March 17, 2013 – 10:13 am
A couple of weeks ago, I finally figured out one of the several reasons I’ve been having so much difficulty booting up The New Thing. It’s because for my last eight to ten books, I haven’t had to do any deep worldbuilding, because all of them came with that part ready-made. The Frontier Magic books, [...]
January 20, 2013 – 6:56 am
Some while back, I was talking with long-time writer friends about the good old days, and I had an epiphany. I was complaining about how The New Thing is refusing to go anywhere and various of my usual tricks and techniques weren’t working, and I realized that a whole lot of the things I spent [...]
January 13, 2013 – 6:11 am
Back in the mid 1990s, shortly after Dealing with Dragons came out, I was asked to join a panel of folks to talk about dragons, and the topic I was handed to talk about was “Dragons and Gender Bias.” After blinking several times, I asked the moderator just what he expected me to talk about with [...]
October 16, 2011 – 10:13 am
When people ask me when I knew I wanted to be a writer, I always tell them that I never did want to be a writer. I wanted to write. Being a writer was something that happened by accident. Recently someone asked me what I meant. Surely, if you want to write, that kind of [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Once again, I am late on a book. This time, it’s a combination of things: first off, I didn’t count on how much time handling my Dad’s taxes would take this year; second off, I didn’t count on yet another family crisis involving meeting with lawyers and bankers and what-not cropping up at more or [...]
I’ve talked more than once about the Big Three – plot, characterization, and setting. They started off as the earliest writing advice I recall getting (and I wish I could remember the name of the writer who told me that, so I could credit him properly), as the three things one can do in a [...]
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 [...]
First things first: a bit over two weeks ago, our own Michelle Wood emailed me that she’s done a wonderful video trailer for the Frontier Magic series. I’ve been planning to put a link to it on the website, but I’m in the downhill rush to finish the book and updating the web page is [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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, [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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), [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.) [...]