Tag Archives: ideas

Hollywood science

October 3, 2012 – 6:15 am

The trip continues; we have reached LA after a stop in Las Vegas (neither of us did any gambling, but we ate some great food and saw Cirque du Soleil’s Mystere). And in justice to my father, I have to point out that when he ran off the road in the mountains, a) he was [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Family, Writing | Also tagged | Comments (10)

What’s missing

May 2, 2012 – 6:04 am

Last week I got into another one of those discussions with a would-be writer who was convinced that before he ever sat down to write, he had to have the perfect idea – one with depth and resonance, something he found personally meaningful and inspiring, and above all else, something original. If it wasn’t original, [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Also tagged | Comments (7)

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 [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Also tagged , , | Comments (11)

Now what?

July 13, 2011 – 6:30 am

So the first draft of The Far West is done at last, turned in a bit over two weeks ago, and I’m past the first walking-around-in-a-daze bit where I spend all my time feeling as if I ought to be finishing the book and then remembering that no, I’m actually done until the editorial revision [...]

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Water, fertilizer, and other care

May 22, 2011 – 6:05 am

When would-be writers ask “where do you get your ideas?” they are often asking the wrong question. They’re struggling to get started on a story, but they’re not actually starting from scratch. They have an idea. It’s just not enough to go on with yet. So what these folks really want and need to know isn’t [...]

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Hardy perennial

May 18, 2011 – 6:25 am

“Where do you get your ideas?” is probably the most-asked question writers get, and one of the reasons writers hate getting it is because it can actually be fairly hard to answer. Oh, not if the person asking the question is a semi-interested reader who’s more interested in making conversation than in any kind of realistic answer [...]

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Before the Beginning

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 [...]

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What do you do with your ideas once you have them?

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 [...]

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Where do you get your ideas?

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 [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Also tagged , | Comments (6)

From the road

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 [...]

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