Authors Electric

I’m turning into a craft-obsessed monster. Everywhere I look, I see POV, narrator, mood, tone and voice. I blame this hideous transformation on my writing workshop . Each week, our teacher gives us a new set of craft techniques to apply to our writing. I’ve been using this opportunity to overhaul my many failed short stories, looking for a new way into the narrative. POV or point of view is one of those life-and-death decisions a writer must make. Changing that perspective can give a dead-in-the-water story a new lease on life. But how to choose? Shall I tell my story of an adulterous love affair from the perspective of the straying wife, the cuckolded husband, the lover or an all-knowing bystander? Whatever choice I make will, inevitably, influence the reader’s sympathies. To feel pity for poor old Charles Bovary, exasperation with the flighty Emma or disdain for her many lovers. POV options There’s a famous writer who writes his novel from the perspective of eac...

migrant ˈmʌɪɡr(ə)nt noun a person who moves from one place to another in order to find work or better living conditions I am a migrant. I moved from the United States to the Netherlands because my husband got the job of his dreams in Amsterdam. My parents are migrants, too, leaving China for America for education (in the case of my mother) or to flee the Communists (in the case of my father). I’m an imaginary migrant. In my writing, I complete my parents’ journey by returning to my father’s birthplace in my Shanghai Quartet . Britta Marakatt-Labba, Historja. Photo credit: Karen Kao   Migrant writing comes from that place between homes. But where is home? It may be the place you were born, through no choice of your own. Or, it’s where you happen to live now. I write my best inside that halfway house between cultures and languages, too. In this one respect, it’s not such a bad thing to be a migrant. We writers are gifted with an embarrassment...