A review by panda_incognito
Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction, by Jeff VanderMeer
3.0
This book presents writing advice in an unusual, immersive format, with lots of fantastical and surrealist illustrations, sidebars, and illustrated diagrams. Since I am a visual learner, I hoped that I would find this helpful, but the sidebars fragmented my attention, many of the diagrams were too cluttered for me to easily interpret them, and the larger, standalone images were sometimes so unusual and surreal that I remember them in place of the text. Overall, the idea of this book is good, but I found the format distracting.
The writing advice itself is excellent, and the author supplements his own perspective with interviews and sidebars with thoughts from other writers. There is a lot of good material here, especially for people who write fantasy and science fiction, since the examples are in their genre. My chosen genre is slice-of-life fiction, but I enjoy reading fantasy, and it was fun to see the different angle that these examples provided on familiar writing advice. Most books about craft analyze passages from either pretentious literary novels or melodramatic popular fiction, so I appreciated this change of pace.
This book ended up being a mixed bag for me, but it covers a lot of important general material and includes genre-specific topics that are rarely explored elsewhere. I would recommend this to anyone who finds the idea of this book appealing, but would encourage them not to have overly high expectations. The main value of this book is in the written advice, most of which is available elsewhere, and not in the illustrated diagrams or inclusion of other pictures. Writers should approach this book with the expectation that it contains useful written advice, and should not expect the fantastical or bizarre images to make it unique in a transformative way.
The writing advice itself is excellent, and the author supplements his own perspective with interviews and sidebars with thoughts from other writers. There is a lot of good material here, especially for people who write fantasy and science fiction, since the examples are in their genre. My chosen genre is slice-of-life fiction, but I enjoy reading fantasy, and it was fun to see the different angle that these examples provided on familiar writing advice. Most books about craft analyze passages from either pretentious literary novels or melodramatic popular fiction, so I appreciated this change of pace.
This book ended up being a mixed bag for me, but it covers a lot of important general material and includes genre-specific topics that are rarely explored elsewhere. I would recommend this to anyone who finds the idea of this book appealing, but would encourage them not to have overly high expectations. The main value of this book is in the written advice, most of which is available elsewhere, and not in the illustrated diagrams or inclusion of other pictures. Writers should approach this book with the expectation that it contains useful written advice, and should not expect the fantastical or bizarre images to make it unique in a transformative way.