As you might have noticed from previous reviews, I’m a great fan of Japanese literature. I’m also a great fan of cats. Combine the two, and this review of The Travelling Cat Chronicles, by Hiro Arikawa, was the result.
Indeed, I’m writing this review mere minutes after I finished the book, as the impact is still very fresh in my mind. You should also know that I finished reading the book in a few hours – it’s one of those books that simply flows effortlessly.
So, what is The Travelling Cat Chronicles about? Much more than what the premise lets you think.
Literature in the audiovisual era. Can it survive, and how? I’m bouncing ideas off Igor da Silva Livramento, friend and fellow writer, academic, and creative-writing advisor. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn, and also take a look at his blog and his page on Bandcamp.
Chris: The idea behind this post began as a series of what-if thoughts and musings. We were talking about a generational disconnect in terms of readers’ ability to fill in the gaps.
Igor: Younger-generation writers grew up with (anglophone) young-adult fantasy and science fiction. Literally everything is spoon-fed to them, all details, all plot points, everything. I don’t like that. I wholeheartedly believe in strategic holes and unexplainables.
Igor: Suggesting is much more powerful than showing, because the imagination is boundless, thus filling the vacuum with something truly intense. This is the tactic I’ve found for my literature to survive in a predominantly audiovisual era.
How can literature survive in the audiovisual era, where vision & sound give the illusion of everything?(more…)
There are many guides out there that promise to teach you how to write genre fiction. And yet few of them will tell you the most important thing: Writing genre fiction is an inherently people-pleasing act, which is an always dangerous business.
In a sense, genre fiction is the opposite of literary fiction. Whereas literary fiction deals with abstractness and generality, genre fiction deals with concreteness and specificity. To put it another way, if literary fiction is about “everyone, always”, genre fiction is about “that one, right there and then”Of course, this is a somewhat simplistic way of putting it. Quality literature (including genre fiction) can always extrapolate from the specific to the generic, even if it does so operating on a subconscious level. Take a look at my review of The Lighthouse..
If this sounds a bit too theoretical, worry not; I’ll unpack it in more detail in this post. My purpose is not to offer you tips on how to write genre fiction, but tips on how not to write genre fiction – though obviously enough, the two processes overlap.
In other words, I’ll highlight the pitfalls of writing genre fiction, together with my opinion on how to avoid them (there’s a twist in the plot here).
If you’re writing genre fiction (say, fantasy with witches), there are things you can do, and there are things you can’t do. This is always a problem in anything that would like to call itself artistic creation(more…)
