By Teoh Yoong Shuen/Photos by interviewee

The script “Is This Love?” has a scene where a child tells his mother he wants his parents to be happy. In reality, the scriptwriter Ng Wei Ying has mentioned these words to her mother because she wants her to be happy with whatever decision she makes. 

The synopsis of “Is This Love?” depicts the marriage disputes of parents causing them to have arguments where the impact of their action brings harm to their children and strains the parent- child relationship. 

Ng Wei Ying: Scriptwriting can help me to express my sadness.

The inspiration of “Is This Love?” came from the scriptwriter’s personal experience and stories from the public about the struggles and grievances of parents in a loveless marriage and their impact on the children. Ng’s script drives home the message that children do not necessarily need a complete family, but the feeling of love from their parents.

“Even if we change our status or identity, love is a continuous feeling because it is always there but there are many ways feeling can be connected with the feeling of love,” Ng said.

Ng is a final year Han Chiang University College of Communication broadcasting student that won an excellent award in the Short Film Script Writing category of the 13th USM Literature Competition Awards. The judges said the overall script was well-written with no unrealistic elements; the emotional portrayal of the characters was clear; the conversation between the characters was genuine; the script presented another perspective of how parents take care of their children after unwanted incidents happened.

When Ng was interviewed, she mentioned that she was surprised and felt honoured to receive the award because it was her first time participating in a script writing competition.

“This award means a lot to me because it is an affirmation to my creation and it also acts as a motivation to persist,” she said.

Ng revealed that script writing is her interest. She saw a Facebook post from “Wu Ben”, a local movie magazine which posted the literature awards competition for script writing, then she boldly took the opportunity to participate in the competition.

Scriptwriting can release negative emotions

“Expressing certain situations or emotions verbally is impossible to allow other people to understand my feelings, so scriptwriting has become a way for me to vent out my emotions”.

“Whenever I have a deep feeling or thought, I will turn it into a script. Scriptwriting is an avenue for me to have a conversation with myself to solve the troubles I have had for some time,” Ng said. 

The USM Literature Award short film script writing category awards winners. (Source: USM Literature Award official Facebook page)

She took one month to finish the script. When she finally finished the script, she felt her accumulated negative emotions had been released from her heart and she felt much more relaxed.

When she was writing her script, it was a rough journey since one of the challenges that she faced was writing meaningless dialogues between the characters.

“I need more practice on not relying too much on dialogues to express the message as this will affect my script badly,” Ng said  

When she was asked whether she wanted her script to be adopted into a short movie, she was excited and hoped to obtain the organiser’s permission to do so. However, she was worried that her lack of experience and capability in shooting short films might ruin the essence of the short films. Ng added she might write a script on the ambitions or the obsessions for film arts in the future.

“I remember reading an article from the second issue of “Wu Ben” which said ‘we do not need movies’ which has inspired me. Director Charlotte Lim said there are no movies in many people’s lives, but it is just that we have to take it seriously and make it complicated,” she said.

Ng said a good script is able to deliver the desired message to the audiences. She encourages people wanting to pursue scriptwriting to write their scripts without doubts or worries to prevent themselves from thinking that their script is not good enough.