Anyone who hangs out with professional writers for very long will eventually hear one of them say “I couldn’t get away with that in a novel” or “If I put that in a story, nobody would believe it,” and they’ll probably hear it sooner rather than later.
Read more →The first time I heard an editor talk about character-based plotting, it made me think I was doing something wrong. (This was around 25 years ago, mind.) “Your characters have to want something, and want it badly,” he said. “That’s where you start. All the best plots
Read more →For a variety of reasons, I’ve been rereading a couple of different series recently, even though I gave up on both of them somewhere between book 8 and book 12. One was a mystery series, the other science fiction…but both of them had similar problems. When I
Read more →One of several things I discovered this week is that when you have 31 hours of driving (spit over several days), a convention gig, and most especially a bunch of editorial revisions to do on a collection of blog posts, remembering that you also have to write
Read more →One of the first decisions writers have to make, once they’ve actually sold a manuscript, is what name to write under. There are a lot of possible considerations here, so let’s start with your actual name. My current full name is Patricia Collins Wrede; I could have
Read more →First, the exciting news (exciting for me, anyway): I have just signed the contract to do a collection of these blog posts (selected, edited, and occasionally augmented) on writing for Diversion Books. It should be coming out in December as an e-book with a hard-copy option (so
Read more →One of the most common questions I get, right up there with “Where do you get your ideas?” and “How can I get published?”, is “How do you deal with writer’s block?” Sometimes it gets asked plaintively; sometimes with a note of desperation. Once in a great
Read more →“A villain is the one who knows the most and cares the least.” – Chuck Klosterman I get a lot of good blog ideas from radio quotes. That one came in a July 9, 2013 NPR segment interviewing Mr. Klosterman, who has just written a book about real
Read more →OK, first as regards the computer problems: They are tearing down and rebuilding a house just down the street from me, which evidently was the cause of the problem. Unfortunately, the work is ongoing…and on top of that, they are going to start tearing down and rebuilding
Read more →Sometimes it seems that there are a zillion different metaphors for how writers construct a plot. There’s the sculpture metaphor (carve away everything that doesn’t look like an elephant). There’s the pottery-making metaphor (add a lump of clay, work it until you have the center, then shape
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