What I remind myself

Why do I write?

Paint a picture of realistic characters, and make the readers see themselves in my characters.

My strength:

Good instincts about plot, symbolism and emotional significance. Rather ambitious.

My weakness:

Plot driven, inattention to details and internal monologue, insensitivity to the effects of one character on the others.

Tendency to over explain, repetitive writing. Not confident in my readers.

Potential downfall:

Lazy writing culminates in writing like “a movie,” or a screenplay. Lack of layers and complexity.

Ways to improve (a checklist):

1. Always write a fresh experience (do my research even on the smallest actions) based on real people’s experience. Remember: show my passion through the small, authentic details. NEVER give in to mediocrity, indifference and generic details. Don’t be clever, or write easily: I can NEVER be so interesting.
2. Create a realistic world. Notice the mundane details that will “go out of fashion” or cease to exist. Never leave my characters in a vacuum with pure emotions—they cease to matter!
3. Be passionately political. It is far better than sex; in fact, sex is not any good if it’s not political. The distaste for politics (telling lies) in my early years caused me to be turned off in order to develop my independence (to see the truth). This indifference made me insensitive to the intricacy of Chinese politics. I need to know the political world my characters live in, the forces they battle in their daily lives.
4. Focus on the conflicts. There are other ways to move the plot forward: natural growth (of people, a business, a town), beautiful scenery, and essentially life itself. But conflicts are essential to fiction because they tell the reader what to focus on, and reveal characters on a deep level: what they stand for, what they are capable of, what they will betray in order to survive/thrive.

Remember Anton Chekho, "Try and write a story about a young man - the son of a serf, a former grocer, choir boy, schoolboy and university student, raised on respect for rank, kissing the priests' hands, worshipping the ideas of others, and giving thanks for every piece of bread, receiving frequent whippings, making the rounds as a tutor without galoshes, brawling, torturing animals, enjoying dinners at the houses of rich relatives, needlessly hypocritical before God and man merely to acknowledge his own insignificance - write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop and how, on waking up one fine morning, he finds that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave, but that of a real human being." (Karlinsky, 85).