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Get Up and Ruck
Life is not lived sitting down behind a screen. Life is lived outside at the edge of your comfort zone, at the borders of your day-to-day experience. When everyday life grinds down your soul, when you weary of staying indoors and experiencing the same routine over and over again, there is a simple solution. Get…
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How to Write Different Kinds of Violence
I don’t read a lot of fiction these days. My tastes run towards action-packed thrillers, and as I discussed elsewhere, many writers have no idea how to write authentic action scenes. Outside the thriller genre, I can only name a small handful of writers who can instill in action sequences the ring of truth. In…
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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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Why I Avoid Reading Violence in Fiction
I’m not a pacifist. But I must confess: in the vast majority of manga I read these days, I skip most depictions of violence. In books, if I encounter an action scene that doesn’t make sense, I just dump the book altogether. Fiction requires suspension of disbelief, and when a sequence triggers disbelief, then the story has failed. There…
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To 2017: Write Less to Write More
If you’re a writer, nobody cares about how many stories you’ve written. Only about the stories you’ve published. Ideas and stories are meaningless if they are locked away in a hard drive or scrapbook. They only hold value when they are shared with the world. You’re not an author if you don’t publish your works.…
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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…