Ken Liu, Writer

Author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie

Ken

Save the Cat

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My friend Georgia recommended this to me, and I’m really glad she did. It’s not the sort of book I would have picked up on my own, as I’m not a screenwriter. But as it turns out, Snyder’s tips are really great for any kind of fiction.

Snyder writes in a breezy, easy style that makes for quick reading. He has strong opinions and doesn’t back down from them. A lot of the things he says about how a story must be constructed will be controversial for short-story writers and novelists. But I think he provides a useful framework for thinking about how to make your story engaging and interesting — aspects that I need to work on more in my own fiction.

Very much recommended.

Fantasy Ideas

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I just read a beautiful piece of flash fantasy tonight — the kind that makes you jealous and wish you had come up with it — and it confirmed something I’ve been thinking lately: good concepts for contemporary fantasy can be generated by literalizing metaphors.

This was what I did in “State Change” (your soul/spirit is literally an object). And it was also the idea in The Golden Compass (your soul/spirit is literally an animal). It seems that whenever you treat a metaphor as real, there’s the potential for an evocative, moving exploration of the metaphor as fantasy.

This is no doubt old news for many fantasy readers and writers, but it’s still exciting to discover tricks like this on your own.

Collaborative Writing

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Lisa and I just finished the first draft of a story we are writing together.

I’ve now written a few stories in collaboration with other authors. (One of them, “Saving Face”, co-written with Shelly Li, is up at Crossed Genres.) In general, it seems to work best if the story naturally requires more than one voice, and each author can take charge of crafting a separate one. It is a lot of fun to draft together.

Writing doesn’t have to be done alone.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is beautiful. Carefully crafted, suspenseful, interesting, indeed, thrilling. It’s not what I consider one of David Mitchell’s best works — mainly because his other books are so magnificent — but even so, it is great. I can only wish I had one-tenth his skill at creating narrative pull. Highly recommended.