Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 27

Mid-book decisions

At the beginning of a novel, anything can happen, and it’s easy to change things one doesn’t like. Your heroine starts off sitting on a rock by Cape Canaveral, longingly watching the rockets take off, and three paragraphs in it suddenly occurs to you that she’s a mermaid. Odds are that you won’t have to rewrite anything, and even if you do, well, it’s only three paragraphs. Then you decide on Page 3 that your hero should be a marine biologist instead of one of the Space-X scientists. Not real...

Series structure

Katherine asked: Could  you please share your thoughts on shaping a good story / balancing the form, particularly across a series?

If you are setting out to commit a series on purpose, with malice aforethought, the first few things you need to think about are: 1) Do you really want to do this? 2) Do you actually have enough material for multiple books? And 3) Do you have the personal commitment and stamina to write multiple books about the same place/characters/plot/theme/idea without getting...

Perfectionism

“Aiming for perfection is what causes people to stay stuck.” –Alice Boyes

My brother recently took a class in gem-cutting. When he finished, he told me that a “perfect” cut is a matter of magnification. What looks perfect to the naked eye is a bit off when you crank up the magnification, and it gets worse and worse the closer you look. Of course, that level of magnification also allows you to fix the flaw…until you crank it up another notch. The catch is, after a certain point, even the most...

Questionnaires and Decisions

I ran across one of those character-creation sheets the other day, the ones with 200 questions that are supposed to create your unique and wonderful protagonist. As usual, my immediate reaction was severely negative, which got me thinking about why.

The first problem I have with these lists is that they all seem to start from the assumption that a character is a collection of bits and pieces of specific information, and that if you know the information, you then will have a character. To me,...

Do I have to…

I’ve seen quite a few new writers come near to wrecking their work by trying to follow well-intentioned advice about what must go in a story. Oddly enough, the two most common pieces of story-wrecking advice are diametrically opposed.

The first is: “Your main character must change and grow in the course of the story, due to the events of the story, or your readers won’t care about him/her.”

Nope.

James Bond doesn’t change and grow over the course of the series, let alone any one book. Neither...

First person voice and viewpoint

Voice and viewpoint are inseparable, no matter what viewpoint the writer is using. This is true of all viewpoints to some extent, but it is most evident in first person.

In first person, the viewpoint character is the putative storyteller, so that character’s voice is the narrative voice. But in everything other than fiction, an author writing “I went to New York on my summer vacation” is telling the reader about what happened to the actual writer on their real-life summer vacation. In fictio...

Viewpoint as a Fix

“Viewpoint fixes everything,” I heard a writer claim at a convention some years back.

Well, that depends on what you mean by “viewpoint” and how you expect to use it to “fix” things.

“Viewpoint” in fiction can mean either the viewpoint character (the narrator, through whose eyes the reader sees the story) or the viewpoint type (whether the story is in omniscient, tight-third-person, stream-of-consciousness, etc.).

Who the viewpoint character is has an enormous impact on the story, even if all...

Review and comment: Anne Bishop’s Others series

I just finished reading a series that I thought was a bit of an object lesson, both in terms of what I think worked and what I think didn’t, so I decided to break a ten-year streak and actually review some fiction.

The series is Anne Bishop’s The Others, and the biggest thing Bishop does right is playing to her strengths. The series has a lot of the same horror-Romance feel as Bishop’s early work and many of the characters reprise roles that are familiar from her other stories.

Bishop has alw...

From the Mailbag: On editors

Do you have any professional editors that you would recommend?

The short answer is “No.” All the professional editors I know work for publishers, and I don’t think any of them do freelance work on the side.

The longer answer starts with a question: Why do you think you need an editor?

The answer to this is usually one of two things: either the writer in question thinks they need to have their book professionally edited before they even try to sell it to a publishing house, or else the writer...

The Problems and Uses of an Internal Editor

Every writer has things they allow to keep themselves from writing. One of the most common is the internal critic or internal editor – that voice in one’s head that picks apart one’s work, pointing at all the things that are wrong with it, from typos and misplaced commas to major plot holes and lapses in characterization.

There are thousands of writing blog posts dedicated to silencing your internal editor, many with completely contradictory advice. One of the ones I found was phrased as a li...