Ken Liu, Writer

Author of The Grace of Kings and The Paper Menagerie

tips

Sheltered

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It seems that a popular way to “win” an argument is to belittle your opponent by claiming that the person has lived a “sheltered life.” Because the other person has not lived as authentic and gritty a life as you, the theory goes, he cannot possibly understand all the experience/passion/feeling/moral force behind your position, which is drawn from the quintessence of life itself. Indeed, he has not even earned the right to debate you.

I do not think there is much to recommend this strategy — though I’ve often been tempted to yield to it myself. Each of us has lived an authentic life in our own way, and we have all been deprived of other experiences. We are all sheltered.

Revisions

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I was recently talking with my friend Erica about how much more difficult revising a novel is compared to writing the first draft.

I think it’s much harder to get into a “flow” when revising, and as a result, it tends to be more exhausting. I draft at least three times faster than I revise.

Some writers tell me that they prefer drafting so much more to revising that they’d rather write novels and forget about them to avoid the pain of revising.

I’m not quite there yet. But I do get tempted sometimes. It’s really hard to push yourself to stick to the task of making that string of words you felt so good about putting down on paper work as a 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.

Editor Comments

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Editors who give you feedback on rejections are doing you a huge favor. Treasure them as the gifts that they are.

Ideas

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The more you write, the more ideas you get.

Shouldn’t be surprising, I know. But it’s different knowing something in theory and experiencing it as fact.

Critiques

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Tons have been written about how writers should deal with critiques during the drafting process. This is just my take.

  1. The most important thing about critiques is learning how to benefit from them. Not every criticism is valid, and you don’t have to listen to every critiquer. Figuring out which ones you do need to listen to is a skill that must be acquired.
  2. It is not possible to write something that pleases everyone, though some works will appeal to more people than others (and you have to decide how important that is to you). I’m sure you’ve bought anthologies and thought some of the stories were duds while others were brilliant, and another reader will pick out hits and misses different from yours. Keep that in mind — but also remember that at least someone — the editor — must really like your story for it to go anywhere.
  3. Even the most negative critiques usually contain something that you can use: the knowledge that a part of your story didn’t work for some reader. The most useful critiques identify exactly what bothered the reader. Explanations for why these parts of the story didn’t work can be useful, but not everyone is good at articulating such reasons clearly. Suggestions for how to improve those parts are less useful, unless you have a writing style similar to the critiquer’s. Quotations of “rules of writing,” on the other hand, are almost always useless.
  4. Some people are better at critiquing your work than others. This seems to be a skill independent of how successful they are as writers, and it may even be independent of how much you like their writing. This is why it’s important to get critiques from as many people as possible.
  5. If hearing criticism of your work makes you unable to function, then you simply cannot be a writer. The courage to hear criticism and still proceed is even more important for writers than dedication and “talent,” whatever that may mean.