I have a confession to make: I submitted my competition piece a few minutes before the deadline.
Yes, I do mean a few minutes. I had been procrastinating on this short story, I’ll admit – I only began to feel time pressure in the last few hours. I tend to ruminate extensively on stories before I write them, and this one had … quite the journey from my imagination to the page.
I typed out The Keeper of the Garden of Secrets at 11pm on a school night, bundled up beneath my blankets with the laptop propped against my knees. The clock was ticking away and I had close to no time to revise. Hence the frantic scramble of my fingers across the keyboard. Hence the hastily gulped down glasses of mango juice. Hence the blinking, the eye-rubbing, and the fatigue. Hence sixteen pages of some of the best metaphors and descriptions I’ve ever used, writing that somehow caught the attention of judges out of 150 participants. Part of me is still in denial.
Strange how writers’ minds work. My best writing tends to come under time pressure. I recall that one day at the very end of my deadline for the Thornsong first draft – I wrote ten thousand words across twelve hours, which broke my previous record of about five thousand. Wow.
Anyway, it wasn’t just the adrenaline rush that inspired this story. The Keeper was a compilation of ambiguous moments and many influences – possibly the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest in Kyoto, which we got the opportunity to visit last November (for fifteen minutes. Humph). Perhaps I also received inspiration from all those moments of solitude spent at the window in the early hours of morning, listening to birdsong and watching the sun rise. Or maybe I just wanted to write a story that gave me the opportunity to describe different types of birds.
— Y.
P.S. I’m excited to share that this story won me the Top Talent Award at the Asian Gifted Youth Literary Competition 2025! Out of 150 participants in the Junior Secondary Division, only the top 2% received this recognition, and I was one of just three who earned it. I shared the honor with two other talented writers, alongside students from Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, and Singapore who also competed.