Name: 0005 - Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer
Uploaded: 2025-05-20T22:06:56.000Z
Duration: 14 min 26 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey there, my name is André and I'm here with another book review for you.

This time I'm going to review a craft book for creative writers.

I published five books already, but those were non-fiction books.

Very specialized, software development books like this one, for example.

And the thing about publishing these books is that software development books are not really about prose or about genre techniques.

When I decided that what I wanted to do was write fiction, I was at a very strange position of being someone that had some experience with book publishing, but had zero experience writing fiction besides a couple short stories way back when.

So, one after the other, I got a gazillion craft books.

And I think that collecting and reading craft books is a way for me to procrastinate.

I think that might be more common than many writers care to admit.

Because it's much easier to buy and read a craft book than actually sitting down and write.

But in this quest to find the perfect craft book and of simply enjoying craft books, I came to realize that they come in different flavors.

Many craft books try to be generic craft books that would be wonderful for literary fiction.

But they don't provide you with genre-specific information.

Because even though there are good advice and good practices that apply everywhere, some genres have specific tropes and characteristics that the readers expect.

And many of those craft books don't touch them.

For example, crime fiction and cozy mysteries, things like Sherlock Holmes.

And those craft books will not talk about those rules.

And if you come back to me and say, oh, rules are meant to be broken.

Yes, but you need to know them so that you can break them.

Growing up, a lot of the trend I would see in books I was reading was plot-driven books.

And now readers appear to love character-driven books more.

And lots of craft books talk about character development.

Many characters in cozy mysteries don't change.

They are the rock and the things change around them.

You kind of need specialized books to write that kind of fiction.

Or at least to write that kind of fiction in a way that is recognizable.

And I couldn't find good books about crafting fantasy books.

Or let's say, let's put fantasy and science fiction together as speculative fiction.

There are fantastic books about a specific aspect of it.

And that's when I discover, and this being a long-winded intro to tell you that...

In my everlasting procrastination of collecting craft books...

I found the perfect craft book for those wanting to write speculative fiction.

You might remember him because he's awesome and you might have read his books.

One of his books became a quite trippy film.

I think that in North America might be REIX.

And there is the Humbergris novels as well.

It's made to intrigue you, to inspire you.

It's not like cold, boring rules and exercises.

Even though there are rules and exercises.

Like, any page you open, it's completely trippy.

Like, this is one thing about this book is that its layout is very evocative.

You cannot separate the textual content of this book from the presentation of this book.

The text is meant to be presented in this trippy way.

It's actually an interactive book because you have little QR codes that you can scan and get extra information.

Because there is a site for this book as well.

From an introduction trying to figure out what speculative fiction is.

And it has a ton of quotes and guest chapters by renowned authors in multiple genres of science fiction and fantasy.

What you might perceive as illustrations, they are not actually just artwork.

And one that rewards reading and rereading and exploring and getting lost on the sections of it that inspire you through its innovative design.

I think that from all the craft books I have, this one is the one I cherish the most.

Like, if I'm going to say what I like about it, I will need to mention every single word, every single drop of ink in an artwork.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

0005 - Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer

weird

specific

perceive

content