Authors Electric

Eighteen months, I gave a master class on novel writing at the International Writers’ Collective. Because my debut novel is set in Shanghai 1937, we spent a little time talking about the historical research that went into The Dancing Girl and the Turtle . Out of fear of disappearing into the research rabbit hole, I decided to write the story first and figure out the facts later. That seemed to make a lot of people in the audience happy. I think I made writing historical fiction sound easy. Did I mention all the rewriting? a slow learner I made some major historical mistakes in that first draft of The Dancing Girl and the Turtle . They ranged from setting my novel during the wrong Sino-Japanese War to misusing the term for those body-hugging dresses worn in 1930s Shanghai. Fixing all those gaffes required a full-on, page 1 rewrite. In fact, if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that 90% of what I wrote for The Dancing Girl and the Turtle , I threw away. And what was l...

The Shanghai Quartet is going to be my magnum opus: four interlocking novels spanning a quarter century of Chinese history. Volume one was my my debut novel, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle . I’ve just finished the manuscript for volume two, Peace Court . While I await feedback from my beta readers, my mind wanders to volume three. I see Laogai as a collection of interlocking short stories. But what exactly is that and, more importantly, how do I write them? Definition   Writing short fiction is notoriously difficult. You have to accelerate from zero to sixty miles an hour in the space of a few sentences. A short story is often more about what’s not said than what is. According to author Baird Hunter , that’s what makes the short story so powerful. the ambiguities on which short form often insists, in the white spaces of section breaks and in the big dark void at the end. But not all writers can carry off the short form. Author Sonja Chung is embarrassed...