I also get back into writing novels and to my amazement, the novel for my Creative Writing IV course that I thought disappeared was secretly submitted by my Professor to the publisher and it was published! They changed the title to Satu Bicara (The Dialogue).This novel is about an interracial relationship that had gone south and how the main characters came out physically intact despite all the emotional wounds they received in the relationship.
You can view all my writings from 1993 to 2001. They are all in Malay language but I did translate the titles in English just for reference. As I pointed in my About Me page, I stopped my writing and resigned from my academic profession when I moved to the USA to be with my husband.
Now I am baaacckkk….seven years later and I determine to get published this time in both languages! 
