Authors Electric

  Tell It Slant by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola Tell It Slant by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola is in its 3rd edition. Long a resource for writers and teachers of creative nonfiction, Tell It Slant aims to capture a glimpse of creative nonfiction in the wild. How to feed it. How to sharpen its teeth. This is a manual on how to track some of the many ways in which a writer can tell her truth slant. For writers One definition of creative nonfiction is “ true stories, well told .” Tell It Slant calls it “tricky business.” "In creative nonfiction—more so, perhaps, than in any other genre—readers assume a real person behind the artifice, an author who speaks directly to the reader. Just as in spoken conversation, it’s a symbiotic relationship. The reader completes this act of communication through attention to the author’s story, and the author must establish right away a reason for the reader to be attentive at all."   Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola, Tel...

  A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders Let me confess: I haven’t read many Russians. The big novels, yes, but few of the classic short stories. It feels like time to correct that omission with A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life) by George Saunders. The four 19th century Russians–Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol–deliver on the promises Saunders makes in his subtitle. They teach us, by way of seven sample short stories, about omission, patterns and escalation. Or rather, Saunders does. I’ve never heard him speak, let alone attended one of his short story writing classes. But I like to think that reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain comes a close second for writers and readers of Russians and everyone else. For readers For Saunders, writing begins with reading. The Russians were not the first authors he discovered. The Russians are the ones against whom he still measures his ow...

  Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose This book was recommended to me by the director of a creative writing program here in Amsterdam. She thought it might help me reacquaint myself with the various craft terms I’d need to know when I start teaching in the spring. Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose turned out to be so much more. As a reader, it crystallized for me the reason I love books.  As a writer, it offered real life tips. And as a wannabe teacher, it gives me the courage to think I’ll make it someday. on reading For many of us, reading has become a chore. We skim through reports, emails, the news feed hoping to digest as much information as quickly as we can. And even when we read for pleasure, we might skip pages and paragraphs to cut to the chase, find out whodunit, answer the who-what-when questions in our mind. But when we were kids, reading was different. As Francine Prose reminds us:   "We all begin as close readers. Even before we ...

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard   Annie Dillard writes poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction. For more than 20 years, she also taught writing at Wesleyan College. She was such an influence on Alexander Chee that his desire upon graduation was to become Annie Dillard. Like all good writing teachers, Dillard believes in reading. Listen to this anecdote. "A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, 'Do you think I could be a writer?' 'Well,' the writer said, 'I don’t know. … Do you like sentences?' The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I liked the smell of the paint.'”   Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (Harper Perennial 1990) A Tough Life It’s hard to tell if Dillard likes sentences or r...

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...

I love shadow boxes. I don’t mean the practice of sparring with yourself (though this is a worthy act that bears repeating). Think of a literal box, perhaps protected by a glass front, inside of which resides a world of whimsy. Think of it as found poetry in three-dimensional form. Marcia Espinosa, Detail of “Shrines for your domestic wishes”, TAFE Gallery Central. Photo credit: Karen Kao Shadow history Sailors were the first to create shadow boxes. They made them out of wood salvaged from their ships. They made them out of fear. Sailors believed that if their shadow reached shore before they did, their life on land would be cursed. The box, containing the sum total of a sailor’s personal effects, protected their true self. The tradition carries on among US military. Upon retirement, they receive a shadow box of medals, awards, flags and insignia. It’s a physical manifestation of a life of service. After my mother-in-law died, her youngest son created a bea...

Image source: International Writers' Collective   Every term, my students at the International Writers' Collective ask: how do you develop a writing practice? If you’re taking one of our core writing workshops, you already have a rhythm. It might be the last minute sprint to finish your exercise in time for the deadline. Any schedule is better than none. Try to hold onto it, even after the term is over. Need a hard deadline? Set yourself a realistic goal. Need a spanking when you miss your deadline? Find a writing buddy. Do what works for you. I have it easy. Writing is my work. This is what my daily practice looks like. 08.00 Wake up. 08.05 Make coffee. Unless you’re the novelist Jennifer Egan , in which case you reach for your journal and start to write. She doesn’t mind that her handwriting is illegible, even to her. She wants to surprise herself. There are monsters and plot points and character arcs to be found in the grey space betw...

I grew up reading Louise May Alcott. I still have copies of all her books: dog-eared, broken-backed, and beloved. On the rare occasions when I get sick, it’s a toss-up between Alcott and Jane Austen as comfort reading. One of Alcott’s books, Eight Cousins , features a white character (Annabel) who marries the “highly satisfactory Chinaman” (Fun See). I remember the scene distinctly but it never affected me particularly until I read Maxine Hong Kingston’s response. Fun See was still exotically “other,” with his long fingernails and queue, his yellow skin and peculiar manners. That’s me, Kingston thought. She realized that she would never be a March sister. “I felt like I was popped out of her writing,” she said. “Out of American literature.” Hua Hsu, “The Making of Americans” in The New Yorker, 8/15 June 2020 The Other in the Room Maxine Hong Kingston Somehow, Kingston managed to pop herself back into American literature. She mined her own life and the st...

In this post, International Writers' Collective teacher Karen Kao talks about what historical fiction is, the importance of research and how to weave actual historical events and figures into your story as well as the nitty-gritty of description, dialogue, and setting in a historical context. I hate history. I’ve no head for dates or names. And yet, my debut novel, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle , is a work of historical fiction. It is one of a planned quartet of interlocking novels set in Shanghai. My inspiration comes from my father’s stories of growing up in Shanghai. Of the uncle who gambled away his fortune to feed his opium addiction. Of the aunt who became a dance hall hostess to send herself to school. Maybe you, too, have an illicit bit of family history you’d love to share. Or, you’re obsessed with a particular historical time and place whose story is screaming to be told. In that case, you can use all the craft elements we teach at the International Writers...

  When I write fiction, I have no idea where the story will end. Something sparks my imagination ⏤ an overheard conversation or an image glimpsed from a train window. Maybe I can sense already the character I want to portray. I might have a general direction of where that character will go. Or not. By the time I’m ready to edit my fiction, most of the moving parts will have revealed themselves. I have a setting, some plot points, and a cast of thousands. It’s time to decide whether I want my story to be plot-driven or character-driven. A plot-driven novel compels the reader to turn the page because she needs to know what happens next . A character makes a decision that causes a cascade of effects. Consequences follow in rapid order. The question in the reader’s mind is: did the character make the right choice? The character-driven novel centers on why a character makes certain decisions. What fear or desire is driving their action (or inaction)? Their...

  For a writer, sound is finicky. It’s difficult to describe in words, let alone render onto the page. Cliches abound. Babbling brooks, birdsong, a lover’s sigh. And yet, to reach for that sensory detail of sound can make or break a piece of writing. Think of how we feel when robbed of our sense of hearing in real life. We believe ourselves to be isolated. We’re suddenly unable to use any of our remaining senses to perceive the world around us. To craft a compelling piece of writing, it pays to appeal to all five senses. Not just sound but also taste, touch, sight and smell . And wouldn’t you know it? Sound can serve many purposes. Setting For example, sound is a way to set the writer’s stage just as a movie soundtrack warns you when something bad’s about to happen. Some noises belong to a specific time and place. Think of the sound of a thousand vuvuzelas at full blast during a soccer match. Just as the idea of a packed sports arena seems far-fetched in these...