On Saturday, 3th July 2021, Janus Education, Singapore hosted an online live instalment of 4 among 13 winners of the MYAA (Malaysia Young Author Award), including our interviewee Brandon Yong Zhan Onn (currently a student at Junior Middle Level of Kuen Cheng High School) to share the inspirations and struggles behind their published novels.
The host started out by allowing the young authors to introduce themselves and the novels they have written. Brandon’s novel is called “Bad Karma”, which is a horror story that teaches us to not be greedy or else we will face the consequences for what we have done. The host also reminded the viewers that the novels of the young authors are already published at their website at a 20% discount.
The host invited Brandon to share his experience on e-learning. He said that he was not used to online learning at first and it was really hard to focus, but then he slowly got used to it and eventually got to pay attention during online learning just like in a physical classroom. He also stated that he missed the interactions with his friends as in online lessons it is quite hard for them to chat.
Then, they talked about the ways they get their inspirations and the challenges faced when they wrote the book. Brandon stated that he watched a lot of movies and dramas, reading books and also listening to songs especially horror movies, novels, and songs. For example, Pet Sematary, It by Stephen King, which are the main inspirations for his novel. He pointed out he preferred Pet Sematary as it has various events which are connected and lead to a scary ending.
Next, they discussed writing tips. Brandon said after writing the story, just let it sit there for about 2 weeks then pick it up again as our minds tend to forget what we have written and when we come back to it we can find grammar errors which we can improve from that to make our novels better.
Afterwards, they went on introducing the stories of their novels. In Brandon’s opinion, his novel is a must read if you are looking for some thrills in the story and feel scared. Then, they played a guessing game with the viewers. There are 4 winners that stand a chance to get a flipbook of the stories they guessed. An excerpt is shown on the screen and the young authors will randomly read the excerpt and the rest need to guess the story that it came from.
While waiting for the results of the guessing game, the host continued asking questions to the young authors. They discussed the celebrities they want to be the main character in their stories and the reasons. Brandon chose Will Smith as Brandon really enjoyed Will’s acting and he wanted to see him in a horror movie as he did not see Will act in a horror movie before. After that, they read some of the comments that were on Facebook.
To end the session, the young authors were encouraged to give some messages to the people who have supported them throughout their writing journey. Brandon thanked his parents and English teacher for the love and support. He also said that he will continue to work on being a better author.
In the interview, Brandon said he chose the ‘Ghosts & Ghouls’ theme out of the 7 themes given. He pointed out he got his inspiration for the book’s theme when he recalled his memory to 11 years old, when his father took him to watch a horror movie and he got interested in it, while he got the inspiration for the content of the book from some of the books he read. He stated that he learnt how to not give up easily during the writing period of the book as he faced difficulties while writing the book. He experienced problems with the lack of ideas close to the ending because he had no clue on how to end the story. He pointed out that it took him around a week to finish the 5000 words story. He said that he was full of accomplishment after finishing the whole story.
