Jennifer R. Hubbard's Blog, page 117

Writing lessons from TV

Every time I watch an episode of the TV show Top Chef, I am grateful that I'm not the person who has to edit the footage and put together each episode. They obviously film for hours and hours, following anywhere from half a dozen to about twenty people (judges and contestants). Everyone has a story: a home life, dreams and ambitions, strengths and weaknesses. Everyone has a vision and assorted obstacles for each challenge, and there are two challenges per episode. Yet, amazingly, each episode...

How many projects do you have to write before the big one?

Writers often get asked how many books they wrote before they got one published. I think the typical answer is around four (I vaguely recall someone compiling statistics on this, but it's also my experience anecdotally, from talking to other writers). I do know writers who have sold the very first book they ever wrote, but they are the exception.

I have a tough time answering this question, because it depends on what you mean by "write a book." I started writing little stories as soon as my fi...

Plot + character = beginning

Sometimes people ask whether character or plot comes first. I've discovered that I need both in order to write. Plot is what happens; I can't write without it, because otherwise the characters have nothing to do. But I also need a voice in which to tell the story. I need a protagonist with whom I'm willing to spend a couple of years of writing, revising, and just plain thinking. Let's face it, book characters are almost like roommates or family--they live with you; you worry about their fates...

Keeping it real

What do you think of when you see this phrase?
Captain of the football team

In YA lit, that character is typically a gorgeous popular guy, often the object of a crush by a less popular main character. We've seen this character so often that "captain of the football team" sets up certain expectations.

And yet, here's the truth about my own high school: I had no idea who the captain of the football team was. I didn't even think about it at the time--it's only now, looking back to write this post, ...

Question

When stories are bubbling just beneath the surface, sending up bursts of steam and cryptic hints--what exactly are they doing down there?

Books as objects

With the coming of the e-book age, the reading public is often seen as divided into two camps: those who will quickly adopt the new technology because a story is a story and e-reading is much more convenient; and those who will resist until paper books are pried from their cold rigid fingers.

It's true that a story is a story, no matter how the text is presented (although I think the format does have some influence, however subtle). We have stories with us today that began in the days of oral...

It's all in the telling

This weekend, I saw the Cleopatra exhibit at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Cleopatra VII's life was full of story-worthy material: she married two of her brothers and her three-year-old son, had children by Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, spoke several languages, wrote books, outwitted several political plots, and ultimately lost a war and committed suicide. If a writer can't find material there, s/he just isn't trying.

Of course, you could hand the above paragraph to 50 different wri...

On the agent-writer relationship

A few online discussions I've seen or participated in recently (most notably at #yalitchat, which if you don't already know, is a regular Wednesday-night event on Twitter) have involved the agent search, the role of agents, and the relationships between agents and writers.

I see a spectrum of writers' attitudes on the writer-agent relationship, and these are the two extreme ends of the spectrum:
1) A writer writes. An agent should just sell the work for as much as possible, and it's all about b...

This is why I read blogs

So many people were showering brilliance into the blogosphere this week that I just had to collect them all into one shiny bundle:

The talented bogwitch64  pointed me to this post from Maggie Jamison at Apex Books: "A friend asked me a few weeks ago about balancing both pain and sympathy in fiction: how do you create a character who suffers immensely, but who doesn’t sound whiny to the reader?"  Read the whole post. Seriously. Because it talks about practical and simple ways to achieve this.

The...

Go for the eclair

Sometimes we can fall into the trap of not wanting to write something unless it seems like the perfect idea, or until we can write it perfectly. We reject the story idea about the talking eclair because, darn it, we want to write something IMPORTANT. An epic that brings home the meaning of true love, life and death, and just what we're all doing here on this planet. A talking eclair may be fun, but it ain't gonna unify the human race. Even if the eclair is very wise and funny, with a penchant...