Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 15

Macro scene choreography

Choreography is defined as “the art or practice of designing sequences of movements of physical bodies (or their depictions) in which motion, form, or both are specified.” It is most often applied to dance, but the term gets used for pretty much anything that involves a need for a lot of people and/or things to move in complex patterns, from chorus lines to awards ceremonies to weddings to parades to battle scenes in a movie. A stage choreographer plans out a fight scene, move by move, so that i...

Thinking about greatness in books

What makes a book great?

Having read a lot of articles on the subject, I can say three things with considerably certainty:

While there is some agreement about what books are great, there is very little agreement about why they are great. When asked what makes a particular book great, different readers pick different things, even when they’re talking about the same book.At least 98% of the articles I read picked different aspects of the writing craft when trying to describe what makes for a gre...

Characters and complexity

One way and another, a lot of pixels get used talking about making “well-rounded” or complex characters.

I put “well-rounded” in scare quotes because it always makes me think of the advice I got in high school about being well-rounded – take many kinds of classes, try out for a sport or the school play, join different after-school clubs and activities … basically, give yourself a broad range of subjects and experiences to draw on. This does not seem to be what most people mean when they talk abo...

A Metaphorical Idea-to-Story path

“Getting an idea” is a bit like having a bowl full of flour. You can stir in some sugar and salt and baking powder and spices, and you still have a bowl of white powder that doesn’t stick together to make anything. You can cut in a bunch of butter, and you get a bowl of damp-looking yellowish powder that still doesn’t look like it will make anything. And then you add the egg, or some milk, and suddenly you have cookie dough that you can bake. But at what point did it become “cookie dough”? If yo...

Querying

Let’s talk about query letters for a minute. Specifically, let’s talk about the plot summary portion of a query letter.

(Note: This post is going to have a bunch of spoilers for Mairelon the Magician, which I’m using as an example.)

Query letters are conventionally limited to one page, in which you have to provide the editor with critical information about your manuscript (genre, word count, completion status) and then boil your 100,000+ word manuscript down into the two or three paragraphs that...

Post-Holiday Open Mic

Today is our regularly scheduled Open Mic, during which people can make announcements, wish belated holiday greetings, whinge about how their writing is going (or celebrate how well it is), complain about being stuck at home, or pretty much what you want.

My announcement is that yesterday, January 5, the audiobook of The Grand Tour went on sale.

Happy Holidays!

Sorry about the temporary outage – there was a technical glitch with the pointers (?) that it took my web people a while to figure out how to fix.

This is the time of year that I generally take the weeks around Christmas and New Years off. This year, I’m taking this week, and next week is the official Open Mic week, and then we’ll be back to regular posts. In the meantime, I wanted to mention that the audiobooks of the second and third Kate and Cecy books will be coming out in January:

 

Have a...

How To Take Advice Without Taking It

In last week’s comments, Niki (nct2) asked about some feedback she got from an editorial service. I’m going to summarize a bit and then respond, because I had kind of a lot to say; if you want a more complete picture, check the comments on the previous post.

First, editorial services. They CAN be a good idea in some circumstances – for instance, when the writer has serious, specific problems with writing basics – but if you just want  how-to-make-this-sell advice, they’re less helpful. I say thi...

I wish I’d known…Revisions

Among the many things I wish someone had talked to me about back when I was first getting started were revisions. Not so much the how-to part – like writing, that tends to be specific to the combination of writer-plus-editor-plus-book. What I really wish I’d had were a) reassurance that the problems I had and the things I did to solve them were normal, and b) a few tips about how to give my editor what she wanted.

This has been on my mind because I just finished the revisions for The Dark Lor...

Filing off the Serial Numbers

Every so often, a new, old, or would-be writer reads a story that grabs their imagination and won’t let go. Many, many of these writers attempt to exorcise the demon by writing fanfiction, some successfully, some not. Those who are successful eventually face a choice: they can continue writing fanfiction about the story (or stories) they love, they can start writing (and hopefully publishing) completely original fiction, or they can file the serial numbers off their first love and call the resul...