Hazlitt, Terraform, and
F&SF, plus multiple appearances in Year’s Bests, Yu has developed a reputation for boundary-breaking fiction, wonderful prose, and thorough research. Creatively, she isn’t interested in limitations: she writes poems, plays, novels, essays, stories, songs. She has worked on video games such as
Destiny and
Destiny 2. Her 2015
Uncanny Magazine story, “Woman at Exhibition,” was part of the Discenza-Straub exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco; more recently, she taught an Interactive Fiction seminar for Clarion West.
Her debut novel, steeped in research from books, Persian language study, detention center visits, travel, and more, is called
Many years ago, I met a friend for lunch in New York. This was in the days before cellphones, so we made a plan to find each other at the 96
th Street subway station. When I arrived, it was windy and rainy, so I huddled under an awning with my hood up. I was worried that my friend wouldn’t find me, but more worried that I would get soaked, so I stayed there, searching all the drab raincoats exiting the subway for a familiar form.
Advertisement
After a few minutes, a body separated from the masses on the other side of Broadway, crossed the street, and approached me. It was my friend. “I knew it was you from over there,” he said, “because I could see you biting your nails.”
(1)
TAG TEAM. YouTuber Morganeua, a fourth year PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies, uses Stephen King and Toni Morrison to beat Isaac Asimov into the ground in “Asimov’s Adverbs.” (Think of it as a homage to “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.”)
I just finished reading “Foundation and Empire” by Isaac Asimov and it was GREAT but I noticed THIS about his writing. What do you think about excessive -ly adverb use in novels?
(2)
YouTube channel.
Some people outline their novel before they start. Others don’t, but just plunge right and start. There’s plenty of advice on how to do the former, but those who practice the latter sometimes feel that they’re floundering, and no one’s providing any guidance. Working with my own process as well as that of students, clients, and mentees, I’ve come up with twelve principles for writing that you can apply, pre and post-pantsing, in order to start moving from chaos to order.