Living in moments : a snapshot of life and death

• Main Author: De Roza, Celestia
• Other Authors: Boey Kim Cheng
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/66960
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This FYP contains two original short stories about living in Singapore and the tensions in the family within an urban landscape. The short story is a snapshot of life. In its brevity it encapsulates the essence of a character, a moment or an event; it unfolds the inner psychology and tensions in a quick hour, a glimpse of a brush that comes from a larger artwork. To work on a small canvas is tricky, “the short story wants to stop time,” and in that breath of time, a whole life that existed beyond and before the story (Mikics 185). Annie Dillard wrote in Living by Fiction that “the virtues of contemporary modernist fiction are literary, are intellectual and aesthetic” (30). This essay will discuss the inspirations and techniques that have gone into the work and what the writer hopes to achieve with them; and as all creative works are conceived, the ineluctable hardships that this writer had to overcome, the limitations and discoveries in the process of drafting.