Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 23
July 17, 2019
Why this question annoys me
“How do you write such strong female heroines (sic)?”
Ever since Dealing with Dragons came out, I’ve gotten this question (or the “Why do you…” variation) pretty much every time somebody asks for an interview. My first reaction – which I have given in to, more than once – is to look blank and respond, “Don’t you know any women?”
The question makes me cranky. Not because it’s common – “Where do you get your ideas?” has been the most common question writers get asked since forever, and while i...
July 10, 2019
Writers with Hammers
There’s an old saying that goes something like, “To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
The subtext of this particular idiom is usually that it isn’t a good idea to expect one tool to be able to fix absolutely everything that you want to fix. This is fairly obvious when it comes to physical tools – you can pound a screw in with a hammer, but the result won’t hold nearly as well as it would have if you’d screwed the screw in with a screwdriver; you can break a board into two...
July 3, 2019
Getting Back on the Horse
One of the things that is inevitable in a writing career is that sooner or later, you will face an experience that seems to have utterly destroyed your confidence and/or your will to write.
It may be a long-time reader saying that you really blew it on your last book. It may be an editor saying “Well, if you really want to write that, I’ll look at it” in that tone that means “I’m humoring your dumb idea” about the idea you are totally in love with and (until that moment) incredibly excited ab...
June 26, 2019
Ordinary fantasy
“Ordinary people also go to war.” – Elizabeth Bear
It’s been a week since I got exercised about the Fourth Street panel about “ordinary people,” and I’m still exercised about it, so you get a blog post on the subject,
The first problem is, as always, definition. “Writing about ordinary people” can mean writing about people who bake, weave, or drive trucks, rather than about people who are kings, presidents, or prime ministers. It can also mean writing about people who have no extraordinary...
June 19, 2019
4th Street 2019 Review
I got to spend last weekend at Fourth Street Fantasy Convention last weekend, for the first time in several years. For those readers who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a small convention focused on topics of interest to writers and serious readers of fantasy. It’s often more like a seminar than a typical SF convention, at least as far as the programming goes.
I had a good weekend, though I missed the main part of Saturday’s programming due to an inconvenient migraine. The panels I did get to w...
June 12, 2019
Not the worst thing
“I might only have one match
But I can make an explosion.”– Rachel Platten
Writers who are trying to get a reluctant protagonist moving in mid-book often look for the “worst possible thing that can happen to their character.” Quite a few of them do this to get revenge on their characters (“You want to loaf around in the bathtub instead of getting on with my plot? I’ll show you – have some torture and a possibly crippling injury and…”)
This kind of thing can be cathartic for the writer in th...
June 5, 2019
The Unexpected Blockbuster Effect
Every few years, a book or series of books comes out that sells a bazillion copies more than anyone expected it to. Examples include The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter books, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and Twilight. (The key here is “more than anyone expected” – Stephen King’s books sell in huge numbers, but that’s been considered normal for him ever since Carrie.)
An unexpected blockbuster nearly always has two major effects on the book market, one on editors and the other on writ...
May 29, 2019
The Changing Market
Fiction is necessarily a reflection on the present, even when it’s set in the future, the past, or some totally sideways world populated solely by centipedes.
Authors, editors, and readers all have a worldview, and their worldview is inevitably shaped by their individual and collective life experiences. For authors, that worldview creeps into their work, whether they intend it to or not. For editors and readers, that worldview shapes their taste in fiction, specifically the type of fiction th...
May 22, 2019
Trust Your Story
Over the years, I’ve talked to a lot of writers about their writing processes, and specifically about why they do certain things. I’m always exceedingly bemused by the people who claim to put specific types of events or incidents or characters in their stories (or leave them out) for specific reasons that have little or nothing to do with the story they’re writing.
For instance, the writer who always ends her stories with last-minute justifications for the villain’s mass murder (“It was an a...
May 15, 2019
A case study on ending problems
When I am writing according to my normal process, I nearly always have some degree of ending in mind from very early on in the process. It’s nearly always wrong as to specifics (if I have any specifics; for a while, every plot outline I wrote ended with “There is a big fight/confrontation and the good guys win. Appropriate rewards and weddings follow.”), but at least I have something to aim at.
Twice now, though, I’ve written books where I had no idea what the ending was going to be when I st...
