Monthly Archives: September 2011

Getting to know them

September 28, 2011 – 6:27 am

Characterization is one of the things I had a hard time getting a handle on. In my early books, I was doing it all by instinct – which was all well and good (I still do it pretty much by instinct), except that I hadn’t thought about characterization, about what goes into it or how [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , | Comments (7)

Banned Books Week 2011

September 25, 2011 – 6:59 am

Some years back, a good friend of mine told me a story about her nine-year-old son, who came to her wanting to read a particular series of adult books that he’d heard his late-teenaged siblings talking about. The books in question were great adventure books, but they did contain several explicit mentions of sex – [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in General, Reading | Tagged , | Comments (9)

Gaming for Writers, or Writing for Gamers

September 21, 2011 – 6:15 am

I’ve been doing role-playing games off and on since the mid-1970s, when I was first introduced to the concept of D&D style tabletop games. The group I gamed with wasn’t big on number-crunching and stats; we were more about the improvised story-telling. At least five of us ended up inventing and running our own gaming [...]

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Mailbag #6

September 18, 2011 – 6:15 am

How did you know that you wanted to be a writer? I didn’t. I never, ever wanted to “be a writer.” I wanted to write. I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to get these blasted characters out of my head and nailed down on paper so I wouldn’t have to keep thinking about them. [...]

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Teamwork

September 14, 2011 – 6:57 am

When you look at the arts, there are some that clearly, obviously require the talents of multiple people to produce. Movies, for instance, need not only writers but actors, camera operators, prop and costume people, and on and on – last time I went to one, the credits rolled on for nearly five minutes. At [...]

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Hooking the Reader

September 11, 2011 – 6:25 am

I’ve talked before about the opening of a story and some of the things that can go wrong with the all-drama, all-action, all-the-time “hook.” But it occurs to me that I haven’t talked much about what a hook is, or how to do it right. Hence today’s post. Openings are important; nobody denies that. In my [...]

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Reality Isn’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be

September 7, 2011 – 6:07 am

Writers who set their stories in the real world, whether modern or historical, have a double advantage over those of us who alter reality/history to suit our own ends, or who make up our own versions from whole cloth. The first advantage is that they can look up whatever details they need – architecture, dress, [...]

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Order and outlines

September 4, 2011 – 6:38 am

Back in grade school, when they taught us to write essays, the first step was always “decide on a topic,” and the second one was “make an outline/plan.” Nowadays there’s a lot more focus on creativity, i.e., writing fiction instead of essays. Based on what I’ve seen in school visits and from talking with teachers [...]

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