Eunhae Han > Recent Status Updates

"Fable" by Andrea Cohen

"Wishes for a Black Women" by Lor Clincy

Act I of The Chickencoop Chinaman — Frank Chin A groundbreaking play about Tam Lum, a Chinese American filmmaker who travels to San Francisco's Chinatown. He confronts stereotypes about Asian men, Hollywood's representations of Chinese Americans, and the pressure to accept an identity created by white America. The play challenges the idea that Asian American men must be passive, submissive, or emasculated.

Is This Thing On? — Aparna Nancherla The comedian reflects on growing up shy and her immigrant mother's attempts to help her become more confident and comfortable speaking publicly.

A Sudanese American journalist explores how his geographically scattered family maintains its connection through WhatsApp. Digital conversations become a substitute for gathering around the family dinner table.

One of its most compelling ideas is that the supernatural often provides a way to examine realities that are difficult to confront directly. A ghost can represent unresolved grief. A monster can expose social prejudice. A haunted house can reveal the violence hidden inside an apparently respectable family. An imagined scientific breakthrough can raise questions about human ambition and responsibility.

A transition should do more than announce the next paragraph. It should help readers understand the relationship between what came before and what comes next.

Make abstract emotions concrete. Give the reader or viewer something observable that allows them to experience the emotion rather than simply being told about it.

Writing lesson: When writing dialogue, ask what each character wants from the other person. The tension between those desires can create a scene.

- Revision involves both cutting and adding. Sometimes a scene contains too much explanation and needs restraint.
- At other times, a story lacks the context, detail, or emotional development necessary for readers to understand it.

- Revision means learning what you actually mean
- A writer may begin a story with one intention and discover something more complicated while revising it.
- The first draft records an initial understanding

- The goal is not simply to make every sentence beautiful. It is to discover what the story needs to become

Rather than treating revision as merely correcting grammar or polishing sentences, the book approaches it as a creative process involving difficult choices: what to cut, what to preserve, what to clarify, and what to leave ambiguous

Instead of asking only, “What am I trying to say?” the poet also asks:
- Where should the reader pause?
- Where should the thought continue?
- Which words should receive emphasis?
- What patterns am I creating?
- When should I disrupt those patterns?
- How does the sound of the language change when I arrange it differently?

Technique What it can contribute
Meter A recurring rhythmic pattern
Rhyme Sonic relationships and expectations
Repetition Emphasis, rhythm, and familiarity
Syntax The movement and logic of thought
Lineation Pacing, emphasis, interruption, and continuation
Diction The texture and sound of individual words

weasel words
words that suck that life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks the egg and leaves the shell

ex: that

highlight when you explain something
see how often you are doing this

either the action on the page isn't sufficiently clear for the read to understand or feel on their own . . . or else you're overexplaining what a smart and sensitive reader should be able to understand/feel for themselves

The stick I've employed in the last five years is to have characters chatter away and then, in the next draft, take out every other line. Oddly enough, the speech has more life, more surprise.

replace the smile/shug/sigh
be more artful about it

now highlight when you give backstory for characters
- what is necessary

highest strongest sentences
weakest sentences

- make sure stressed syllables in a sentence outnumber the unstressed syllables
- the few unstressed there are, ,the more impact the sonic will have
- end your sentences with the stressed syllables
- train your ear for this

verbs
- diminish thought tags (she wondered, she understood, etc)
- diminish sensory verbs (saw, looked, watched, etc)
- diminish to be

vary sentence and paragraph lengths

consider how the camera moves through a scene, clearly mark transition and time and space (make timeline of time/location)

cut the opening paragraph. cut the last paragraph. do that for each scene. now rewrite the ones that have to be there, let the rest die

take a page of your most lifeless page, pick out the best sentences, and then retype those sentences onto a new page

"form of attention" . . . as you move through the life around you, you'll see it simultaneously with your own eyes and with the eyes of your novel

every novel I've written gradually accrued a project-specific foundation of other art: novels and short stories, poems, and plays and essays, movies and music and visual art, all of which somehow felt in conversation with the book I was writing

read predictively… what scenes do you predict might follow . . . where are these characters headed . . . what will they do to get where they want . . . pay attention to threads being set up in a novel's early chapters to see how those threads are lengthened and where and when they pay off

"writing the island" . . . write the big scenes you already know . . later write the bridges that connect them

first draft is an exploratory draft, to discover the book by writing it . . . don't get attached