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
While browsing the subreddit for fantasy writers, I came across a brief discussion detailing the value of content over style, and it reminded me of an Ursula K Le Guin essay called From Elfland to Poughkeepsie, published in 1973. Here, Le Guin makes a point which all writers, especially fantasists, should be familiar with: style and content are not mutually exclusive. Most… Read More STYLE & FANTASY
Over the weekend I attended Winnipeg’s Central Canada Lit Fest, dedicated to all things speculative fiction. The festival catered to writers, with workshops on publishing, marketing, world-building, cover art, query letters, beta reading, and so forth. Here are five of the most informative and surprising things I took note of: 1. The publishing world is not in shambles. The… Read More C4 LIT FEST
HUNTER JOURNAL 