Around about twenty years back, I had the privilege of being at a convention where Judith Merril was appearing, and I made sure to go to every panel she was on. There weren’t a lot (she wasn’t in the best of health at the time), but when
Read more →Last Sunday, I was having so much fun going through Mom’s old writing books that I promised a couple more posts on the subject…forgetting that I was going to be out of town until the end of Wiscon. So you’ll have to wait a week for me
Read more →One of the things I inherited from my mother was her collection of writing textbooks. Most of them date from the 1940s and 1950s; a few are as recent as the 1970s. It’s fascinating to look at them, especially in light of my own far more recent
Read more →It’s been a while since I’ve talked about viewpoint, and first-person has been on my mind lately. First person seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it viewpoint. I’ve heard folks say that it’s the easiest viewpoint for a beginner to use, that no one should ever use it, that
Read more →One of the things about writing is that if you want to improve, you have to work at it yourself. Nobody is going to make you practice; nobody is going to force you to get better. Even taking writing classes is a choice – I’ve known people
Read more →First off, I am pleased to say that the three Kate and Cecy books will be going live as e-books on May 22. Stephanie Burgis did a lovely blog post on them. Which means that all of the backlist except the Enchanted Forest books are now available
Read more →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
Read more →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
Read more →One of the things it took me a while to get a handle on was giving my characters different speech patterns, depending on both their personalities and their backgrounds. For my first couple of books, I was too busy juggling all the other stuff – background, plot,
Read more →The process of revising effectively tends to vary from writer to writer just as the first-draft writing process varies, and it’s not necessarily connected to the way one writes your first drafts. In fact, often (though not always) the revisions process seems to need to be the
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