Tag Archives: novel

Where do I begin…

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 generally start [...]

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Name it…what?

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 blindingly [...]

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So, What About All These Rules, Then?

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 [...]

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Cinderella at the Rock Concert

June 25, 2009 – 9:46 am

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 novel, [...]

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