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...

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...

  Few authors venture to write in a language that is not their mother tongue.  It’s hard enough to write. Why make it any more difficult by adapting a new vocabulary, grammar and syntax? Some might even call it a betrayal of country, home, blood. The Chinese Typewriter My grandfather wrote in English. Born and bred in Shanghai, he spoke to his four children in the local dialect but wrote to them all in English. He typed each letter, keeping a carbon copy for his own records while leaving space open to insert by hand Chinese names and proverbs. Maybe he wrote in English because typewriters for Chinese characters were beyond the reach of mere mortals. According to an article in the Los Angeles Times Chinese typewriters look something like a cross between a deli-meat slicer and a small printing press. There are no keys, just thousands of little metal characters arranged in a grid system. Because Chinese has no alphabet and no alphabetical order, the operator ...

I started writing in high school. My metier then was parody of the sort that only a teenager could find funny. From parody, I went to poetry, from poetry to prose, from novel to short story to the personal essay. My road has been anything but straight. Of course, not all my writerly moves have been random. I started this blog because someone told me I should. Who knew that I would love it? To feed my blog, I collect scraps of paper. A museum brochure. A newspaper clipping. Some old photographs. Then I wait until that magic moment when the bones of an essay emerge. Memory In 2011, I quit my law practice to write. I had plenty of ideas and arrogance, too. It eventually became clear to me that I needed an education. I needed to read. What better place to start than The New Yorkers lying about my house? At the time, I didn’t know what to look for. All I wanted was to be surprised. By a pregnant image, a flash of insight, a chord of pure emotion. It didn’t matt...

Motherhood by Sheila Heti The bookshop is small but well-stocked. It occupies a narrow windowless space like most places in this part of Amsterdam. At the far end of the shop sits Sheila Heti, waiting to talk about her latest novel, Motherhood . We join the crowd. We are four women in a sea of female faces. Three of us are mothers; one is not. I am one of the few women in the room past the child-bearing age. Whether a woman is still sexually productive seems relevant when Motherhood is about an unnamed protagonist wrestling with the decision to have a child. Heti and her protagonist share many of the same characteristics. Both are writers, around 40 years old, living in Toronto. Both have mothers who put their work ahead of child-rearing. Many reviewers have assumed that Motherhood is a very public accounting of Heti’s private decision. But that wasn’t Heti’s goal. Her interest is in language and how we choose to speak about the choices we make....