Category: Blog

When I Overcame a Tough Book

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Growing up I did like reading a fair bit, though I honestly didn’t get an itch for it until early adulthood. I could be rather picky. While I was younger, I remember I read most of the Harry Potter books, a couple from A Series of Unfortunate Events, Goosebumps, The Hobbit, a random Boxcar Children novel, and a book about a kid raising a raccoon or something. The list I can recall feels rather small. There had to be some superficial element to it that drew me in. I can’t remember the plot to that Boxcar Children book at all, but it had a picture of a T-Rex skeleton on the cover, so I wanted to read it. The novels I had to read for school, especially as I got older, often served as a barrier to my comprehension. At the time, if a book challenged me I was unlikely to want to bother.Read More »

Story Hoarding

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I’ve been ill for the past week, and while that hasn’t stopped me from getting a couple hundred pages into The Dark Tower or from getting sucked into Breath of the Wild, my motivation to write has been a little shot. The sickness was so bad at one point it even stopped me from enjoying said anticipated video game. That being the case, this week’s post is more on the light side. I just wanted to make sure I wrote something. This is a bit of a continuation of a line of thought I had in a post I wrote months ago called “What We Get To,” although more lighthearted.Read More »

Trying to get Refocused

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Lately I’ve been taking in just how much I still need to get through, not just in terms of books, but all forms of art and storytelling that have been backlogged for years now. I think part of this has to do with coming into my own both as a reader/viewer/etc. and as someone with critical aspirations. When I was in university, the material I had to learn and write about was provided for me and occupied a lot of my time. Now, I have to be the author of my own progress. The problem is, despite progress I feel I have made as a writer, I’m terrible at managing what content I get through.Read More »

What We Get To

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Recently I read Found, a book of poetry by Souvankham Thammavongsa. Not to disparage this book in the slightest, but the content of this book specifically isn’t important. What matters right now is what it is to me, what is has been. I read her first collection of poems, Small Arguments, in 2008 for Critical Thinking about Poetry, a first year course I took during my time at the University of Toronto at Scarborough (UTSC). I can’t precisely remember when, but I bought Found in the UTSC bookstore shortly afterwards because it was there. I recognized the similar binding, that I’d read the poet already, and picked it up. I wasn’t even particularly partial to Thammavongsa’s work. I was just starting to collect books and I jumped on it.Read More »

A Beginner’s Advice: Reading the Good and the Bad

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Dark&Stormy

Today, I want to extend some advice I continually try to follow in my pursuit of writing fiction: that you should be reading as much as you can, as often as possible. This of course extends to other storytelling mediums as well, whichever you want to be writing in. While this is probably obvious, what I feel can be overlooked, however — which I too am guilty of — is that you should read, watch, play, etc. as much outside of the genre you’re interested in writing about as possible.Read More »

A Beginner’s Advice: Giving Characters Depth

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As a writer, I’m not sure I’ve given one particular thing more thought than character depth. I’m sure all writers think about this, especially other beginners brimming with the drive to create a character who can offer something captivating and unique to the reading audience. While I’m hardly an expert on crafting characters, there are some methods I’ve come up with that can help with the process. Writing, writing, and more writing is of course the best way to practice the craft, but it does help to discuss, and learn what you can from what you read, which is how I arrived at the line of thinking I’m going to share.Read More »

Which is Scarier?

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While there are numerous ways to present the horror genre, I’ve found myself considering two distinct types of horror stories: those where the threat is paranormal, and those where the threat is mundane. When I say mundane, I mean something that we all acknowledge is within the realm of possibility. Stories that tell of gruesome killers and levels of cruelty only a twisted human imagination could conjure up and for all intents and purposes could actually happen.Read More »

When Classics Aren’t Enough

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Recently, while having a conversation with a friend about books, the subject turned to reading what is generally considered to be “classic” literature. These are the books that are taught in high schools, university courses, and other academic circles. While I personally appreciate the academic reasons and approach to examining this kind of literature (which most people characterize as Literature proper), my friend brought up a very valid point: they’re not only a major chore to get through at times, but contain narrative devices and plot points that would be heavily criticized if done today.Read More »

Hesitation Near The End

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There is a phenomenon I have experienced throughout much of my life that I haven’t been self-conscious of until very recently. It is an obscure sorrow that I have become increasingly aware of — credit to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows for inspiring this kind of reflection — and I’ve begun to feel that there are probably a lot of other people who feel the same way.

There are people who love to marathon through shows, movies, speed-run games, or speed read. While they may share my experience, I feel it applies more specifically to the way I go through things. I read a lot, but I’m not particularly fast at it. My pace gets the job done, but I hardly read fast enough to finish even a short book in one sitting. I can spend even greater amounts of time on a game, or a series, where going back to the material becomes a regular routine in my life.Read More »