Category: The Writer’s Craft
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Tired Tropes: the Tsundere
Welcome to Tired Tropes, in which I dissect popular tropes I find annoying. While tropes are tools, they can be overused or done badly, and Tired Tropes are especially gregarious examples of them. Here, I take on the tsundere. The tsundere is a staple of Japanese media. She—for the overwhelming majority of tsunderes are female—is…
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5 Writing Lessons from Manga
As a child, I couldn’t understand the appeal of manga. To me, they were simply a different kind of comic book, and comics held little appeal to me. Then, in my teens, English-translated anime took off in Singapore. Almost all of them were adaptations of Japanese manga. I pursued the source material, and found Ghost…
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Plan Your Antagonist First
People read fiction to escape reality in pseudo-reality. They want to immerse themselves in the protagonist’s adventures, marvel at his derring-do, and cheer as he overcomes the obstacles in his way and attains his goal. But where would the protagonist be without the antagonist? The antagonist is the yin to the protagonist’s yang. Without the…
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Drop the ‘Strong and Independent Female’ Label
‘Strong, independent female’ is a meaningless label. Use more powerful descriptors to create a memorable identity.
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Inducing Flow Through Mindful Writing
You have finite time and energy. The world has infinite distractions. How, then, can a writer stay true to his calling? I began writing my first novel when I was 13. Every day, I sat at my beat-up second-hand laptop and wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote until I was done. Then I went…
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The Truth of Your Vision, The Truth of the World
Fiction writing is about truth. The truth of your vision and the truth of the world. The best stories marry these truths into a seamless, dazzling, inspiring whole. The truth of your vision is at once simple and complicated. It is the story you want to tell. It is the aesthetics of the story world,…