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
Read more →On the very first day at Fourth Street Fantasy convention (which as of this posting, is still in session for another half-day or so), Elizabeth Bear mentioned running into a writing myth I’d never heard myself before: Women can’t ride stallions, because stallions get aggressive around women.
Read more →On Monday I was commiserating with a businessman friend about the miserable state of the economy, the dismal job market, the Packers winning the Superbowl (because he cares, not because I do), and various other usual topics, when he mentioned in passing that he couldn’t find the
Read more →I wrote my first novel on a typewriter, and one of my most vivid memories of that is proofreading the final submission draft and trying to decide, over and over, whether it was worth retyping a whole page in order to get rid of one too-common word
Read more →Back in 1947, in an essay titled “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” (since reprinted several times), Robert Heinlein wrote five rules for people who want to become professional writers. They’ve been republished many times, and for the most part, they’re still good (I’ll get to that
Read more →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
Read more →Several questions come up a lot about plotting – how can you be sure it makes sense, how can you be sure it’s not clichéd, how do you develop it, how do you get it to work out. Most of the answers have to do with looking
Read more →This is the last part of Chapter 1 of Shadow Magic, as revised ten years later for the omnibus Shadows Over Lyra. Strikethroughs are the deletions from the original; plain text is the original that was kept; bold are additions. Italics are my comments, which are few
Read more →This is the third part of Chapter 1 of Shadow Magic, as revised ten years later for Shadows Over Lyra, and the second of the posts that was supposed to come up while I was away, but didn’t because I am apparently incapable of properly using the scheduler.
Read more →This is the next part of Chapter 1 of Shadow Magic, as revised ten years later for Shadows Over Lyra. Plain text is the original version; strikethrough is what I deleted; boldface is what I added. Italics are my comments on why I did what I did.
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