• Craft,  Creative Metanonfiction

    The Mitchellverse: A Primer on the Fiction of David Mitchell

    A Bloggy Introduction For many expatriate writers today, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein are still role models. And then there are the American MFA Programs, a host of which seem to be cranking out annual batches of Raymond Carver clones. Said one fresh-baked MFA clone from a prestigious fictioneering facility in Austin, Texas: “And they even taught me how to write the Raymond Carver story–it was required!” I can see his face now. A young Pakistani gentlemen who has a crush on Raymond Carver. Bushy black eyebrows, dark eyes, nerd glasses, the voice of a diplomat. Whenever we meet at the Bookworm café in Chengdu we talk shop, having forgotten…

  • Craft,  MFA

    Leave Your Darlings Alone

    At what point does murdering your darlings become genocide?   No idea, but why should anybody want to murder them in the first place? Writing advice like that was propagated in the lecture halls of Cambridge University over a hundred years ago. When Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch exhorted the writers of his day to murder their darlings in 1914, had he any inkling how many of his students and members of the university would join the infantry and be slaughtered in the following years? 2,470 to be exact. That such advice on style, On the Art of Writing, would be published the same year as the Battle of the Somme to me…

  • Craft,  Memoir

    The Art of Juxtaposition: Visual Storytelling with Stephan Eirik Clark

    In a recent lecture at City University of Hong Kong MFA Program, Sweetness #9 author, Stephan Eirik Clark described how writers can borrow cinematic visual storytelling methods to enhance their prose. He illustrated his thesis, using scripts from two films from the year 1985, Witness with Harrison Ford and Rambo II with Sylvester Stallone. By using the later as a counterpoint, Clark showed the difference between image-driven storytelling and Tweedledee and Tweedledumb driven pulp: Co: How you get into this? Rambo: It’s a long story. Co: Long ride. Rambo: Well… after I left Special Forces, I… moved around a lot. A hollow tale requiring noise and flurry to mesmerize the…