Finished up the last chapter of Circuit Magician yesterday around noon; spent the rest of the afternoon doing final clean-up of assorted things that had been tagged to fix but somehow hadn’t gotten fixed yet, and sent it off. This morning, I had notes from my editor and agent saying they received it, so the [...]
Thanks to some last-minute schedule changes and cancellations, I am now very confident that the first draft of Circuit Magician will be finished by late this week, even if I don’t quite make the June 1 deadline. Since I’ve already cleared that with my editor, this will work out fine. Sooner would be better, though. [...]
How well does a writer need to know her characters? There seem to be two sets of conventional wisdom about this. One holds that writing characters is rather like method acting – the writer has to become the character, so as to know them from the inside. The other is more mechanical, and is typified [...]
One major plot point to go, and about a week and a half to do it in. I got lucky on the deadline – my editor is on vacation, and while he will be back June 1, he’ll be spending his first few days catching up. So as long as I get the ms. to [...]
The first thing you need to know about getting published is that the process is best described as interminably long stretches of boredom and anxiety, punctuated by moments of panic and frantic activity. And this applies to the whole process, not just the submission part. Most people who want to be professionally published figure out [...]
OK, I said I’d post updates on how things are going. This week wasn’t bad, but everything is taking longer than I think it should (longer in the more-words-and-scenes sense, rather than longer in the more-time-to-write-one-scene sense). In one way, this is good; it means there’s lots of juice in this story. In another way, [...]
Where are your best places to write? I can write pretty much anywhere; I learned that trick when I was still working and had very limited time in which to write. (“A writer with only two hours a day can write in the back of an open truck on the Interstate.” – Gene Wolfe) Most [...]
Circuit Magician (the tentative title of the sequel to Thirteenth Child) has been giving me fits for months…years, if the truth be told. Many of the problems have been external (I didn’t have any control over when Mom had her stroke), but it’s also just a tough book to do. The middle of a story [...]
Dialog is the primary way most of us communicate with each other, so it’s also the main way our characters communicate with each other. It’s really hard to write a satisfactory short story that has no dialogue at all, and the longer this story, the harder it is to tell without ever having one character talk [...]
So after rambling on for three posts, I’m finally getting down to the nuts and bolts of writing action scenes. One of the first pieces of action-writing advice you find is usually “Use short sentences and sentence fragments,” because they pick up the pace, and an action scene has to be fast-paced, right? People who think [...]
April 29, 2010 – 12:50 pm
I thought I was going to get to the nitty-gritty of technique today, but it seems I have a bit more to say about the nitty-gritty of planning. What you need to know up front (unless you are a total “surprise me” writer, who can’t know anything up front) is 1) what the setting is [...]
April 27, 2010 – 10:57 am
So how do you build an action scene? There are a lot of things to consider. Some of them will be dictated by decisions the writer has made earlier in the story, and the first and most important of these is viewpoint, which frequently implies level. Action can be “seen” by the reader from lots of [...]
Action scenes are the bread-and-butter of whole genres of fiction. As such, they’re pretty important, and I was rather stunned to realize that I’ve said very little about writing them. I was even more stunned when I went to the bookcase that’s full of how-to-write books – five shelves of them – and couldn’t find [...]
Before you start critiquing someone else’s work, you are best off asking a few questions. Not questions about the story – usually, one of the things the writer is looking for is a fresh eye, a virgin reader, someone who has no idea what the story is about or what the writer was trying to accomplish, [...]
I promised a while back that I’d post on training first-readers (or beta readers, or critiquers, or whatever you personally call them). I already talked about the difficulty of finding good crit, so I’ll try not to repeat too much of that. Working with first-readers starts with finding some folks who are a) articulate people whose [...]
I am home again after another four-day trip to Chicago to get my Dad’s taxes signed and meet with the lawyer about family business stuff. I am more than a little chuffed, because this is the first time in at least six years that Dad hasn’t needed to file an extension. (You all did notice [...]
Infodumps – those long passages of narrative summary that provide a huge wodge of background or plot development or characterization – have an undeservedly bad reputation among would-be writers. The allergy to infodumps is a bit of stylistic advice which is largely peddled to beginning writers, but which is not upheld by looking at real [...]
I seem to have acquired a reputation as some sort of worldbuilding maven, probably based on the Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions I came up with as a personal crutch during my middle career. I don’t actually think the reputation is deserved – really, it should belong to someone who does a much better job of worldbuilding [...]
Getting good comments on a work-in-process is hard. In part, this is because a) many writers think that only other writers can/will provide useful criticism, b) most people are not writers, and c) people may be very good writers and still be very bad at providing critique. a) and b) mean that many writers limit their [...]
March 30, 2010 – 10:28 am
Last Saturday there was a meeting of the local Mythopoeic Society, at which they planned to discuss Thirteenth Child. They very kindly asked me to attend, and spent considerable time arranging to have the meeting on a date when I was sure I could make it. And I spaced it. I have a list of excuses [...]
Writing is difficult to talk about. I mean the real thing, the stuff that happens when you are sitting there with your paper and pen or your computer or your stone tablets and chisel and telling a story. We talk about bits and pieces of writing all the time. We separate out plot, characterization, setting, [...]
Theme is something I’ve been thinking about for years, because it’s one of those writing things that I can’t seem to ever quite grasp when it comes to my own writing process. Thanks to my excellent high school English teachers, I can pick out and analyze themes in other people’s stuff, but I never quite get [...]
So I’m working along, facing my third deadline extension, way behind on everything, with lots of vital-or-at-least-urgent non-writing stuff going on. I FINALLY get past the exceedingly sticky argument scene I’ve been poking at for the last two months, and on into the next bit of wandering-around-the-settlements. I’ve done the go-to-dinner-and-whine thing several times, and [...]
People make time for the things they love. That is why I am always a bit skeptical at first when people tell me that they can’t write because they have a day job…especially when their day job is a relatively non-demanding 40 hours per week. People have to make time for the things they love, [...]
March 12, 2010 – 10:23 am
As I said in our last exciting episode, there are two kinds of novel outlines writers do: the sort meant to sell a manuscript to a publisher, and the sort meant to help the writer write the book. This post is about the second kind. The first and possibly most important thing to know about [...]
“Outline – 1) A line showing the shape or boundary of something; 2) A statement or summary of the chief facts about something; 3) A sketch containing lines but no shading” – Oxford American Dictionary If you want to be a professional novelist, odds are that sooner or later, you’re going to write an outline. [...]
This is the time of year when I run across folks – newly published writers, generally – who have forgotten one of the most basic facts about their writing careers, and who are about to pay a painful price. What fact? The fact that they’re running a business, and they’re going to have to pay taxes [...]
February 28, 2010 – 10:54 am
For those of you just tuning in, I have two sisters who are professional artists. The one who does theater scenery and tromp l’oeil lives here in town, and when I moved into my new house some years back, she decided to paint my closets for me. With scenes from children’s books/movies. I’ve already posted [...]
February 24, 2010 – 9:39 am
Real-life incidents aren’t all that useful in fiction, in my experience, because real life just sort of happens. Basing a piece of fiction too closely on real-life events and experiences all too often results in stories that don’t work, and which the author justifies by saying “But it really happened that way!” “It really happened” [...]
February 18, 2010 – 3:18 pm
There are three basic ways to handle plotting a story, whether it’s a short story, a stand-alone novel, or an epic twenty-volume series: 1) You can do it intuitively as you write, 2) You can plan it out in advance, or 3) You can write a bunch of stuff and then arrange it into a [...]
February 14, 2010 – 11:28 am
I’ve been mulling over green_knight and accio_aqualung’s request for something on plotting multi-volume stories for a few days now. It’s not easy, because on this question, I’m working mainly from observation. The closest I’ve come to writing a multi-volume story myself are 1) the Lyra books, which aren’t really a multi-volume story so much as [...]
February 8, 2010 – 10:38 am
What makes an ending “The End”? In a word: closure. At the end of the story, whether the heroine won or lost, she’s not going to get another chance to try. The Evil Overlord is gone for good, the wedding is on (or off), the murderer has been discovered and arrested. There may be some [...]
February 3, 2010 – 10:34 pm
I just (and I mean just, as in, haven’t unpacked the suitcase yet) got back from Chicago. The planned five-day trip turned into six (I should have known better than to schedule the meeting with the lawyer for the last day), but the estate tax return is now signed and with the lawyer to file, [...]
January 30, 2010 – 1:50 pm
Worldbuilding in some sense is a requirement for all writers. The people and places in fiction may have analogs in real life, but a writer in the U.S. cannot depend on every reader (or even most readers) being familiar with the Lincoln Park area of Chicago or the lower east side of Manhattan, much less the [...]
January 27, 2010 – 3:35 pm
Another thing that it is really important to pay attention to in first-person writing is what that character knows. Not what he/she knows about the plot; that should be obvious. About everything else. When your first-person narrator looks at the street outside his house, does he see Fords and Chryslers and Saturns? Or does he see red [...]
January 25, 2010 – 2:00 pm
As I’ve said before, the term “viewpoint” gets used to mean both the person who is seeing the action (viewpoint character) and the way in which everything is written (viewpoint type). This is going to be about the latter sort of viewpoint. Specifically, it’s about first-person. First-person viewpoint is the “I” viewpoint: “I hate pickled [...]
January 21, 2010 – 4:42 pm
When professional writers are asked “what are the books you keep within arm’s reach of your desk or computer?”, many of the lists have for years included Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Fowler’s Modern English Usage is also popular, as is The Chicago Manual of Style and Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s delightful The Deluxe [...]
January 18, 2010 – 8:13 am
How do you decide where a story starts? Stories, short or long, generally are not about characters who are happily living their normal lives. Something unusual is going on; something has upset the status quo (whether the status quo was a miserable life as a slave, or a happy life as a king). Stories therefore [...]
January 15, 2010 – 9:06 am
One of the problems with talking about writing is that the terminology isn’t standardized. Even when everybody agrees what something is called, the same word gets used to mean other things, which can lead to confusion. Take the term “viewpoint.” It can mean either the person through whose eyes the story is told, as in [...]
January 12, 2010 – 11:29 am
If people would ask writers where they get their titles, instead of where they get their ideas, they’d probably get a lot more interesting answers much of the time. In my experience, it’s really difficult for most writers to articulate exactly where they got the idea for something (except in those few cases where it’s [...]
January 9, 2010 – 12:15 pm
It’s been a little over a year since my mother died, and one of the things I inherited from her was her collection of cookbooks. It’s quite a collection, too. When Mom ran out of space on the kitchen cookbook shelf, she just started putting them elsewhere. I’ve taken three large boxes and two paper bags full of [...]
January 3, 2010 – 3:45 pm
It being the new year – and the first year of a new decade – I went poking around the web and noticed a bunch of websites for people’s New Year’s Resolutions. A little further investigation revealed that “write a book” is, in some form or another, on an awful lot of people’s lists (it [...]
December 29, 2009 – 11:25 am
I flew down to Alabama for the Big Family Christmas this year. That meant I also flew back the day after Christmas. Which was also the day after some idiot tried to blow up a plane over Detroit. My sister and I were lucky – the new “security precautions” didn’t get put into place until [...]
December 20, 2009 – 11:46 pm
As promised, here are the first couple of closet pictures. As some of you already know, I have the coolest closets in the world. My sister Carol, who used to paint theater scenery for a living, decided to “redecorate” the interiors of of my ordinary boring closets with decor from my favorite children’s books. This [...]
December 15, 2009 – 11:13 am
When a writer sets out to tell a story, she has a lot of choices to make, and every time she makes one, it influences what options are still available for the other choices. In some cases, one decision can completely eliminate all other options. Take the matter of narrative voice (which I define as [...]
December 11, 2009 – 12:17 pm
I keep running across people who think that there is One Right Way to write a story, and who tie themselves in knots trying to force themselves to write “the right way” when it doesn’t suit their particurlar mental processes. Somewhere, somehow, they’ve gotten convinced (usually because some authority figure like an editor or highly respected [...]
December 8, 2009 – 11:02 am
The cake! Me (in the stripes in front) and the book club!
December 7, 2009 – 5:50 pm
I am grumpy. It’s partly my own fault, and partly not (at least, I think it isn’t). The part that I think is not my fault has to do with the refusal of my blogging software to upload pictures, despite several hours of trying different formats with the supposedly-easy-built-in-uploader. The software finds the right file, [...]
December 3, 2009 – 12:07 pm
A speech tag is the thing that goes with a line of dialog that tells you who said it; it “tags” the line with the name (or occupation, or some other identifiable description) of the person who said it. “Run!” Jeff cried. (“Jeff cried” is the speech tag.) Jane said, “I can’t.” (“Jane said” is [...]
November 29, 2009 – 1:32 pm
I had brunch this morning with my friend Rosemary, who is about as crazy as I am but on just a different enough axis that we stimulate each other to new heights of silliness, rather than bogging down because we’ve each had exactly the same idea and can’t build on it. Anyway, Rosemary is one [...]
November 24, 2009 – 11:26 am
The second most common way of leading into and out of a flashback sequence is by shifting tenses. Most novels are told in what’s called the “historic present,” meaning that the “now” of the story is told in simple past tense (He slept in the library all afternoon rather than He sleeps in the library all afternoon). This confuses a lot [...]
November 22, 2009 – 11:46 am
There are two important things to know about flashbacks: how to do them, and when to do them. Both things can be trickier to figure out than they look. FIrst, a definition: as far as I’m concerned, flashbacks are a way of conveying some background/backstory information as if it were happening “now”. The central story that is being [...]
November 19, 2009 – 11:25 am
Over the years, I have worked with a lot of editors myself, and watched a lot of my friends work with others. Some have been better than others; some have just been a better fit than others. But they all do pretty much the same thankless, undervalued, and misunderstood job…which is most especially misunderstood by [...]
November 17, 2009 – 11:45 am
Every so often, I get asked what the difference is between writing fantasy and writing realistic fiction. It’s a pretty good question, though since I’ve never written anything that wasn’t science fiction or fantasy, I’m not sure why anyone expects me to know. (Of course, I have opinions on just about everything, but that’s another [...]
November 14, 2009 – 11:59 am
Some people are afraid to exercise their talents, or afraid that if they try, they will fail and have to face just how little talent they have. But far more are just simply not interested enough. Writing a book sounds like a nice thing to do – the way learning to ski sounds nice, or [...]
November 9, 2009 – 9:36 am
So you have a bunch of characters, and you want your readers to get to know them. How do you do that? Well, how do you get to know people in real life? You find out about them based on what other people say about them (“”He’s a jerk!” Chris told her”), based on how [...]
November 5, 2009 – 6:33 am
In the comments on our last exciting episode, accio_aqualung asked: So pretend you’ve spent so much time on something that you’ve got gobs and gobs of backstory and little trivial details, like the MC is terminally left handed or her brother has to organize his pens in a very specific way or their uncle won [...]
November 2, 2009 – 8:21 am
There’s a range of writing types, from people who hate revising and who want to write it down and be done with it, to people who can’t let go of anything and who keep changing it. The trick is to find a balance point that works for you. Nothing is ever perfect the first time [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
September 30, 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 into four parts to post as part of Banned Books Week. This is the second part of four. __________ I wrote that story for this speech, [...]
September 29, 2009 – 6:37 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. It begins with a story, because I am a writer and most things lead me [...]
September 28, 2009 – 11:13 am
Every year, the American Library Association holds Banned Books Week in September. This is that week. I’ve felt rather strongly about Banned Books Week for a long time – even before I met the teacher who was nearly fired because she put “Dealing With Dragons” on the reading list for her fifth-grade class (a parent, [...]
September 27, 2009 – 8:28 am
Exactly what constitutes ”good writing” is a subjective judgment, and it can be extremely hard to separate from one’s personal taste – not the least because one is unlikely to read books one doesn’t like, and if one doesn’t read them, one can’t tell whether they’re “good writing” or not. Furthermore, there can be an enormous [...]
September 21, 2009 – 8:21 am
Years ago, when I was an unpublished wannabe, I was at a local SF convention trying to learn the True Secret of Writing from the professional writers in attendence. One of them (I think it may have been Gordy Dickson) threw out a piece of advice that has stood me in good stead for all [...]
September 17, 2009 – 9:46 am
Why don’t you do a collection of Enchanted Forest short stories, like Book of Enchantments only all Enchanted Forest? Well, mainly because I’m a novelist. Short stories are really hard for me; in thirty years as a writer, I’ve written roughly fifteen publishable short stories. Ten of them are in Book of Enchantments; three more [...]
September 12, 2009 – 9:18 am
I asked Caroline to do a guest post on her view of writing Kate and Cecy, particularly The Mislaid Magician. And this is what she says: — Pat said, “You’re going to kill me.” That’s the way I remember my first encounter with THE MISLAID MAGICIAN. Pat Wrede and I were just finishing up with [...]
September 9, 2009 – 12:00 pm
Alex asked “how you felt about the stand alone getting a sequel with the Kate and Cecelia books. I think you did an amazing job with escalation with these books, but did you have a hard time creating the right level of escalation?” Well, for starters, “getting a sequel” isn’t quite the right phrase. The [...]
September 5, 2009 – 9:34 am
The comments on the last post started getting into endings and the escalation of threat, particularly as related to series books, and I discovered I had quite a lot to say on the subject even though I haven’t written a long-running series myself. The first thing is that not all trilogies or series are the [...]
September 2, 2009 – 10:13 am
There are a couple of ways of looking at plot, ranging from the bird’s-eye view at a macro level to the order of scenes, and events and incidents within scenes. The one most people run across first – and one of the most useful ways of looking at it for many writers – is the [...]
August 30, 2009 – 11:11 am
In the comments on the last post, S.A. Cox said “Historically, however, with both writing and teaching, one of the main keys to my development has been trusting my instincts about what is working and what isn’t, and then working like a dog at what isn’t.” My experience with trusting my instincts has been good; [...]
August 28, 2009 – 11:23 am
Every writer has something – some part of writing, however tiny – that comes easily (or at least, more easily than the rest of it). For some it’s action scenes; for others, it’s deep characterization; for others it’s plot or dialog or structure or theme. But there’s always something. What this means is that, for [...]
August 24, 2009 – 7:34 pm
Just for fun, I thought I’d put up some of my favorite quotations about writing, writers, and publishing. Feel free to chime in with yours! “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” – W. Somerset Maugham “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, “And [...]
August 22, 2009 – 11:46 am
So last weekend, my brother and his family came to visit. We had a lovely time, despite the fact that they all had colds. You see where this is going already, don’t you? But to really understand this, you have to know that when I get a cold, I usually have a week of being [...]
August 20, 2009 – 9:14 am
Every once in a while, I run across people who are baffled and frustrated by the behavior of certain talented friends of theirs. “They can write great stuff; why don’t they?” “Their fanfic is great; why don’t they try to submit stuff professionally?” “They’ve sold a bunch of books; why don’t they quit their day [...]
August 19, 2009 – 9:08 am
Part of the way down Wisconsin (if you’re coming from Minnesota via I94), there’s a spot where they were doing road work about six months ago. They finished up the first part, but apparently they want to do more on the same stretch at some unspecified future date. Because instead of removing the big orange [...]
August 16, 2009 – 8:30 am
To my mind, a purely altruistic, goody-two-shoes hero is even more boring and unrealistic than a purely evil villain. Maybe because at least the villain is getting something out of being a villain? All those armies to order around, and castles, and power, and so on. OK, people do wake up in the morning and think [...]
August 14, 2009 – 8:35 am
Cazaril, my Maine Coon/Tabby rescue cat, has been seriously annoyed with me lately. I think it’s all the travel – he really doesn’t like being left home with just Nimue for company. So he’s been trying to get me up several times a night. To play with him. (How I know this is, I made [...]
August 11, 2009 – 1:04 pm
I probably should have posted this first, if I was going to blog about getting stuck. Because one of the more important things a writer needs to do when they’re stuck, before trying to apply any of the techniques I was talking about, is to figure out why they are stuck. Diagnosis is important, because [...]
August 10, 2009 – 8:54 pm
Back when I was in 7th grade, I took a summer sewing class. On the first day, they showed everybody how to work the sewing machine and then gave us pieces of paper to “sew” with a dull needle and no thread, so we could learn how to guide stuff through the feeds. I waited until [...]
I’ve been getting quite a few questions in the mailbag recently about writer’s block, and invariably they end with the anguished plea, “How do you know what happens next?” Which is a lot of the problem right there, in my opinon. Because “What happens next?” and “What do I do next?” are among the most [...]
So Book 2 of Frontier Magic (Title To Come) seems to be getting some momentum up at last. Possibly because I finally have a bit of shape for this volume, which looks just a bit novel-like. Part of the difficulty, it seems in retrospect, has been that I’ve only ever written three-related-standalone-novels, not a three-volume [...]
August 2, 2009 – 10:32 am
One of the things you see a lot in fantasy stories is a villain who is purely and simply evil and knows it. No rationalizations, no semi-plausible rationales, not even a rotten childhood to blame it on, just the Dark Lord Who Wants To Take Over The World Because He Is Really, Really Evil. There are ways of [...]
Every so often, I have an encounter with readers (usually academics, but sometimes not) who are happy to tell me, in detail and at great length, all the reasons why I wrote something, or wrote it in this or that particular way. (Usually because they object to the reasons they’ve come up with…but I digress.) [...]
One of the plagues of beginning writers is the feeling that they are doing something “wrong.” Not wrong in the sense of technique – messing up viewpoint, for instance – but that they have made, are making, or will make, a wrong decision about “what happens next.” They are haunted by the fear that it [...]
The new book (Frontier Magic, Book 2, Title To Come) is progressing slowly. Partly because of the perversity of the characters. First, one of my important-but-offstage-for-a-while characters decided to be stingy about writing letters. With some reason, I admit, but if I can’t get him started corresponding again, there’s a whole great wodge of planned-for [...]
Description is one of those love-it-or-hate-it things. Some readers want more, more, more; they want to see every button and bead on the dress, every scratch on the woodwork. Other people roll their eyes and complain about slowing down the story when they run across long passages of descriptive infodump. Still others want to have [...]
The day I spent at the American Library Association convention was long and intense, full of talking to exceedingly intelligent librarians. How I know they were exceedingly intelligent is this: I do not normally talk in my sleep, but the night after the convention, I woke myself up out of a sound slumber by saying [...]
One of the perennial questions I get from people, especially those who want to be writers, is “how do you come up with the names?”-meaning, usually, the “weird fantasy names” in settings that bear no resemblance to the “real world,” rather than the more ordinary names like James and Cecelia I use in other books. [...]
The “different panel” at 4th Street this year was on pacing and structure. I’ve been pondering it since then, and this is what I think (or part of it, anyway): Pacing is how fast it feels like things happen. Not how fast they actually do happen; what it feels like to the reader-this is why sometimes the cure [...]
I have a confession to make: I have never deliberately written a trilogy before in my life. Yes, I know, there are four Enchanted Forest books, and three Kate and Cecy books, and the Lyra series, and so on. But with all of those, I didn’t set out to write more than one book. I [...]
Last weekend, at 4th Street Fantasycon, somebody asked me for a post that I did years back on Usenet, on the difference between the way short story writers and novelists might develop the same basic story idea. Here it is: Basically, short stories require a tight focus and a single, central plot thread; in a [...]
Spent a glorious weekend at Fourth Street Fantasycon, of which more anon, I hope. Now my car is busted AGAIN and I’m waiting for them to come and tow it to the garage to fix the ignition switch. And I think I should get my cat to the vet before I leave for Chicago, but I [...]