Monthly Archives: October 2010

One of those weeks

October 31, 2010 – 6:38 am

As you may recall, dear reader, in our last exciting episode on Wednesday morning I stated categorically that I wouldn’t be doing NaNoWriMo this year for a lot of good reasons, including house guests, Thanksgiving, and general life workload. November-December are supposed to be slow months for work, because of all the holiday busy-ness. I should [...]

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NaNoWriMo

October 27, 2010 – 6:20 am

November approaches, and with it comes National Novel Writing Month, a “writing event” that involves people all over the world trying to write a 50,000 word novel from scratch during the month of November. Along with NaNoWriMo comes, inevitably, a flock of earnest would-be writers asking whether or not they should participate (and, occasionally, whether [...]

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Search-and-Destroy

October 24, 2010 – 2:50 pm

I wrote my first novel on a typewriter, and one of my most vivid memories of that is proofreading the final submission draft and trying to decide, over and over, whether it was worth retyping a whole page in order to get rid of one too-common word or phrase. Mostly, it wasn’t. When I got [...]

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Changing Characters

October 20, 2010 – 5:59 pm

One of the things writers are urged to do, over and over, is to create characters who grow and change over the course of their adventures. Obviously, growth and change are not an absolute requirement; there are plenty of long-running series in which the characters are exactly the same at the end of the book or [...]

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Deciding to be a Writer

October 17, 2010 – 9:33 pm

One of the questions I get asked a lot is “how did you decide to be a writer?” And the short answer is, I didn’t. Oh, I’ve been writing since I started my first (unfinished, unpublishable) novel in seventh grade, but it was always about writing, not about being a writer. Part of that was [...]

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Standing on your Head in the Shower

October 13, 2010 – 12:05 pm

There is no bad way to write a story.  No editor cares how you wrote it.  No editor, to my knowledge, has ever rejected a story on the grounds that the author did not have a plan, character sketches, maps, or time lines before writing the story.  Editors want a good story; if you write [...]

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A Group of One’s Own

October 10, 2010 – 8:50 pm

January of 2010 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the first time six would-be writers in Minneapolis got together and formed a critique group. Within five years, all seven of the eventual members sold, and six are still publishing (the seventh went back to his first love, music and songwriting). You may have heard of us: the [...]

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Plotting nonfiction

October 6, 2010 – 6:24 am

An awful lot of the techniques that get used in fiction have applications in nonfiction as well. They’re not necessary in nonfiction, but they can add a lot of appeal, interest, and readability, among other things. One of the less obvious candidates for this sort of usefulness is plot. The problem is, I think, with that nonfiction [...]

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Necessary and Sufficient

October 3, 2010 – 1:56 pm

Back in high school, I had a marvelous history teacher who made a point of going into more than memorizing dates and names and places. One of the key things I took away from that class was the concept of necessary and sufficient causes, and the difference between them. Necessary causes are the things that [...]

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