Authors Electric

The god I grew up with was the Catholic God: all-knowing, all-powerful, fierce in his retribution and tender in his forgiveness. The gods I spend my time with these days are a whole other ball of wax. Petty, self-indulgent, more interested in a game of mahjong than the plight of mere mortals. Meet the Chinese concept of a god. The Celestial Kingdom The Celestial Kingdom is the Chinese version of heaven. It looks an awful lot like the imperial capital Chang’An (today’s Xi’An) when China was a kingdom on the Yellow River. There is no one god but rather an entire panoply with a pecking order, too. Lady Mazu in the train. Photo credit: Karen Kao At the top of the power structure stands the Jade Emperor, a benevolent and wise figure. His empress is the Lady Mazu, protector of fishermen and a wildly popular deity in Taiwan. The first time I met her up close and personal was on a train from Kaohsiung to Taipei. She had her own heavenly carriage also known as the lu...

Bruce Nauman, Double Poke in the Eye II, Tate Modern. Photo credit: Karen Kao A while ago, a student asked me to talk about writing dialogue. She felt that her own dialogue was stilted, created solely for the purpose of completing her writing exercise for the week. I said something vague and probably wholly unsatisfactory, although this student was too polite to say so. I think I mumbled something like: use dialogue when it’s the most efficient way to convey your information. When the reader needs to hear the words coming out of the mouth of one of your characters. After class, I went home and started looking at my writing books. As I had hoped, there were plenty of better answers than my flubbed attempt. So here’s what I learned about writing dialogue. Impossible Dialogue Image source: HarperCollins Legend has it that Truman Capote could eavesdrop on a conversation on the street, rush back to his hotel room, and transcribe that conversation verbatim....

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...

I think a lot about the craft of writing. The poem, the essay, the short story and the novel each have their own internal rules, all of which are to be broken if a writer wants to achieve something new. Lately, my obsession has become short form. The short story has all the same requisites as a novel: voice, characters, arc. But because it’s short form, everything must be compressed. You don’t have hundreds of pages at your disposal, maybe only a dozen at most. So you haven’t got the time to paint a sweeping landscape or people a multi-generational cast of characters. You may not even have enough space to get through a single day. Short story writing is about choices. Not that I know much about the matter. Only three of my short stories have been published and I have enough rejection letters to paper a small whale. But I try anyway. I read and listen. And as soon I think I’ve figured it out, I hear the admonishing words of John Gardner in The Art of Fiction (p....