Ken Liu, Writer

Author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie

Ken

Mono no aware

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Mono no aware (物の哀れ), or “an empathy toward things,” describes “the awareness of … the transience of things and a bittersweet sadness at their passing.”

It’s a pretty common theme in a lot of art from Japan and China (the term “mono no aware” is Japanese, but the sentiment is certainly not unique to Japan). Since many Westerners are manga fans, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō (ヨコハマ買い出し紀行) is an example of this genre that some may be familiar with.

I’ve recently realized that a lot of my stories that have difficulty finding markets exhibit mono no aware as their central sentiment. Nothing much happens in them, save an attempt to give the reader an experience of this wistfulness at the passing of time and things.

Could be that this is just not something that most readers in the West are interested in. (Or, in the alternative, I’m just a terrible writer when it comes to this kind of story.)

Ū-

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Priceless bit of parody of Information Architect’s Writer for iPad from Merlin Mann:

Because, ū— is the first app to remove every conceivable distraction from the drafting process—including cruft like paragraphs, lines, and words. This is why ū— only displays the bottom half of one letter at a time. Talk about focus.

— via Daring Fireball.

I’ve tried so many of these “distraction-free” writing environments over the years: WriteRoom, OmmWriter, full-screen mode in countless other apps. They’ve never worked for me.

I think the attraction of such software is the hope that with the right software you’ll turn into a magical version of yourself, the really great writer. Somehow, we tell ourselves, if I just get the right software, my sentences will flow, my plots will intrigue, and my characters will come to life. That’s certainly why I kept on trying these things.

But experience has shown me that, at least as far as my own work is concerned, the tool involved in writing makes zero difference. I’ve done good writing in Microsoft Word and in Google Docs, in Scrivener and Vim. I’ve even done some serious drafting in Simplenote and Pages on an iPad (with a bluetooth keyboard).

It’s a bit like reading. Despite all the debate over the Kindle vs. the iPad vs. paper books, what really matters for the reading experience is being able to forget about the device and sink into the book. Writing is similar. Forget about the software, just write.

Fishing

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Because we are not free to say what we really mean:

蓬头稚子学垂纶， 侧坐莓苔草映身。
路人借问遥招手， 怕得鱼惊不应人。

Seeing Writing Where There’s No Writing

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There must be a neurological condition where the sufferer thinks that he sees writing even in meaningless patterns, kind of an opposite to alexia.

I sat on the high-speed train from Hefei to Shanghai and stared at the fabric pattern on the back of the seat before me for several minutes, convinced that the grid was filled with Chinese characters that I was on the verge of recognizing.

Not Writing