Yesterday, while bemoaning my lack of blog post topics to my walking buddy over our post-walk stop at the coffee shop (she gets coffee; I get tea), I had a revelation. (OK, not a big heavenly-choirs, life-changing sort of revelation, just a tiny hey-I-can-turn-that-into-a-blog-post revelation, but I’ll take what I can get.) She was listing [...]
As any devoted Heinlein fan knows, TANSTAAFL stands for There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. It’s one of those obvious truths about the world, like Murphy’s Law, that ought to go without saying, yet people seem to need to be reminded of it over and over. Something in the human psyche really wants [...]
There are two basic approaches to combining or developing ideas and story: in-depth development, and the kitchen sink approach. These are opposite ends of a continuum, of course; there are very few writers who work strictly one way or the other. Still, it’s useful to think about the extremes before one starts thinking about how [...]
I’m in what I hope is the downhill stretch of The Far West at last. I have finally gotten my characters out of town and moving, and yesterday I got to what was supposed to be a throwaway bit at their first stop, just a little bit of business to establish how their expedition operates [...]
Nearly everyone, these days, can name a lot of obvious advantages brought on by the establishment of the Internet. Pre-Internet, for instance, most writers only ever saw the small selection of their readers who came to autographings and readings; now, any reader with Internet access and ten minutes of free time can drop their favorite author [...]
“There’s more to the theater than repetition. There’s more to the theater than repetition. There’s more to the theater than repetition… “But not much!” – The Flying Karamozov Brothers There are some basic things about writing that people who’ve done it for a while tend to take for granted. I was reminded of one [...]
My walking partner and I were talking the other day about the sorts of assumptions people make about books, and she said something that made me pause to think. I can’t give you the exact phrasing, but the basic sense of it was that literary and mainstream fiction is, as a general rule, a lot [...]
April 15 is coming up fast, and for anyone who made money writing, it tends to be rather traumatic. No matter how much you set aside from your payments, it never seems to be enough (for those of us in the U.S., that 15% Social Security payment is a perennial killer). And of course they [...]
One of the things that happens when you write books that are marketed as Young Adult or childrens is, you get letters from kids who have been assigned to write them in class. It’s really obvious, for two reasons: first, the number of letters drops off markedly during the summer months, and second, the class [...]
Disasters bring out the best in a lot of people. We see the pictures on TV or the web, and want to help; it’s a natural, human thing. Writers are human; we have those same reactions. We pull out our credit cards and donate to the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders and other organizations. [...]
So I’m still poking through all the programs for writers. Storybook turned out to be another one that was more of a planner than a writing program, which shouldn’t have surprised me, since it bills itself as a writing organizer. If I wanted a separate one of these, I think I’d really like it. I [...]
I have a confession to make: I love playing with writing programs. They’re a window into other writers’ working processes, something I find utterly fascinating and always have. Lately, I’ve had another reason for poking through what’s available: the latest and last version update to my favorite word-processor was over ten years ago, and I doubt [...]
Nearly every piece of fiction has one main character and one central problem. Even when the story is told from multiple viewpoints with an ensemble cast, each of whom has a different important plotline, there is almost always one plot problem that is the problem that the reader wants to see solved, and one character [...]
”When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less.” – Lewis Carroll One of the things I didn’t understand when I started writing was the pliability of words. Oh, I knew that the way I phrased things was [...]
February 27, 2011 – 6:21 am
Sooner or later, everyone gets stressed, and stress affects everybody’s writing, one way or another. There are a few folks whose writing is their escape from stress, who write more when they get more stressed and less when they get happy, but that doesn’t seem to be all that common among published writers (probably because [...]
February 23, 2011 – 6:05 am
The Twin Cities are currently cleaning up after the…fourth or fifth? I forget…big storm of the season. Somewhere between a foot and a half and two feet of snow fell from Sunday afternoon to Monday evening, on top of the more-than-a-normal-winter’s-worth that we’d already had by the end of January. The snow mountains at the [...]
February 20, 2011 – 6:35 am
A long time back, a friend of mine (tongue firmly in cheek) told me that when it came to fiction, all the trashy stuff was full of sex and violence, while all the great literature was about love and death. The truth underneath that bit of word play is that which you have – sex [...]
February 16, 2011 – 6:30 am
“I don’t CARE what happens to these people.” – Dorothy J. Heydt Stories are, at bottom, about people (or people-analogs, like anthropomorphized talking animals). But more than that, they’re about people or people-analogs that the reader cares about. Hooks and cliffhangers, opening in medias res, lots of fast-paced action, brilliant worldbuilding, intricate plots – all [...]
February 13, 2011 – 6:40 am
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, one of my many editor friends, once claimed that writers are like otters. Apparently, if you are trying to train animals, the normal method is to provide praise and rewards when they do something you would like them to do; the theory is that the animal thinks “He liked that! Cool! I’ll [...]
February 9, 2011 – 6:44 am
On Monday I was commiserating with a businessman friend about the miserable state of the economy, the dismal job market, the Packers winning the Superbowl (because he cares, not because I do), and various other usual topics, when he mentioned in passing that he couldn’t find the right person to fill a particular job opening. [...]
February 6, 2011 – 10:34 am
As regular readers of this blog may remember, a couple of months back I realized I’d gotten partway into the third of the Frontier Magic books and realized that I’d gotten the events in the wrong order. Not “wrong” in the sense that I’d gotten cause and effect reversed (you know, the sort of thing where someone’s [...]
February 2, 2011 – 6:40 am
This is the last of this series of posts. Really. I mean it. Part of why it’s the last is that I’m up to scenes, and I’m not really sure I can take this analogy this far, let alone any farther. Paragraphs were OK, because they’re the linking point between the basic blocks of language [...]
January 30, 2011 – 6:05 am
OK, you twisted my arm. But I’m stopping at scenes. Really. As I said, paragraphs are where this analogy switches from looking at building blocks to looking at what you are building out of the building blocks. Consequently, the main properties of paragraphs aren’t so much about the paragraphs as a unit; they’re more about [...]
January 26, 2011 – 6:52 am
A quick recap, for those who are getting a little lost: Fiction (and the English language generally) is built up by combining smaller units into larger and larger ones according to various rules and principles, the same way you build large, intricate Lego models by putting a few relatively simple blocks together into more and [...]
January 23, 2011 – 2:58 am
Clauses are the next step up from phrases, and they are intimately connected with sentences. They come in two varieties, independent and dependent, and the first sort is a sentence, or could be if you punctuated it differently. “He ran, but she escaped.” is a single sentence built out of two independent clauses with a [...]
January 19, 2011 – 6:00 am
Before I go on, I would like to remind everybody once again that the vast majority of authors do not consciously and deliberately micro-manage their writing to wring every last bit of strength out of every word’s position, rhythm, etc. Most of the time, we work by feel – this way feels better/stronger than that [...]
January 16, 2011 – 6:02 am
Every set of Legos has the basic square and rectangular blocks that you build most of your castles and dinosaurs and pirates with, and then a bunch of oddly shaped pieces that you use to make the fancy bits. Last post, I compared the basic Legos to the first four basic parts of speech – [...]
January 12, 2011 – 6:13 am
Words, being the smallest and most basic building blocks of fiction, have lots of useful and important properties. I’ve already talked about specificity and sound; the next really key thing a writer needs to know about words is that they have different…strength or significance. I define strong words as “the ones people pay more attention [...]
January 9, 2011 – 6:41 am
Fiction is like Legos. It’s built out of a series of different units, stuck together. Each new level of unit is built out of a clump of previous units. The more units you have, the more complex effects you can achieve by moving them around, putting them in different configurations, making different associations, etc. What [...]
January 5, 2011 – 6:09 am
“It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.” – Mark Twain One of the things that a great many people seem to know for sure is that they don’t need any knowledge of the rules of grammar, punctuation, or syntax in order to write to [...]
January 2, 2011 – 6:50 am
I think I was back in high school when I first started setting goals for myself on a regular basis. I didn’t start saving copies of them until I was out of college, though, and I rather regret that. At this point in my life, looking back over 35+ years of goals is really interesting. [...]
December 29, 2010 – 7:50 am
The flip side of forgetting about the implications of all the things one puts into one’s worldbuilding is becoming obsessed with getting every detail just so. It is a great way not to produce a lot of finished writing. Overbuilding an imaginary world is a problem that is closely related to over-researching. They have similar pitfalls [...]
December 26, 2010 – 10:34 am
Merry Christmas, everybody, and happy whatever-you-celebrate-at-this-time-of-year! My Dad and youngest sister are here for Christmas this weekend, so I’m doing the big Christmas dinner thing, with full tree (and happy cats eyeing ornaments whenever they aren’t on someone’s lap getting petted). Which means this will be a little short. And now that we have that [...]
December 22, 2010 – 9:07 am
Back in the day, I spent a couple of years as gamesmaster for what would now be called an RPG that I basically made up myself, based around the background I was using in my Lyra series. Paper-and-pencil gaming was fairly popular then, at least in my social circles, so there were quite a few [...]
December 19, 2010 – 6:14 am
Recently, I got an email from a reader asking about the relationship between a writer’s success and/or fame and that writer’s ability to disregard the rules of writing and still have their books be considered great. The two sides of the argument seemed to be 1) once an author has published or won some awards, [...]
December 15, 2010 – 6:07 am
Having just talked a bit about beginnings, I’m now going to talk about endings…sort of. Specifically, I’m going to talk about chapter endings, because when you’re writing a novel, you end up having to do quite a lot of those. A good chapter ending, from the point of view of a writer, is one that [...]
December 12, 2010 – 6:27 am
It has become a truism in writing that one should always open a story with a “hook” – something that grabs the reader and pulls them into the story, forcing them to keep reading. The problem with this is that what “hooks” one reader will annoy or repel another, and this is seldom acknowledged by [...]
December 8, 2010 – 9:03 am
Having gone on and on about how much I dislike writing exercises, I’m now going to talk a bit about how and when I think they’re useful. That would be mainly as very specific, targeted ways of addressing particular problems or writing skills that aren’t as developed as the rest of the writer’s tool set. [...]
December 5, 2010 – 5:19 pm
Back when I was in 7th grade, I took a sewing class for beginners. In the first class, they showed us how to work the sewing machines and then gave us pieces of paper to “sew” with a dull needle and no thread, so we could see how to guide stuff through the feed. I [...]
December 1, 2010 – 6:08 am
Back in the late 1960s or early 1970s, Algis Budrys wrote an excellent series of columns for LOCUS magazine on what he called “cinematic prose,” using his Hugo-nominated novel Rogue Moon as an example. Alas, my copies have long since vanished into wherever things go when one has moved house multiple times over that many [...]
November 28, 2010 – 12:24 pm
I wrote my first novel, Shadow Magic, in what I now call “sloppy omniscient viewpoint.” Most of the time, a given scene would have a “viewpoint character,” but whenever I thought someone else’s thoughts or feelings were more interesting, I just jumped into that character’s head for a few lines. I also backed off every [...]
November 24, 2010 – 6:30 am
As I’ve said before, the terms “viewpoint” and “point of view” can mean two different things: either the viewpoint character or the type of viewpoint (first, second, or third-person). I’m using it in the second sense today. Third person viewpoint, taken as a whole, is probably the most commonly used viewpoint in fiction. There are [...]
November 21, 2010 – 11:17 am
There seem to be two basic myths about How Writers Work. The first is the painfully slow, unbelievably picky Brooding Poetic Genius typified by the Oscar Wilde remark about having a good day writing because he’d spent the morning removing a comma and the afternoon putting it back. The second is the inspired whirlwind All-You-Need-Is-An-Idea [...]
November 17, 2010 – 9:15 am
A query letter is one page, asking the editor if he/she wants to see a submission of the book. It includes some sort of very brief summary of the book (so the editor can get an idea whether it’s worth asking to see it), and there are two schools of thought about this. One school [...]
November 14, 2010 – 6:38 am
A bit over a hundred years ago, Mark Twain made the famous remark that “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.” At around the same time, Gustave Flaubert came up with his le seule mot juste [the only right word], which seems [...]
November 10, 2010 – 6:07 am
When I was writing my first novel, I didn’t know any other writers (well, except for my mother). I’d also never read a how-to-write book. Consequently, there were a lot of things that I did without knowing there was a name for them; as far as I was concerned, they were just things I’d seen [...]
November 7, 2010 – 2:10 pm
Ms. Wrede, do you use a plot skeleton? asked the earnest student. How do you apply it to your work? I sat there for a minute, completely slumguzzled. Because the question was coming from such an alien perspective that it took me a while to come up with an answer that seemed even remotely sensible [...]
November 3, 2010 – 9:59 am
When I first started writing, I didn’t pay too much attention to the way people spoke. I figured I was lucky to get my characters to sound as if they were holding a real conversation, rather than reading alternate paragraphs from an 18th century tome on rhetorical devices. Slowly but surely, I got better at [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
September 26, 2010 – 11:02 am
Every story, short or long, takes place somewhere. Every scene takes place somewhere. And every place has features about it that are unique, whether it is the collection of overly cute fairy-figurines on the mantelpiece in the parlor, the cracked and faded mural across the back wall of the bar, or the odd kink in the third-level [...]
September 22, 2010 – 8:29 am
I have several friends (some professional writers, some not) who consider themselves conflict-averse. Faced with the near-universal insistence on conflict as the primary factor in plotting, they either hunch down, grumbling, and attempt to provide enough murders, fights, and battles to fill this presumed need, or they throw up their hands in despair and produce [...]
September 19, 2010 – 6:55 pm
Last Wednesday, I finished reviewing the copy-edit of Across the Great Barrier, which was my last chance to make any major changes to the book. I’ll get another look at it when the galleys/page proofs come, but barring some totally egregious error that’s slipped past every single person who’s gone over the ms. thus far, [...]
September 15, 2010 – 10:18 am
Starting a completely new story is exciting. There aren’t any constraints to worry about: no dangling plot threads that you have to tie up, no previously established background that you have to stay consistent with, no inconvenient mysteries or revelations that you’re stuck with. It’s a clean slate, full of fresh new possibilities. At least, it [...]
September 12, 2010 – 6:48 am
Back in 1947, in an essay titled “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” (since reprinted several times), Robert Heinlein wrote five rules for people who want to become professional writers. They’ve been republished many times, and for the most part, they’re still good (I’ll get to that “most part” in a minute). The rules are: [...]
September 8, 2010 – 6:45 am
Transitions are a pain. It is very likely that I feel this way because I hate doing transitions, and the ones I write nearly always feel clunky to me. Some of the clunkiness is probably just my dislike of the process of producing one attaching itself to the finished product, but I don’t think all of [...]
September 5, 2010 – 6:43 am
There’s an old story about time management and prioritizing that I dearly love, not least because I’ve seen it repurposed several times. The story, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with already, is the one about the professor who walks into class with a large jar. He proceeds to fill it with big [...]
September 1, 2010 – 6:30 am
Humor has a reputation as one of the hardest and most under-appreciated types of writing there is. It’s a well-deserved reputation. Everyone over the age of five has at least watched someone else’s funny story fall flat, if not had it happen to themselves. And while you can find plenty of books on writing drama, [...]
August 29, 2010 – 10:12 am
Dialog is one of the bedrock necessities in about 99% of all fiction. Plays and screenplays are almost nothing but dialog, and it’s not unusual to see whole scenes or entire short stories that are told entirely in dialog (sometimes, without even speech tags to let the reader know who’s talking). It’s something that seems [...]
August 25, 2010 – 10:56 am
Probably the most often-asked question writers get is “Where do you get your ideas?” Very few people ever ask “What do you do with your ideas once you have them?” though that seems to me to be the logical next step. It seems a good many people don’t realize that there is a lot of [...]
August 22, 2010 – 3:58 pm
“I don’t have time to write” is one of the most common writers’ complaints, both from people who haven’t published yet and from seasoned pros. The statement means different things to different people, but the most common meaning is “There are a lot of other things in my life that are more important to me [...]
August 18, 2010 – 7:32 am
From the mailbag:: I know some people who feel quite strongly about keeping to the main character’s POV except when it’s absolutely necessary to go to someone else, but I’ve also seen that rule (like so many others!)broken successfully. It can be so useful to show someone else reacting to the MC. Any guidelines on [...]
August 16, 2010 – 8:27 am
Every saga has a beginning, and this one begins four weeks ago, when my editor sent me a three-page, single-spaced revisions e-mail and a copy of the ms. for what is now Across the Great Barrier that was full of comment balloons. It didn’t arrive. We didn’t realize this for a week, because I was being restrained and [...]
So the revisions request for Book 2 of the Frontier Magic trilogy have come in, and I’m head down for the next week and a half. After much emailing, the consensus is that, among many other things, it needs a title change. The editors felt that Circuit Magician was a good title…for a different book. [...]
Big, fat, complex, multiple-viewpoint novels have been popular for quite a while, and they have a whole set of problems all their own. Once of those problems is pacing. The temptation is always to take advantage of a slow moment in the main plot to advance a subplot, and it’s frequently a good idea in [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Nearly every writer has what I call a “default setting” for many or most of the basic pieces of writing. They tend to automatically write in first person, or third, or multiple viewpoint. When they’re thinking up stories or developing ideas, they gravitate toward the action/adventure plot, or toward one focusing on relationships, or toward [...]
This is the last part of Chapter 1 of Shadow Magic, as revised ten years later for the omnibus Shadows Over Lyra. Strikethroughs are the deletions from the original; plain text is the original that was kept; bold are additions. Italics are my comments, which are few on this part. Bracor led them inside and [...]
This is the third part of Chapter 1 of Shadow Magic, as revised ten years later for Shadows Over Lyra, and the second of the posts that was supposed to come up while I was away, but didn’t because I am apparently incapable of properly using the scheduler. The final part will go up tomorrow. Plain text [...]
This is the next part of Chapter 1 of Shadow Magic, as revised ten years later for Shadows Over Lyra. Plain text is the original version; strikethrough is what I deleted; boldface is what I added. Italics are my comments on why I did what I did. “I’ll mind,” Maurin muttered, too low for Har [...]
Last week, I suggested that people find books that have been reedited by their authors for a years-later reprint, and compare before-and-after versions. To show you what I mean, I’m going to post the first chapter of my first novel, Shadow Magic, which came out in 1982 and which I revised ten years later for an omnibus edition. It’s going [...]
Barely over a week ago, I turned in the first draft of Circuit Rider, after a major death-march push to get the thing done somewhere within shouting distance of deadline. The plan was to spend a couple of weeks taking care of everything that got put off to finish the book (laundry, dishes, yardwork, finances), [...]
Most people just read books. That is, they absorb the information, or enjoy the plot and characters, without thinking too much about how and why they work. It’s a lot like watching a play, or a magic show. It’s supposed to be relaxing, so sit back and enjoy. Reading like a writer is more like [...]
A bit ago, I got asked to do my standard rant on this. I put it off ’til the book was done, but it’s done now. So here’s the short form: Read a story. Does it work? Yes? Then it’s good. The problem with the term “good writing” is that it assumes there is an [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]