Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 21

“Why me?” asked the protagonist.

I’ve said before that “why” is one of the most useful, and therefore important, questions a writer can ask. Most of the time, this is because figuring out why your characters need to do something is the first step in figuring out what your characters need to do next.

One of the earlies “why” questions is “Why do these people have to solve this problem?” There are a bunch of general answers that work:

It’s their job to solve this sort of problem. Detectives and police investigate crimes;...

Thanksgiving and Other Holidays

Happy Thanksgiving!

Think about Thanksgiving for a minute. On the one hand, it is one of two quintessentially American holidays (the other being the Fourth of July); it’s been celebrated for a bit over four hundred years, if you start from the story about the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, but it’s only been an official national holiday for 156 years. And if you widen the lens a bit, it’s part of a tradition of harvest festivals that goes back and back until it fades into the mists of prehistory....

Getting Into It

“If you can’t get into it, get out of it.”

I’ve run across this bit of wisdom quite a bit on the internet lately. Often it’s in the context of encouraging people to “follow their passion” – to believe in their dreams enough to quit the job they hate (“can’t get into”) and go for them.

Which is all very well, as long as one doesn’t expect the Dreams-and-Passions Fairy to immediately drop in with everything one needs to create that dream, including a fully functioning Etsy shop complete with inventory a...

Time

One of the hardest things most writers have to do is defend their writing time.

There are always chores to be done, emergencies to be dealt with, other people who want large pieces of your time for something, and really cool things that writers would love to be doing in addition to or instead of writing. And you are the only one who can stop yourself from getting up from the computer to feed the cat and do the laundry, to call the plumber about the sudden explosion in the bathroom pipes, to answer...

What They Want … Really?

“Start with what your main character desperately wants. If they don’t want something, they have no motivation.”

I really dislike that advice, mainly because most of the time I either have no idea what my protagonist’s deepest, most desperate wants are, or else I do know and those wants have nothing to do with the story I’m trying to tell. It’s really difficult to get an adventure story moving if the main character’s deepest desire is to spend a nice, peaceful, quiet time at home.

(It can be done, but if the main charac...

What do you want to be good at?

Writing fiction is a complex task, with lots of moving parts. Lots of people recognize this, but never really stop to think about what that means in terms of actually doing the writing.

There are three questions that anyone faced with an incredibly complex job would likely find useful to think about up front. They are:

What am I good at? What do I need to be good at? What do I want to be good at?

What am I good at?

Which parts of this job do you already know how to do well? Everybody is good at something, even if it’s som...

Backstage at the Novel

Back in high school and college, I was briefly involved in class theater productions – not acting in them, but as part of the support crew, the people who ran lights, made costumes, painted scenery, made sure the right props were in the right places at the right times. One of the lessons I retained from that time was double-sided:  On the one hand, backstage was out of sight, and the crew could mess up in a lot of minor ways without the audience ever knowing (though you were sure to get chewe...

Different strokes…

Every book a writer writes is a different experience, but some of them are more different than others.

Writing The Dark Lord’s Daughter has been a very different experience for me.

Normally – if one can say such a thing about writing – I am a task-oriented, linear, plodding planner type writer. That is, I usually have a plan (though I almost never stick firmly to it). I sit down more or less daily and work on the current scene until I run out of steam; when that gets finished, I go on to the next bit, in the order...

More on planning systems

Putting one foot in front of other gets you somewhere, but if you don’t look where you are stepping you can end up in quicksand – or worse yet, wandering over a cliff.

This rather obvious truism has been on my mind because of a writing website someone recommended last week. It’s one of the many, many current sites that argue that you should plan, plan, plan before you ever start writing. The blogger summarizes no less than nine different planning-and-structure systems (one of which is Joseph...

Conveying information

Fiction writing is ultimately about giving readers information in a controlled fashion. That’s what words do – they convey information. “There’s a lion behind that rock.” “This person is likely to steal your diamond necklace.” “That route ends in a dead end.”

All the ways we break fiction down into parts have to do with what information the reader needs to know, when they need to know it, and how to give it to them most effectively. “Effective” usually means keeping the reader’s suspension of...