Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 83

A Different View

One of the problems with talking about writing is that the terminology isn't standardized. Even when everybody agrees what something is called, the same word gets used to mean other things, which can lead to confusion.

Take the term "viewpoint." It can mean either the person through whose eyes the story is told, as in "Who is the viewpoint character? Whose viewpoint is this from?", or it can mean the way the story is told, as in "Which viewpoint are you using - omniscient or first-person?"

Most...

Name it…what?

If people would ask writers where they get their titles, instead of where they get their ideas, they'd probably get a lot more interesting answers much of the time.

In my experience, it's really difficult for most writers to articulate exactly where they got the idea for something (except in those few cases where it's blindingly obvious). But titles…that's another matter. Many of us struggle with titles; after all, the title is supposed to sum up the story somehow, or at least attract the...

Making soup

It's been a little over a year since my mother died, and one of the things I inherited from her was her collection of cookbooks.

It's quite a collection, too. When Mom ran out of space on the kitchen cookbook shelf, she just started putting them elsewhere. I've taken three large boxes and two paper bags full of cookbooks out of the house already, and I haven't touched the ones in the bedroom, the office, or the bookcase in the spare room. I'm afraid to even look in the attic.

My mother loved...

So you want to write a book…

It being the new year - and the first year of a new decade - I went poking around the web and noticed a bunch of websites for people's New Year's Resolutions. A little further investigation revealed that "write a book" is, in some form or another, on an awful lot of people's lists (it was one of the 20 most popular goals on one web site I found).

Speaking as someone for whom "write a book" is more of a necessity than anything else, I have to wonder whether any of those people really know what ...

Security, My Great-Aunt Martha.

I flew down to Alabama for the Big Family Christmas this year. That meant I also flew back the day after Christmas.

Which was also the day after some idiot tried to blow up a plane over Detroit.

My sister and I were lucky - the new "security precautions" didn't get put into place until after we were safely home. But the news has been full of nothing else since then, and it leaves me shaking my head in wonder.

"Nothing in your lap for the last hour of flight." What? What good is that supposed to ...

The First of the Closets

As promised, here are the first couple of closet pictures. As some of you already know, I have the coolest closets in the world. My sister Carol, who used to paint theater scenery for a living, decided to "redecorate" the interiors of of my ordinary boring closets with decor from my favorite children's books. This is what's in my front hall closet - The Wizard of Oz. If you look closely, you can see some of my coats shoved to either side.

Oz closet from front

 This is the Emerald City, with...

Who says?

When a writer sets out to tell a story, she has a lot of choices to make, and every time she makes one, it influences what options are still available for the other choices. In some cases, one decision can completely eliminate all other options.

Take the matter of narrative voice (which I define as the way all the stuff that isn't dialog sounds). Theoretically, the writer has three basic options:  1) the narrative can be in her, the author's, natural voice; 2) the narrative can be in the...

The jigsaw puzzle analogy

I keep running across people who think that there is One Right Way to write a story, and who tie themselves in knots trying to force themselves to write "the right way" when it doesn't suit their particurlar mental processes. Somewhere, somehow, they've gotten convinced (usually because some authority figure like an editor or highly respected author or influential teacher told them) that the only way to come up with a Really Good Book/Short-Story is to do X.

Usually, "X" is something like...

Pictures from the signing!

  The cake!

 Me (in the stripes in front) and the book club!

One of those days

I am grumpy.

It's partly my own fault, and partly not (at least, I think it isn't). The part that I think is not my fault has to do with the refusal of my blogging software to upload pictures, despite several hours of trying different formats with the supposedly-easy-built-in-uploader. The software finds the right file, crunches it, produces all the right information…except there's NO PICTURE. I'm bummed.

I am bummed because I had an entire book group show up for my talk/autographing at...