The other day, somebody asked me what the best and worst writing advice I’d ever gotten was. The best was easy: “Learn to type.” My mother was the first to give me that particular bit of writing advice, though I’ve seen it since coming from a variety of authors, including Ursula le Guin and Isaac [...]
As near as I can tell, “prewriting” is a trendy catch-all term for “everything a writer does before they actually sit down and start writing the story.” Even that definition is a little dicey, given how many writers go through a stage where they’re writing down bits and snippets and scenelets and even whole scenes, [...]
February 20, 2013 – 6:09 am
I’ve always been fascinated with process and with what it takes to get that initial story-seed-idea developed enough to actually start writing it. One of the things I’ve noticed for years is the differences in what writers say they need in order to actually sit down and start writing, especially as regards the background and [...]
February 13, 2013 – 6:06 am
Every writer ends up writing about someone who isn’t exactly like them sooner or later – and it’s nearly always sooner, given the number of characters in the average novel. The minor characters, walk-ons, and even the important secondary characters can usually be fudged, but the main viewpoint character is another story. As a slight [...]
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 16, 2013 – 2:53 am
One of the things writers get asked about a lot is how we do it, either specifically (“How do you plan an action scene?”) or in general (“Where do you get your ideas?”). A lot of the time, it’s fairly evident that the person asking the question thinks there’s a clear-cut answer. They’re looking for [...]
December 19, 2012 – 6:57 am
One of the first things most people realize after they’ve sold their first novel is that, contrary to expectation, they haven’t reached the top of the tree. Instead, they’re now on the bottom rung of a whole new ladder. This comes as a great shock to some people, though anyone who’s actually thought much about [...]
December 9, 2012 – 6:10 am
“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” – Helmuth von Moltke “A writer should always reserve the right to have a better idea.” – Lois McMaster Bujold Prewriting notes – whether they’re about plot, background, or characters – are the writer’s battle plan, and therefore exceedingly important. Lots has been written about this aspect [...]
September 16, 2012 – 6:30 am
There are a number of bits of wisdom that nonwriters frequently impart to writers, usually with the best of intentions. Some of them are useful and very true, like “You need to send that out, you know.” Other times…not so much. One of the not-so-much categories comes in the form “If you (the writer) do [...]
September 5, 2012 – 6:45 am
Plotting a story is one of those writing things where not only does every writer work differently, every book works differently. Oh, there are patterns – I’ve talked before about my write-a-plan-and-then-toss-it method – but they never seem to work one hundred percent consistently for even one writer, let alone a sizeable number of them. [...]
August 19, 2012 – 6:52 am
Writing processes are interesting things, not least because there are so many different kinds. Mine is particularly odd, in that I am neither a sit-down-and-wing-it writer, nor am I a plan-in-advance-and-stick-to-the-plan writer. I’m smack in the middle of the range, a plan-in-advance-and-then-periodically-throw-away-the-plan writer. The reason why I periodically have to throw away the plan has [...]
Back when I was writing my first novel, I got somewhere in the middle and realized I needed to write a battle scene. Not just a bar brawl or a fight between six of the good guys and ten or twelve bad guys; an actual clash of armies. Furthermore, the battle plan had to make [...]
It’s pretty easy for most writers to get about four chapters into something based on an interesting idea/situation/character/plotpoint and a bunch of mysterious happenings. But somewhere around Chapter 4, one hits what has been variously termed “the wall,” “the first veil,” or “the first event horizon.” Sometimes it’s as early as Chapter 2; sometimes it’s [...]
The other day I was browsing writing web sites and came across one that made me blink. Every post for months had a title like “Seven Dialog Mistakes” “Five ways to a Great Scene” “Ten Resolutions for Career Writers” “Twelve Dynamite Endings.” OK, I get that a lot of people really, in their heart of [...]
I’ve been thinking a lot about the classic plot skeleton lately, for a variety of reasons, and I’ve been getting steadily more annoyed with most of what’s written about it, and about plotting in general. The trouble is that most of what’s written about plot and plotting is stuff that’s written after the fact – [...]
One of the things that makes writing difficult for a lot of folks is the notion that they have to do everything at once, on the first try. They’re sure their first draft has to look pretty much like an actual story – maybe it needs some tweaking, but everything’s more-or-less there: the plot, the [...]
February 5, 2012 – 6:23 am
One of the great things about collaborating is that if you pick the right collaborator (and the right method), you can write until you get to a sticky spot, then hand it off to your collaborator and let them deal with it. In most cases, what is sticky for you will not be sticky for [...]
February 1, 2012 – 6:56 am
People go into collaborations for different reasons…and each project, and each co-author, is a different situation. Sometimes, two or more writers collaborate because they came up with a brilliant idea in the bar at three in the morning…and next day, it still looks brilliant and fun. Sometimes, the collaboration springs out of something that began [...]
January 29, 2012 – 6:27 am
There is an old saying that goes something like: “You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, you can have it good. Pick any two.” Meaning that if you want it fast and cheap, it won’t be good; if you want it fast and good, it won’t be cheap; and if you want [...]
December 28, 2011 – 8:17 am
The holiday season is a time for parties, especially the sort of parties that people throw in order to introduce interesting friends and neighbors to other interesting friends and neighbors they haven’t met but might like. It’s a great way to meet interesting people, and the first thing most of them ask is, “So, what [...]
December 21, 2011 – 6:30 am
This summer, I got a new car. Well, new to me – it belonged to Dad for several years, until he decided that with Mom gone, he didn’t really need two cars and he liked the other one better. Anyway, it’s a 2008 model, with lots of snazzy bells and whistles that I’ve never had [...]
December 11, 2011 – 9:29 am
A while back, I was talking with a young writer who was bogged down in mid-novel. The conversation went something like this (with names and plot points changed to protect the guilty): Writer: “I’m totally stuck. My characters are down in the ravine and I don’t know what happens next.” Me: “Sounds familiar.” Writer (despairing): [...]
October 12, 2011 – 6:30 am
Every so often, someone asks me if I work on more than one book at a time. It’s a more complicated question than most people think it is, because there’s work, and then there’s work. Writing comes in phases. Very long phases, but phases nonetheless. There’s six months to a year of writing the first [...]
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 [...]
August 14, 2011 – 6:37 am
There’s an analogy that’s been around for a long time – I’ve been using it myself for years – comparing writing a novel to a long-distance road trip, usually at night. The comparison goes, in the car, you can only see as far as the headlights light up, but you only need to see that [...]
In the two years and a bit that I’ve been producing this blog, I’ve developed a rule of thumb that goes “Any time three people ask me more or less the same question in the same week, it’s probably time to do a post on the topic.” Last weekend, as I said, I was at [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
Lately, I’ve been getting anxious queries from a lot of close friends, who know a) exactly when my book deadline is, b) just how many other desperately important things I have going on to distract me from writing, and c) how many plot threads I still have to wrap up. “How is the book going?” [...]
Fanfiction is a fascinating phenomenon. Yes, yes, I know that there’s still a huge argument going on between the people who think it’s all right to do and the people who consider it illegal, unethical, and unprofessional, but I think it’s a rather silly argument, on the whole, and I certainly don’t want to get [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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), [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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 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 [...]
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 [...]
The new modem is now working, but the wireless still isn’t. I probably should have expected it-it’s one of those corollaries of Murphy’s Law: The week before you leave home on a trip, everything that can go wrong will. But I am going to ignore my chore list today, because the weather is beautiful. If [...]
So the first round of publicity appearances is over; I have two weeks now before Wiscon and the side trip to deal with pressing family business. When you’re working on a book, two weeks is not as much time as it sounds. I’m hoping to use the time to get back some of the momentum [...]