Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 25

Brief hiatus

I am sorry to tell you all that I need to take a brief hiatus from posting. My father’s funeral was yesterday, and between that and the holidays, I don’t expect to have time to post until some time in January.

Have a good holiday season, wherever you are and whatever you celebrate, and I will see you in a couple of weeks.

First person and first novels

Back when I was still working on my first novel, I mentioned it to a bibliophile acquaintance who had been in academia for many years. She cheerfully turned to the woman next to her and said, “Did you hear that? Pat’s working on a novel! And it’s in the third person!”

I spent years being slightly taken aback by this reaction, as third person seemed to me to be the obvious choice. After all, at least 80% of the books I read and loved were in third person. It was somewhere between five and ten...

More mail

I have a world I’ve fallen in love with but I’m afraid of putting out a story in my favorite world too early and having it not sell well because I haven’t gained some critical mass of skills or fans.

I haven’t talked much about the business side of writing lately, and this question falls squarely into that area.

It’s also fairly typical of the sort of question a lot of would-be writers ask. It comes because they’re worrying about the far future – months or years or even decades ahead – instea...

Developing ideas

A couple of weeks back, Rachel asked this:

I was wondering how you work with and extend story ideas without getting bored? Because I have a habit of writing or imagining “moments” that really interest me, certain people or situations that last a page or two, but when I try to extend the idea to a full story I almost immediately become bored with it.

When a would-be writer has this problem, there are a couple of possible reasons, and what you do about it depends on which reason fits your parti...

Some Things To Do about the Internal Editor

The two problems with the Internal Editor that I mentioned last post boil down to these:

The thing it has flagged as a problem is something that doesn’t have a clear right/wrong answer (unlike grammar or spelling rules, for instance). Yet the writer accepts the Internal Editor’s judgement because it has been right so often in the past. The thing it has flagged is clearly a problem – that is, the writer agrees with the Internal Editor – but the writer has no idea how to fix it because their I...

Why is the Internal Editor such a problem?

The Internal Critic, aka Internal Editor, is the part of your brain that points out every single thing that is wrong with whatever you are doing (whether that’s writing or making a fancy dinner for your in-laws), brings up the obvious impossibility of whatever giant task you are required to do (whether that is writing a bestselling novel, finishing your Ph.D. thesis by the end of the month, or doing that three-month project your boss just handed you that they need by the end of the week), and...

The Down Side of Quotas

One of the ways writers attempt to make themselves produce more words fast is to give themselves quotas and/or deadlines. “I will write 1,000 words/four pages/for three hours every day/week/month.”

Most of the time, this doesn’t work terribly well for me, for several reasons. The most obvious one is that arbitrary production quotas are usually just that – arbitrary. There’s no downside to missing them, and my backbrain therefore knows that they are safe to put off until fifteen minutes before...

Plots and Causal Chains

The idea that a plot is a series of events related by cause and effect goes back at least to E.M. Forster, who said, in Aspects of the Novel, that “The king died and then the queen died” was not a plot, merely a set of sequential events, but “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” was a plot because the first event causes the second. Obviously, most novels need a much longer causal chain than that.

Let me pause for a minute to define what a causal chain is and does, in terms of fict...

Getting ready

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is coming up, and people are preparing to slam out 50,000 words between November 1 and November 30. The people at Creative Live have decided to offer a discount on a bunch of their how-to-write classes as part of “NaNoWriMo prep month.” This means that if you are available at the right time of day, you can watch those classes for free all the way through (as opposed to being limited to just one or two sample segments).  (Creative Live streams their cla...

From the Mailbag – Building an Imaginary Society

Every so often, I get a question that makes me blink. The most recent one was something along the lines of “How would a matriarchal society work, especially in terms of politics, child rearing, property, gender roles, religion, etc.?”

I always want to start my answers with a different question, to wit, “You do remember that you are making this stuff up, yes?”

In fiction, the key thing about the worldbuilding is that the writer makes it plausible over the course of the story. Writers can make...