Robin Sloan’s delicious stewing of magical realism and food writing, Sour Dough, serves up the perfect blend of action, pathos, and exposition in its mouth-watering first chapter. Here’s the recipe and ingredients. I’ve broken the first chapter into five sections which form a kind of parallel structure. Warning, there are minor spoilers for the first… Read More FIRST CHAPTER: ROBIN SLOAN’S SOURDOUGH
While reading, you come upon a brick of text that describes religion, history, a magic system, or cultural practices in the book’s fictional world. This is the lore dump. When done poorly, it drags you out of the story, leaves you wondering about its relationship to the plot and characters. Done well, the lore dump… Read More N.K. JEMISIN & THE ART OF THE LORE DUMP
Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch is a post-modern, stream-of-conscious, choose your own adventure novel. Its loaded with meta text, extended allegories, and language experiments that, at once, are beautiful and frustrating. An unconventional book demands unconventional advice: The book is difficult because it has been written and structured to resist understanding. The book is difficult because the… Read More REACTIONS: HOPSCOTCH
TLDR: Real life and real people are ambiguous. If you want your writing to be realistic, be strategic about how you employ ambiguity. We want to breathe life onto the page, make the unreal seem real. In an effort to do so, we often rely on explicit descriptions, leaving no detail to be confused and… Read More BE AMBIGUOUS
Note: The first part can be found here In the world of Murakami, abstract connection and synchronicity are even present at the prose level. Take, for example, the following sentence from The Wind Up Bird Chronicle: “I felt a chill for no reason, then an unpleasant sensation as if something far away were moving slowly… Read More THE LANGUAGE OF DREAMS II
How to Scrap the Outline: Haruki Murakami & Synchronicity Haruki Murakami plot points interlock with meaningful coincidences, bridging the gap between conscious and subconscious. He has gone on record to say that he doesn’t outline any of this. “When I start to write, I don’t have any plan at all. I just wait for the… Read More THE LANGUAGE OF DREAMS I
In the alternative (or secret) history of China Mieville’s The Last Day’s of New Paris, art is power, literally. Living surrealist artworks roam over post-WWII Parisian cobble, with the Eiffel tower hovering in the distance, its lower-half non-existent. Here, Nazi occult rituals and La Résistance collide in a manner reminiscent of Indiana Jones or Hell… Read More THE ELEPHANT FRAGMENT
Rachel scavenges a post-apocalyptic city, rife with traps, mutated child tribes, and monstrous bears. She searches for food, water, and bio-tech. One day, she comes upon Borne, an enigmatic blob with a taste for lizards, and decides to raise him as her own. What is Borne? Where did he come from? Under the veneer of… Read More REACTIONS: BORNE
Last June, the Walrus published a piece on the limitations of high fantasy. I find the notion of genre parameters silly and old-fashioned, and was surprised to find the most reputable magazine in Canada perpetuating such notions. So I wrote an angry letter, which they didn’t print. Here it is: In Emily Landau’s piece Slaying Dragons,… Read More GREAT MINDS CRITICIZE ALIKE
Two things. First, my friend Graeme Brown recently published a novella called the Pact. Brown is a prolific world builder and proponent of outlining. He’s taught me that a published book contains only a fraction of an authors efforts. Case in point, Brown keeps stacks of notes detailing every aspect of his built-world, which will never… Read More SPACE JOURNALISM
HUNTER JOURNAL 