Monthly Archives: July 2010

Hup, Two, Three, Four

July 28, 2010 – 11:09 am

Pacing is movement, and movement has rhythm. Some rhythms are fast, staccato beats, rat-tat-tat-tat; some are slow, leisurely swells; and some are a steady heartbeat. One thing is true for all of them:  in order to have a beat, in order to have rhythm, there must be sound and then silence. A single continuous blast [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (1)

Time Travel the Easy Way

July 25, 2010 – 11:07 am

A few days ago, Beth my exercise buddy mentioned that she’d been rereading some of Connie Willis’ time-travel stories, and it inspired her to ask me a question:  If you could go back in time to do historical research, what time and place would you pick? I mulled it over for a few days before [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Reading, Writing | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)

Walk, Run, or Jog?

July 21, 2010 – 8:14 am

Recently, I was reading an extremely long (quarter-of-a-million-words plus) book that shall remain nameless to avoid embarrassing the author. It held my interest enough to get me through to the end, but it left me curiously unsatisfied, with very little memory of the plot (which is quite unusual for me), and no impulse whatever to [...]

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Mirror, Mirror, on the wall…

July 18, 2010 – 6:27 am

Early on in nearly every story, the writer comes across the necessity of doing a physical description of their characters, and their main viewpoint character in particular. There are two basic schools of thought on this. The first is to keep details to a bare minimum – maybe just hair and eye color – and [...]

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Being Cinderella is a lot of work

July 14, 2010 – 7:45 pm

These days, when people talk about a “Cinderella Story,” they mostly mean the rags-to-riches part. Whether it’s a Cinderella sports team that’s just won the championship (and never mind all the sweat and practice and planning that went into it), or J. K. Rowling’s welfare-mom-to-gazillion-copy-bestseller story, what people seem to be interested in is the [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in General, Writing | Tagged , , , | Comments (8)

Cliches and some things to do with them

July 12, 2010 – 11:08 am

Sooner or later, most writers go through a period of worrying that their work is full of clichés. Some folks take this to ridiculous extremes; one person I ran into was worried about their heroine’s hair color, because it just seemed clichéd to have her be blonde, brunette, or redhead, but the writer couldn’t think [...]

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Working out what comes next

July 7, 2010 – 10:15 am

I’m currently just getting started on the third, as-yet-untitled book of the Frontier Magic trilogy, and the first step of that is working out the plot in more detail than “they explore the Far West to find out what happened to Lewis and Clark and what’s up in the Rocky Mountains; various characters solve assorted [...]

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Changing things

July 4, 2010 – 6:00 am

Several questions come up a lot about plotting – how can you be sure it makes sense, how can you be sure it’s not clichéd, how do you develop it, how do you get it to work out. Most of the answers have to do with looking at things from a different angle from the [...]

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