Ken Liu, Writer

Author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie

writing

Too Much Planning

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I’ve been suffering from writer’s block on my latest project. For a whole month I couldn’t make any progress on it.

Turns out the problem was that I was trying something new for me: to not write a single word of the actual story until I’ve got the whole thing outlined so that all the beat work and all the character arcs make sense.

It was a miserable failure. Staring at the blank screen, I couldn’t think at all. I didn’t know the characters or the plot. I couldn’t see what they wanted or how they would go about getting it. I missed one self-imposed deadline after another.

For me, ideas have to come once I start writing. I have to get to know the characters and the story as I write them, not plot them out ahead of time.

As soon as I decided that I was okay with going off without a clear plan all in my head, ideas started to come. I guess I’m just not an outliner. I prefer writing a story without knowing exactly what the story is.

Covers in Translation

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Translations for a few of my stories are out / will be out soon. I love the cover art on foreign magazines.

La Lluna en un Cove 27

Catalan translation for “The Literomancer” (El literomàntic) appears in Issue 27 of La Lluna en un Cove.

SFW 300th Issue

Chinese translation for “Tying Knots” (《结绳记事》) and “The Visit” (《访客》) will be out in the 300th issue of Science Fiction World (科幻世界).

Science Fiction World’s 300th Issue

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Science Fiction World (科幻世界) just released the TOC for their 300th issue, to be published in May 2011. “Tying Knots” (《结绳记事》) and “The Visit” (《访客》) will be in it.

TOC SFW 300th

Too Close

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It really is true that writers sometimes are too close to their own words.

I recently had a story rejected by a couple of markets, and the editors had the same reaction: the part of the story that felt the most pure to me, the part that I thought was the best and loved the most in writing, was the one part they singled out as not working for them.

They’re right. I just couldn’t see it. I fell in love with that one section so much that I couldn’t see what was wrong with it.

Always be very skeptical about the one part of the story that you think is particularly good — chances are, it is good, but not necessarily good for the story. “Murder your darlings” — that’s what this is about.

Ad Block

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I’ve always been ambivalent about advertising.

First, there’s the issue of definition. Almost any communication is designed to “sell” you something: an idea, a belief, a faith, a feeling, a product. The Declaration of Independence, the Communist Manifesto, and the Bible can all be seen as “advertising” in the right context. Is trying to sell you (or “persuade you of”) an idea inherently better than trying to sell you a thing? You always pay for it, one way or another.

Second, there’s the issue of value. It’s not clear to me that advertising is inherently crass and without any redeeming value. Sometimes our pleasure in a thing, a brand, is very much associated with the intangible marketing message. The emotional power of pop music and Coca Cola, especially to those who aspire to the American Dream, is very much dependent on marketing.

And this barely skims the surface of the body of issues around the idea of “advertising.”

Some of these ideas drove me to write “Ad Block,” which you can read at Kasma Science Fiction.