Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 20

Technically Right, Artistically Wrong

Writing is both an art and a craft. Since most people believe that the “art” part can’t really be taught, 99.9% of the advice out there focuses on the craft part – how do you make dialog sound real? What is a plot skeleton and how do you use it? What is the difference between third person personal viewpoint and omniscient viewpoint? How do you develop character arcs and subplots? I do this myself a lot.

This leads to a plethora of writing, plotting, planning, and characterization systems, and...

Walk-ons with Character

Characters in any book express their personalities in their actions, their words, their thoughts, their decisions, and their reactions. The reader – and, often, the writer – gets to know them the same way they’d get to know a new acquaintance.

A real-life new acquaintance, however, arrives in one’s life with a pre-existing life that has shaped their personality, beliefs, ideas, and knowledge. Characters can, and sometimes do, arrive onstage as a completely blank slate. This can happen either...

Uncooperative Characters

What is an author to do when their characters won’t cooperate? When do they do when they get to the end of Chapter Three, and instead of deciding to investigate the theft, agreeing to take the One Ring to Rivendell, heading off in search of the cattle rustlers, or signing on to the team that is searching for the plague cure, the main character turns to the police detective/wizard/sheriff/medical research expert and says “That’s your job”?

The author has at least five basic options here; the...

Why They Fail the First Time

Last week, Deep Lurker asked: If they [the characters] failed the first time, then why didn’t they fail the second time?

Why does anyone fail to get things right the very first time they try something? Because they tried the wrong thing, the wrong way, at the wrong time, with the wrong tools or the wrong skills or the wrong person – all at once, or one at a time. Why do they succeed on the second try (or third, or fourth)?

Because they have learned from their mistakes.

This is difficult for...

Questions about Plot Skeletons

Every so often, somebody asks me how to get to a full plot skeleton. This leads to me asking them a bunch of questions, which they usually find disconcerting, especially since I always start with:

What do you mean by “a full plot skeleton”?

I have to start with this because a lot of the people who ask me about this seem to think that “a full plot skeleton” means a minimum of twenty pages – often more like fifty – outlining the events of every scene in order, including all the subplots. For...

Problems

Problem: A matter or situation regarded as unwelcome or harmful and needing to be dealt with and overcome. – Oxford English Dictionary

Problems come in all sorts of sizes and shapes. The constant, for the vast majority of fiction, is that by the end of the story, the main character a) will have had some problem that b) either will have been solved and dispensed with, or will have become unsolvable and unstoppable, at least from the main character’s point of view.

Conflict, in stories, is ...

Conflict Isn’t Necessary

I keep running across people who think conflict is the root of all plot. Google “conflict in fiction” and you get 155 million hits. One of the first began with a definition: “Character + want + obstacle = conflict.” Variations of that formula occur over and over in posts on plotting. “Conflict is at the heart of all stories,” trumpets another, and “Literature would be a little boring without conflict” asserts a third.

Now, it is undeniably true that most stories about happy people happily...

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

As both holidays fall on Wednesday this year, I’m taking them off. I wish you all a good holiday season, and I will see you here again on January 8.

Grids and Trees

So last weekend, I got the first batch of editorial revision requests for “The Dark Lord’s Daughter.” They are reasonable and doable, and I need to get right to work on them. Naturally, I spent the entire week…reading how-to-write books. It’s my way of settling in before I start work, and it always turns up something interesting, and occasionally something useful.

In this batch, the only one that seemed both interesting and potentially useful was The Story Grid, by Shawn Coyne published in...

First time for anything

Another interesting “why” question that really bothers some writers (but not others) is “Why haven’t these characters already solved this problem?” Or, on occasion, “Why hasn’t somebody already solved this problem?”

Story problems that depend on external events frequently have clear and obvious reasons why the characters (or somebody) haven’t solved the problem long before the story ever started: Nobody knew about the problem until Chapter One. The problem didn’t even happen until Chapter Two...