Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 22

Partial Endings

When writers complain about having trouble with endings, most of the time, they’re complaining about the end of the story – either the grand climax when everything works out or fails miserably, or getting the last few paragraphs or sentences exactly right.

But any story that has more than one scene (and that’s everything except the shortest of short fiction) has loads of partial endings. I call them “partial” because the overall story doesn’t end at the end of a scene or a chapter; something...

Switching from Nonfiction to Fiction

“Writing nonfiction is different from writing fiction. There’s a lot of overlap of course, but it’s still different. So don’t be surprised if your process is different, too.”

I said that to a convention-acquaintance several decades back. She’d published a lot of articles, but had this fantasy novel she wanted to write, and she’d come to me for some basic advice.

A couple of years later, I ran into her again, and asked how the novel was coming. It wasn’t. So we went out for tea to figure out w...

Site maintenance week

We’re doing some technical updates and site maintenance this week that may result in interruptions and other difficulties. Rather than frustrate everyone (including me, as it affects my end as well as what’s online), I’m skipping the post this week. There will be SOMETHING writing-related next week, I promise, even if it has to be short.

So now you all have the time you would have spent reading my post to go work on your own stuff! How many words will you write this week?

Looking for solutions

Most writing problems have more than one possible solution. The vast majority have more than two, or even three. Of the possible ways of solving a particular writing problem, one of them always looks easy and safe (often, this is the obvious one that one thinks of first); it’s not exciting, but it’s something the writer knows how to do and it will (the writer thinks) work.

All the other possible solutions look hard. They will require a new viewpoint character, or possibly a new protagonist. T...

Just Don’t

“A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.”

–Theodore Sturgeon

I was poking around the many How-To-Write blogs online a few days ago, and I came across one that made me stare in utter disbelief. It was a worksheets-and-examples site – one of those that begins by asserting that all writers need to figure out their entire novel in advance according to their part...

Which Story, Which Hero

“Every character is the hero of their own story” is a writing truism that is usually quoted at people in regard to minor characters, as a way of making them more realistic or more rounded. It’s particularly useful to remember when one is writing a single-viewpoint story, as a reminder that all of the non-viewpoint characters have lives and problems that will make them more real if the writer hints at them from the viewpoint character’s perspective. But it can also play out in multiple other w...

Action Scenes, or, Some Ninjas Came in the Window

When most people think of action scenes, they immediately go for the fast-paced ones with lots of drama and physical maneuvering, the kind one sees in action-adventure movies: fights, battles, hair-raising stunts, dramatic escapes, car chases, the final confrontation between the hero and the villain. But a lot more goes into an effective action scene than the physical action.

Not that the action isn’t important – it isn’t an action scene without it. And it is easy to define “action scene” pur...

One reason Characters are a pain

Characters are even more of a pain than live people.

Most folks do not find it terribly surprising when someone complains that they don’t understand a real, live person. (One’s partner and/or children may complain bitterly about not being understood, but they’re not surprised.) People implicitly acknowledge the truth that people are complicated and have lots of non-obvious reasons for doing whatever they do.

Writers, though, are expected to understand their characters. If you complain about y...

Analysis vs. Intuition

The way a lot of critics, writing teachers, and even writers talk, every writing decision is conscious and deliberate, made with great care and consideration. It doesn’t matter whether it’s something small, like the exact word choice or sentence structure; something large, like the interlocking plot arcs in a ten-book series; something specific and concrete, like the color of the carpet in the villain’s office; or something intangible, like a character’s emotions or the symbolism of a dream s...

Complicated Systems (Like Writing)

When faced with complicated systems (especially really complicated systems that they didn’t invent themselves), people nearly always try to simplify them. There are two common approaches: Either they break the complicated system down into smaller, less complicated parts; or else they go looking for rules and recipes that other people have used to successfully deal with the overall system and/or the less complex pieces.

Writing fiction is complex. The writer has a bazillion things to pay atten...