Monthly Archives: October 2009

Did They Have Birds in the Fourth Century?

October 31, 2009 – 8:38 am

“How could you write about anything without wondering if it was true? I mean, you’d be describing a bird in a garden and suddenly there would be that awful question in your mind, did they have birds in the fourth century?” (Christopher Isherwood to Gore Vidal, Harpers, 1965) One of the things my mother never [...]

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From the mailbag, #2

October 27, 2009 – 9:43 am

Where do you start when you write a story? With characters, setting, conflict…? It depends on the story. Sometimes, it starts with characters; sometimes, with setting; sometimes, with plot; sometimes with a situation or an idea; sometimes with a theme… It really doesn’t matter where the story starts, as long as it has all the [...]

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What do you do with your ideas once you have them?

October 18, 2009 – 6:08 pm

Once you “have an idea,” the next bit of the process for most writers is developing it into a story. How one develops an idea depends largely on the writer and the idea. For a lot of us, the first stage is kind of like the effect of a particle accelerator: two or more interesting [...]

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Where do you get your ideas?

October 16, 2009 – 12:32 pm

The single most common question people ask writers – especially SF/F writers – is “Where do you get your ideas?” The assumption always seems to be that ideas are hard to come by. But it’s not really the ideas themselves that are hard.  For instance, anyone can sit down and come up with a grocery [...]

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So, What About All These Rules, Then?

October 13, 2009 – 6:17 pm

For some reason, I keep running into writers – mostly those who aren’t yet published, but sometimes ones who are – who seem to have gotten the impression that there is some sort of checklist that editors work through before they’ll buy a book. I ran into one recently who had a whole list of [...]

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Wrede’s Rules of Writing Income

October 10, 2009 – 8:46 pm

One of the things nobody ever mentioned to me when I was getting started as a writer was that if I ever got to be a full-time professional, I was going to be, in essence, a self-employed businessperson, with all the troubles and responsibilities (assorted taxes, health insurance, FICA, record-keeping) that go along with running [...]

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Getting back on track

October 7, 2009 – 9:19 am

So I spent last week in bed with something that wasn’t quite the H1N1 thing but had ALL the nasty symptoms (reading between the lines of what my doctor told me, this means I can STILL CATCH the stupid flu and end up going through all this AGAIN). All better, but I’m now faced with catching [...]

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Letting In the Dragons, Part IV

October 2, 2009 – 6:30 am

 Several years ago, I was asked to give a speech on the topic of book-banning, from the viewpoint of a fantasy writer. It’s quite long, so I have carved it up into four parts to post as part of Banned Books Week. This is the last of four parts, and the end of the story that I [...]

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Letting the Dragons In, Part III

October 1, 2009 – 6:30 am

 Several years ago, I was asked to give a speech on the topic of book-banning, from the viewpoint of a fantasy writer. It’s quite long, so I have carved it up into four parts to post as part of Banned Books Week. This is the third of four parts. __________ Fantasy is about possibilities; that’s one of [...]

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