Reading Like a Writer

I’m not reading as much as I did pre-isolation. It’s harder to focus, and with a kid at home, there is very little time. But I can manage a bit of TV—which is just as good for finding writing techniques and strategies. I promise.

Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee, is a novel that spans generations—an incredibly difficult thing to do! 

I’d like to talk about how the style of narration and the careful way it is filtered through various characters helps Lee to a create story that moves through long periods of time with elegance.

Sometimes, as writers, we need to show a shift in atmosphere or mood—but how to describe that? A great technique is to describe the same unchanging thing but in a different way. I think of it as a shift in the sensibility of the character as they respond to the change in the air.

Ocean Vuong's On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a novel about a Vietnamese-American boy, his childhood, and his first boyfriend. It’s written as a letter to the boy’s mother, a woman who is both traumatized and abusive. Vuong is not only a novelist but a poet . . .

Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police is set on an island in which disappearances occur. Things like hats, roses, fruit, and calendars are made to vanish—not only from the physical world but also from memory. And those who mysteriously manage to remember are detained and killed by the Memory Police.

Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House is a devastating memoir about an abusive lesbian relationship. The structure is strange and lovely. Machado doesn't pick a genre for her story but uses a different one each chapter.

The main characters in Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts have been stuck on a spaceship for generations and brutally oppressed by those on higher decks with lighter skin.

"Blue Light in the Sky" is the title story of the collection by Can Xue (translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping). It's a creepy story about two sisters, their adversarial relationship, and what happens when one is mysteriously injured.

The hardest thing is figuring out how to begin a story. It's your one chance at a truly pure and vulnerable reader. The reader knows nothing, and must trust everything—or not—and you can work with that in the best ways.

Manuel Gonzales's The Regional Office is Under Attack is about forces of darkness, those out to stop those forces, and others out to stop the forces stopping the forces. It has assassins, oracles, and robot arms. And it's riveting.

When fiction refuses to look at non-centered characters, it teaches us to do the same in our lives, normalizing the erasure of real human beings.

The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon is about a college student (Phoebe) who becomes enmeshed in a violent religious cult, while her boyfriend (Will, the narrator) grapples with his own discarded faith in God.