The Wall of Storms (The Dandelion Dynasty, #2)

by Ken Liu

Not every mind learns the same way. A knife needs to be sharpened against stone, but a pearl needs to be polished with soft cloth.

There’s a lot of “what works for me must work for everyone” in life. A reader thinks that a book he hates must be hated by every right-thinking individual. A family thinks that the way they go about budgeting must be the way everyone else budgets. A city thinks that their solution to housing should be applicable to every place. A country thinks that its way of life must be desirable for everyone in the world, and if the country is sufficiently powerful, that way of life should be imposed on others at point of sword. The internet also seems to be a medium uniquely suited to the genre of judgmental proclamations of “This Is the One True Way.” Maybe that’s why it feels so exhausting to browse these days. I wish more people in actual positions of power and judgment adopted the attitude of Luan Zya. Early on as a writer, I got a lot of “rules” thrown at me about how you’re supposed to do things. Don’t shift point of view within the same scene. Grab your reader with the first sentence. Show, don’t tell. Eliminate passive constructions. Come up with memorable, punchy titles. Study bestsellers so you can write them… Oh, and my favorite: write in such a way so that you don’t “sound like an amateur,” whatever that means. I tried diligently to follow the advice I was given, but the rules just didn’t work for me. But why should they? Such advice is based on the experience of other people, and you can’t tell your own story by following someone else’s road. Any book worth reading is written in a sui generis idiolect that reflects the mind of the author, that belongs to that author alone. Milton did not write in some nondescript, generic tongue called “Early Modern English.” He had to invent *his* language suited to the task of justifying the ways of God to men: bending the vernacular to fit the syntax of Latin; blending allusions ancient and modern, biblical and scientific; seducing the reader into sin with classical rhetorical tropes before thundering them awake with Puritanical rage. Lu Xun did not write his fiction in some bare grapholect devoid of personality called “Modern Standard Written Chinese.” He had to invent *his* language suited to the task of awakening a nation on the verge of spiritual death, of rejuvenating a classical language of the brush with unfamiliar syntax and vocabulary imported from the West, with neologisms and slang drawn from the revolutionary air. Poe, Austen, Melville, Faulkner, Morrison, Butler, Le Guin … every author who has ever written a book worth remembering has had to invent their own language, dream up their own craft, tell their own story. So I’m going to shift POV in a scene as often as I please; tell instead of show when telling is what’s needed; use passive constructions when they feel right; lean into a rhythm and prosody that suits my voice; double down on allusions and rhetorical ropes and words that speak to me, whether cosmopolitan in source or of my own design … until I’ve crafted a language of my own that *is* suited to telling only the stories I want to tell. What are some “rules” you’ve been told in your life that turned out to be utter nonsense for you? How did you end up inventing your own way? May each of you get to tell the story you want to tell. Always.