Patricia C. Wrede's Blog

As promised, here are the first couple of closet pictures. As some of you already know, I have the coolest closets in the world. My sister Carol, who used to paint theater scenery for a living, decided to "redecorate" the interiors of of my ordinary boring closets with decor from my favorite children's books. This is what's in my front hall closet - The Wizard of Oz. If you look closely, you can see some of my coats shoved to either side.

Oz closet from front

 This is the Emerald City, with...

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When a writer sets out to tell a story, she has a lot of choices to make, and every time she makes one, it influences what options are still available for the other choices. In some cases, one decision can completely eliminate all other options.

Take the matter of narrative voice (which I define as the way all the stuff that isn't dialog sounds). Theoretically, the writer has three basic options:  1) the narrative can be in her, the author's, natural voice; 2) the narrative can be in the...

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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 author or influential teacher told them) that the only way to come up with a Really Good Book/Short-Story is to do X.

Usually, "X" is something like...

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  The cake!

 Me (in the stripes in front) and the book club!

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I am grumpy.

It's partly my own fault, and partly not (at least, I think it isn't). The part that I think is not my fault has to do with the refusal of my blogging software to upload pictures, despite several hours of trying different formats with the supposedly-easy-built-in-uploader. The software finds the right file, crunches it, produces all the right information…except there's NO PICTURE. I'm bummed.

I am bummed because I had an entire book group show up for my talk/autographing at...

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A speech tag is the thing that goes with a line of dialog that tells you who said it; it "tags" the line with the name (or occupation, or some other identifiable description) of the person who said it.

"Run!" Jeff cried.  ("Jeff cried" is the speech tag.)

Jane said, "I can't." ("Jane said" is the speech tag).

"Why not?" he demanded.  ("He demanded" is the tag.)

"BECAUSE YOU'RE STANDING ON MY FOOT!" the girl told him.  ("The girl told him" is…well, you get the idea.)

The most common verbs used i...

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I had brunch this morning with my friend Rosemary, who is about as crazy as I am but on just a different enough axis that we stimulate each other to new heights of silliness, rather than bogging down because we've each had exactly the same idea and can't build on it.

Anyway, Rosemary is one of my best noodling buddies. Noodling is what I call the process of tossing ideas around with someone else. When I'm just starting off on a story, a lot of the noodling has to do with background, character ...

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The second most common way of leading into and out of a flashback sequence is by shifting tenses. Most novels are told in what's called the "historic present," meaning that the "now" of the story is told in simple past tense (He slept in the library all afternoon rather than He sleeps in the library all afternoon).

This confuses a lot of people, so let me just repeat that: in most stories and novels, "He slept in the library all afternoon" is an action that is taking place in the present of...

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There are two important things to know about flashbacks: how to do them, and when to do them. Both things can be trickier to figure out than they look.

FIrst, a definition: as far as I'm concerned, flashbacks are a way of conveying some background/backstory information as if it were happening "now". The central story that is being told, or the central problem to be resolved, is in the story-present, and the flashback is usually just an  illuminating scene or memory from the past. When an...

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Over the years, I have worked with a lot of editors myself, and watched a lot of my friends work with others. Some have been better than others; some have just been a better fit than others. But they all do pretty much the same thankless, undervalued, and misunderstood job…which is most especially misunderstood by people who have yet to get published.

It's not really surprising. For those who are not yet published, editors are the evil, unappreciative Dark Lords who reject writers' brilliant, ...

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