Review: Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction

Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff VanderMeer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was on my (physical) to-read shelf for over a year before I finally picked it up. I think it's good that I waited - I read Jeff Vandermeer's "Southern Reach" trilogy in that time, and having an idea of how he writes is really essential to understanding his guide to writing. He writes weird (the genre, not the pejorative), dreamlike fiction, and I think this guide is most helpful for writing that particular flavor of speculative fiction. I also like that he focused on his process as opposed to the technical aspects (getting an agent, finding an editor, etc.) but that those aspects also weren't completely absent, as the book generally follows the creation of a story from idea through publication.

There were times I loved this and times I thought it was completely useless.

Most of the former were Vandermeer's descriptions of his publishing experiences and writing process or "guest post" moments where other writers contributed a few words. Reading advice and anecdotes from genre authors about the process of writing and publishing was illuminating, and the book's biggest strength is in Vandermeer's networking abilities. Lots of big names contributed bits and pieces that were substantial and worth reading on their own and complemented or contrasted Vandermeer's perspective.

Most of the latter were the completely horrendous visual aids. Honestly, I get that this is a book by writers for prospective writers and that writers are probably better at the written word than at graphic design, but someone involved with this book should have, at some point, checked to see if the graphics made any sense at all. Visual aids are there to *aid* you by *visually* organizing the information into something interesting and/or easy to digest. A good graphic stands on its own. So many of the graphics were so not good - they were just words thrown on top of a picture. Forget about checking the visual aid before reading to get a sense of how to mentally organize the material you're about to read. They didn't make sense even after reading the corresponding pages, and in some cases they managed to completely obfuscate the point. And on top of that, I wasn't a huge fan of the aesthetic that many of the graphics seemed to push, a kind of scrapbook steampunk. Since this is advertised as an "illustrated guide" I was very, very disappointed in how simply unhelpful the illustrations were.

The writing exercises were fun and interesting (though I'll confess I didn't do the ones that *didn't* seem interesting to me). I was partial to the editing/revising ones but that doesn't surprise me one bit. I'd rather reorganize and restructure book matter than generate it on my own. It was very cool to see exercises tailored to speculative fiction. I did think there would be a bit more on the accompanying website than there actually is, especially in terms of exercises, but ah well.

Overall - I enjoyed the process of reading this, and even sometimes enjoyed how angry the completely nonsensical graphics made me. It inspired me to write more and I think it improved my writing. Definitely a good read (or good gift!) for speculative fiction writers.

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