Tag Archives: starting

So the next thing that happens is…

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 the [...]

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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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So you want to write a book…

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 [...]

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The jigsaw puzzle analogy

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 [...]

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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 ideas [...]

By pcwrede | Posted in Writing | Also tagged , | Comments (5)