Azhari Jasman

MA Creative Writing

2024

Azhari Jasman is a fiction writer who finds it difficult to write about himself so detachedly in the third person. I prefer addressing you like this, instead: Just an ordinary guy blessed with extraordinary fingers (type, type, typos) + imaginative mind; loves combining genres/experimental short fiction. Writing prizes won (wee flex, hehe): 2nd Prize, 16th International Conference on the Short Story in English (ICSSE) Short Story Contest 2022; Merit Award, Media Development Authority National Scriptwriting Competition 2003. My poetry (one poem, hehe) has been published in an anthology, One Page Poetry in 2022. I’ve also read at the Singapore Writers Festival 2022 during LASALLE’s inaugural launch of the SAMPAN anthology, in which I discovered my penchant for glossophobia, so I’ve since swore never to again appear before ya.

Thesis work

Novice writers of short fiction face an arduous task of crafting work that is clear, emotionally effective for the reader and intriguing. Those who wish to progress to the next level (to get their work published) have to innovate – pushing the creative boundaries of craft becomes a must, lest our published pieces find little success, land themselves consigned to the leftover unread shelves of public libraries.

To assist, we posit two writer’s beginning mindsets: 'No Genre Worth Simping For' and 'No Singular Voice Worth Possessing'. In the former (of which our thesis Lacquered Shattered Pieces investigates), the decorum of genre conventions are broken. Incursions of poetry, screenplays, circular plots, alternating points-of-view, varying psychic distances and storytelling characters occur.

We begin with a fixed genre and (to escape/FREEDOM!) find some viable ways around – an attempt towards experimental fiction. In the latter (of which our exegesis There’s Always Kintsugi! showcases), a notion of rejecting a singular voice for the writer leads to a search towards multiplicity of voices, leads to the Frankenstein Effect, leads to the (writer’s) block.

We posit the Kintsugi method (writing from experiences of trauma/art therapy) as a means around this block. The search for multiple voices within the writer, as well as the ability to be in-between uncertainties while breaking genre conventions, sets the novice writer a stage for Keat’s Negative Capability, provides a fertile breeding ground for good writing to begin.