Katherine asked: Could you please share your thoughts on shaping a good story / balancing the form, particularly across a series? If you are setting out to commit a series on purpose, with malice aforethought, the first few things you need to think about are: 1) Do
Read more →So I’m sitting here trying to think of a blog post for today, and I get an email from a woman who is preparing to sit down and write her first novel, but she has questions. I read a little farther, and it turns out that she’s
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 →“He was already dead when I got there” is a common claim in mystery novels, but all too often it’s also the answer when fans ask writers “Why did you kill off my favorite character?” And as with mystery novels, the claim is frequently disbelieved, especially when
Read more →So the topic is epic fantasy and the way so many of them get bogged down in an endless proliferation of characters and branching subplots, as described by Marie Brennan. Having spent last post talking about why authors fall into these traps, I’m going to talk more
Read more →Yesterday, a friend of mine forwarded a link to this post on the pitfalls of writing a long fantasy epic, defined as “four or more books that tell an ongoing story.” It’s a fabulous analysis, and the author, Marie Brennan, hits a bunch of really good points
Read more →Do people actually need spoiler alerts for The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit? If so, consider yourselves alerted. So my sister decided she wanted to see “The Hobbit” before she goes off on vacation with my Dad, and we rounded up the usual suspects and
Read more →Last time, I talked about ways to get series backstory (the stuff that has happened in the previous books of a series) into the sort of series that’s really a three- or five- or seven-volume novel split into parts. Today I’m talking about the backstory for the
Read more →Every so often I get an email request from one of the readers of this blog, asking me to address a particular writing question. This week’s inquiry boils down to “When you’re writing a series, and you’re on book three (or five or nineteen), how much backstory
Read more →I’ve been mulling over green_knight and accio_aqualung’s request for something on plotting multi-volume stories for a few days now. It’s not easy, because on this question, I’m working mainly from observation. The closest I’ve come to writing a multi-volume story myself are 1) the Lyra books, which
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