Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 77

Time and again

"I don't have time to write" is one of the most common writers' complaints, both from people who haven't published yet and from seasoned pros.

The statement means different things to different people, but the most common meaning is "There are a lot of other things in my life that are more important to me than writing, so those are what I spend my time on."

For professional writers, writing time is too often eaten up by the things required to manage a writing career. By the time you've...

Whose Turn Is It? (Mailbag #4)

From the mailbag::

I know some people who feel quite strongly about keeping to the main character's POV except when it's absolutely necessary to go to someone else, but I've also seen that rule (like so many others!)broken successfully. It can be so useful to show someone else reacting to the MC.

Any guidelines on choosing? I keep having to write these scenes in more than one version to see which is the right way.

OK, first off, single-character-viewpoint tight-third-person is one kind of...

First Final

Every saga has a beginning, and this one begins four weeks ago, when my editor sent me a three-page, single-spaced revisions e-mail and a copy of the ms. for what is now Across the Great Barrier that was full of comment balloons.

It didn't arrive.

We didn't realize this for a week, because I was being restrained and not asking "Where the $#%@& are the revisions requests you promised me on Monday?" and he was being restrained and giving me time to think about them because they were fairly...

Title Wars, etc.

So the revisions request for Book 2 of the Frontier Magic trilogy have come in, and I'm head down for the next week and a half.

After much emailing, the consensus is that, among many other things, it needs a title change. The editors felt that Circuit Magician was a good title…for a different book. I have to admit, they're right. Eff is still the viewpoint character, and it's still about her, but she's not a circuit magician. Wash is a circuit magician (arguably the best one they have, but...

Complicated Webs

Big, fat, complex, multiple-viewpoint novels have been popular for quite a while, and they have a whole set of problems all their own. Once of those problems is pacing.

The temptation is always to take advantage of a slow moment in the main plot to advance a subplot, and it's frequently a good idea in many respects, but it can lead to a too-even pace as the intense high points of one subplot cancel out the lows of another. So what does one do?

Well, the first thing is to look for places where y...

Hup, Two, Three, Four

Pacing is movement, and movement has rhythm. Some rhythms are fast, staccato beats, rat-tat-tat-tat; some are slow, leisurely swells; and some are a steady heartbeat. One thing is true for all of them:  in order to have a beat, in order to have rhythm, there must be sound and then silence. A single continuous blast of a foghorn has no rhythm; neither does complete silence. It's only when you get the foghorn in multiple blasts that a rhythm can develop.

But there's more to rhythm than...

Time Travel the Easy Way

A few days ago, Beth my exercise buddy mentioned that she'd been rereading some of Connie Willis' time-travel stories, and it inspired her to ask me a question:  If you could go back in time to do historical research, what time and place would you pick?

I mulled it over for a few days before I figured out why I was having so much trouble coming up with an answer. See, the problem is that I really, really like my creature comforts:  hot showers and central heating and air conditioning and the i...

Walk, Run, or Jog?

Recently, I was reading an extremely long (quarter-of-a-million-words plus) book that shall remain nameless to avoid embarrassing the author. It held my interest enough to get me through to the end, but it left me curiously unsatisfied, with very little memory of the plot (which is quite unusual for me), and no impulse whatever to reread it. I mentioned it to one of my friends, along with the joking comment that I should really sit down in my copious free time and analyze the book to see...

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall…

Early on in nearly every story, the writer comes across the necessity of doing a physical description of their characters, and their main viewpoint character in particular. There are two basic schools of thought on this. The first is to keep details to a bare minimum - maybe just hair and eye color - and let the reader fill in the rest of the picture for themselves; the second is to go for a more detailed and complete description.

Since the first way obviously doesn't take much doing, I'm...

Being Cinderella is a lot of work

These days, when people talk about a "Cinderella Story," they mostly mean the rags-to-riches part. Whether it's a Cinderella sports team that's just won the championship (and never mind all the sweat and practice and planning that went into it), or J. K. Rowling's welfare-mom-to-gazillion-copy-bestseller story, what people seem to be interested in is the seemingly miraculous change in circumstances, not all the hard work that made it possible. They only want to look at the unknown girl who...