Yoon Ha Lee is one of my absolute favourite authors—his Machineries of Empire trilogy is among the best science fiction I’ve ever read, and I’ve yet to come across a novel or short story of his that I haven’t loved. So when I found out that Lee had published a book about writing, I snapped at the chance to read it.
Brain Games for Blocked Writers: 81 Tips to Get You Unstuck is not your typical ‘how to write a novel’–type book. It’s a collection of suggested activities for finding inspiration, boosting your creativity, and coming at your writing from angles you might not have considered before.
Lee says in his introduction that these tips are for people “whose brains are not orderly and analytical”, i.e. people for whom working through a checklist of logical solutions is not effective in helping them overcome blocks in their writing. But I’m willing to bet that among the eighty-one suggestions in the book, there is at least one thing that would prompt new ways of thinking in every writer, regardless of the type of brain they have.
The book contains prompts around the act of writing itself—e.g. tools to use, ways to shake your writing process up, word games, and ways to play with genre and form. But a large chunk of suggestions stem from other areas of creativity, too. Lee is evidently a big fan of interactive fiction and narrative-rich games (such as TTRPGs) and this inspires many of the prompts, from thinking about what playing style your characters might have, to writing a ‘video game vision statement’ for your novel. Other prompts draw from art, fashion, music, technology, tarot, sports, and even perfume. My personal favourites might be the prompts that involve cats!
These hugely varied tips are not just one-line ideas or terse instructions: they each come with anecdotes from Lee’s life and personal examples about how he has tried each approach out with his own writing. The result is a conversational and personality-filled read—it almost feels like you’re sat opposite Yoon Ha Lee in a café, listening to him talk about his writing process, his favourite games and anything else that takes his fancy. It lends a whimsical and playful air to what, in someone else’s hands, could have ended up as a dry book of exercises.
So, in short: If writing your novel is feeling like a grind, plenty of the ideas in Brain Games for Blocked Writers will help you to step back and look at things differently—and it might be the prompts that you least expect. Yoon Ha Lee’s suggestions ultimately encourage you to reclaim the fun in writing and, in doing so, to find a new way forward for your story.
You can find details on where to get hold of Brain Games for Blocked Writers: 81 Tips to Get You Unstuck on Yoon Ha Lee’s website (link opens in a new tab).
Do you have any unusual ways to kickstart your creativity? Let me know in the comments, or get in touch another way. I’d love to hear from you!
While you’re here, why not check out my blog post about the three-gender system in Yoon Ha Lee’s novel Phoenix Extravagant?
