Monthly Archives: April 2012

How they say it

April 29, 2012 – 6:59 am

One of the things it took me a while to get a handle on was giving my characters different speech patterns, depending on both their personalities and their backgrounds. For my first couple of books, I was too busy juggling all the other stuff – background, plot, description, action, dialog, viewpoint, etc. – to even [...]

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

Revising

April 25, 2012 – 6:52 am

The process of revising effectively tends to vary from writer to writer just as the first-draft writing process varies, and it’s not necessarily connected to the way one writes your first drafts. In fact, often (though not always) the revisions process seems to need to be the opposite of the writer’s writing process in some [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , , | Comments (13)

Must read?

April 22, 2012 – 6:30 am

Every so often, someone puts out a “top ten must-read” list of books for people unfamiliar with fantasy. There’s nothing much wrong with a list of this nature, if you’re looking for good reading and your taste happens to march with that of the list-maker. Some time back (fifteen years ago?), I was asked to [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Reading | Tagged | Comments (12)

Layering

April 18, 2012 – 6:08 am

One of the things that makes writing difficult for a lot of folks is the notion that they have to do everything at once, on the first try. They’re sure their first draft has to look pretty much like an actual story – maybe it needs some tweaking, but everything’s more-or-less there: the plot, the [...]

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Off Track

April 15, 2012 – 6:27 am

Before we get to the post, I feel obliged to mention that we’re doing some more blog maintenance tomorrow – might as well get it over with as soon/much as possible – so there may possibly be another short outage. We’re expecting this bit to go smoothly, but just in case it doesn’t, I figured [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in General, Writing | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Out of ideas?

April 11, 2012 – 6:30 am

So Minicon was last weekend, and in among seeing lots of friends (and managing to miss seeing far too many others) there was the usual crop of questions – what are you going to write next, where do you get your ideas, etc. Including one poor fellow who was convinced that he’d run out of [...]

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What is right?

April 8, 2012 – 6:35 am

Ask a writer what it is they want to do with their story, and something like eight out of ten will start by giving you a description of the plot. Ask again, push a little harder, and 99% of them will eventually come up with “I want to write a really good book.” Unfortunately, there [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , | Comments (16)

Better Living Through Technology?

April 4, 2012 – 6:13 am

It looks as if we have successfully migrated the blog and web site to the new servers, knock wood. I’m afraid a couple of comments got lost in the switchover, sorry. The whole process was a whole lot more involved than I’d expected, and I wasn’t even the one doing most of the work! Basically, [...]

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