Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 14

Types of crowd scenes

Right from the start, I’ve tended to write stories that have lots of characters. Everybody seems to have their sisters and their cousins and their aunts…and children, parents, brothers, uncles, and grandparents and friends, all of whom have friends and family of their own. I also often

Characterization issues

One of the most common bits of writing advice is variously phrased as “Make the reader fall in love with your characters,” “Make your characters likeable,” “Make your characters sympathetic,” and, most generally, “Make the reader care about your characters.” There are three problems with this advice.

Query, Part 2-Stuckness, Character differentiation

Basically, I’m experiencing three different kinds of Stuck with the three main stories I’m working on.—E. Beck Summary of Stuckness: Stuck because you don’t want to work on this story right now. Stuck because there’s a major time jump/transition to get over. Stuck because you are unsure

Query re getting stuck, part 1

Basically, I’m experiencing three different kinds of Stuck with the three main stories I’m working on.—E. Beck Summarizing the three types you described in last week’s comments: Stuck because you don’t want to work on this story right now. Stuck because there’s a major time jump/transition to

Writing formulas

Back when I still had a day job, I was a financial analyst. It is therefore really unsurprising that I enjoy looking at writing systems that are very structured and involve analyzing stories to pick out what works or doesn’t work. There are, however, a couple of

Another Open Mic Already!

It feels as if I just did this yesterday, but my calendar says it is time for another open mic!

Choices

Probably the second most common question established writers get is “How do you find time to write?” If the writer is known to be a full-time writer, it’s usually phrased as “When you had a day job, how did you…” but it’s still the same question. These

Characters and plans

“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” – Helmuth von Moltk

People in general do not do things completely at random. There may not be much conscious, deliberate planning involved in stumbling out of bed in the morning and getting the coffee or tea started, but the intention of getting hold of a caffeinated drink ASAP is unmistakably present. The process of going to the garage, starting the car, and driving off may be on autopilot, but when I do that, I have a place in mind to go and a ...

Scene choreography part 2

This is a continuation of the pre-open-mic post on choreography. Last time, I was talking mostly about the macro level – the order things happen in the overall story. This week, I’m going to talk more about the scene level.

Choreographing a scene starts with the things that happen in it. There are two kinds: things that have to happen in this scene, and things that could happen in this scene but that could also go somewhere else or not happen at all. Usually, the writer has one particular thing ...

February Open Mic

Today is your regularly scheduled Open Mic chat! Next week, I’ll talk more about ordering events in scenes.