Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 76

Where Are We?

Every story, short or long, takes place somewhere. Every scene takes place somewhere. And every place has features about it that are unique, whether it is the collection of overly cute fairy-figurines on the mantelpiece in the parlor, the cracked and faded mural across the back wall of the bar, or the odd kink in the third-level corridor on the spaceship.

This is one of those too-obvious-to-mention things that a lot of writers seem to forget on occasion. In at least some cases, I think the...

Conflict

I have several friends (some professional writers, some not) who consider themselves conflict-averse. Faced with the near-universal insistence on conflict as the primary factor in plotting, they either hunch down, grumbling, and attempt to provide enough murders, fights, and battles to fill this presumed need, or they throw up their hands in despair and produce plotless descriptions of happy occasions.

For years, I tried to help people get around this difficulty by pointing out that physical f...

Next Step on the Way

Last Wednesday, I finished reviewing the copy-edit of Across the Great Barrier, which was my last chance to make any major changes to the book. I'll get another look at it when the galleys/page proofs come, but barring some totally egregious error that's slipped past every single person who's gone over the ms. thus far, I'll only be able to make minor changes at that point. As far as the words go, the book has reached its final form.

It was also my last chance to fix any of the problems my...

Choice paralysis

Starting a completely new story is exciting. There aren't any constraints to worry about:  no dangling plot threads that you have to tie up, no previously established background that you have to stay consistent with, no inconvenient mysteries or revelations that you're stuck with. It's a clean slate, full of fresh new possibilities.

At least, it is until you sit down and try to start writing. Faced with a clean sheet of paper, a blank word-processor screen, or an empty file, a significant...

Heinlein's Rules for Writing (Mostly)

Back in 1947, in an essay titled "On the Writing of Speculative Fiction" (since reprinted several times), Robert Heinlein wrote five rules for people who want to become professional writers. They've been republished many times, and for the most part, they're still good (I'll get to that "most part" in a minute).

The rules are:

1. You must write.

2. You must finish what you start.

3. You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.

4. You must put it on the market

5. You must keep it on...

Getting From Here to There

Transitions are a pain.

It is very likely that I feel this way because I hate doing transitions, and the ones I write nearly always feel clunky to me. Some of the clunkiness is probably just my dislike of the process of producing one attaching itself to the finished product, but I don't think all of it is. And painful or not, one has to get one's characters (and one's readers) out of one scene and into the next somehow, which means transitions are a very necessary part of writing.

Plot...

Rocks in a Jar

There's an old story about time management and prioritizing that I dearly love, not least because I've seen it repurposed several times.

The story, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with already, is the one about the professor who walks into class with a large jar. He proceeds to fill it with big rocks, and then asks the class whether the jar is full. They say yes. He pulls out some BBs and dumps a bunch in, so that they fill up the spaces between the big rocks. Is the jar full...

Funny Once, Funny Twice, Funny Forever

Humor has a reputation as one of the hardest and most under-appreciated types of writing there is.

It's a well-deserved reputation. Everyone over the age of five has at least watched someone else's funny story fall flat, if not had it happen to themselves. And while you can find plenty of books on writing drama, there's not much out there about writing comedy (and most of what is there seems to be geared toward writing screenplays for TV sitcoms, rather than dealing with the use of humor in...

Say That Again, Would You?

Dialog is one of the bedrock necessities in about 99% of all fiction. Plays and screenplays are almost nothing but dialog, and it's not unusual to see whole scenes or entire short stories that are told entirely in dialog (sometimes, without even speech tags to let the reader know who's talking). It's something that seems like it ought to come naturally - after all, everybody talks, right? Yet dialog is a considerable problem for a lot of writers, and a tin ear for dialog has brought more...

Before the Beginning

Probably the most often-asked question writers get is "Where do you get your ideas?" Very few people ever ask "What do you do with your ideas once you have them?" though that seems to me to be the logical next step. It seems a good many people don't realize that there is a lot of development work to be done in between having an idea and actually writing a story.

A story idea can be anything - a scrap of dialog, a scene, a setting, a situation, a character or two, a plot - that the writer...