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“Is my Vocabulary Good?” Is a Pointless Question

July 4, 2022

book, creativity, fiction, literature, writing

OK, I’m being harsh – and imprecise. Wondering whether your vocabulary is good is a valid concern (at least for beginner or intermediate authors). The “pointless” part of the title is there to offer a quick response: Whether your vocabulary is good or not is not as crucial as you might think.

If you remember my post about writing vivid descriptions, when I was a young and stupid author I thought I needed to write whole pages describing a wall; or a table; or a cup of coffee.

What I didn’t mention in that post – though it’s perhaps implied – is that having a vocabulary that is good plays an integral part in such… strategies.

Whether that’s important or not is something we’ll explore in this post.

vocabulary good — Whether your vocabulary is good or not can affect whether you can offer a three-page description of the sea. The point is, why should you?

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Review of If Cats Disappeared from the World, by Genki Kawamura

May 9, 2022

Book Review, Criticism

book, experiencing, fiction, Japan, literature, love, review, society

I love Japanese literature. Its themes are often focused, intelligent, quirky. I also love cats – indeed, for similar reasons, one may add! Combining the two, we get this review of If Cats Disappeared from the World, by Genki Kawamura.

You might also recall my review of The Travelling Cat Chronicles, by Hiro Arikawa, featuring a very similar theme. There are many similarities between the two novels, and if they weren’t both published in the same year, I’d be willing to ascribe the coincidence to an act of imitation instead.

So, what does a story like If Cats Disappeared from the World tell us?

Review of If Cats Disappeared — *What if Cats Disappeared? We don’t even want to think about it*

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How to Get Writing Advice Successfully

March 7, 2022

Writing

author, book, fiction, literature, writing

This is quite the meta-post: I’ll be offering you advice on how to successfully get writing advice. More maddeningly, perhaps, I’ll be partly asking you to ignore writing advice – advice which you’d have to ignore in order… not to ignore it. There are no simple answers, sorry!

Overall, what this little linguistic and conceptual wizardry underlines is:

Writing fiction is a complex process; it’s both art and isn’t.
Crucially, a certain level of critical thinking is required in order to know what advice to follow.

This latter part is what I’ll be focusing on in this post. I’ll offer you tools that will help you know what to do so that you get writing advice successfully. That is, what to do so that any writing advice you’re getting is actually helping you instead of misleading you.

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