Tag: Writing
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Why Singapore Literature Turns Me Off
Once again, the arts community is promoting Singapore literature through social media and the mainstream media. The latest initiative is #BuySingLit, billed as “an industry-led movement to celebrate stories from Singapore”. Once again, the news turns me off SingLit. A History of Disappointment As a child I was a voracious reader. I read every book…
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Tired Tropes: The Potato Protagonist
If a potato has more personality than the protagonist of a story, the writer is doing it wrong. The best stories are driven by their characters. The best characters aren’t two-dimensional constructs of excessive verbiage, but a reflection and amplification of the myriad facets of humanity. Characters must resonate with readers, acting, talking and thinking…
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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…