Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 86

Letting the Dragons In, Part I

Several years ago, I was asked to give a speech on the topic of book-banning, from the viewpoint of a fantasy writer. It's quite long, so I have carved it up into four parts to post as part of Banned Books Week.

It begins with a story, because I am a writer and most things lead me to stories, sooner or later.

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Once upon a time, in a far country, there lived a beautiful princess.  Or perhaps it was a woodcutter, or the youngest son of a merchant, or all of them at once.  They all had proper e...

It's Banned Books Week!

Every year, the American Library Association holds Banned Books Week in September. This is that week.

I've felt rather strongly about Banned Books Week for a long time - even before I met the teacher who was nearly fired because she put "Dealing With Dragons" on the reading list for her fifth-grade class (a parent, who had not read the book, asserted that it was "teaching witchcraft"; fortunately, the principal of her school had a sense of humor and could recognize parody when he saw it)...

What is "good"?

Exactly what constitutes "good writing" is a subjective judgment, and it can be extremely hard to separate from one's personal taste - not the least because one is unlikely to read books one doesn't like, and if one doesn't read them, one can't tell whether they're "good writing" or not.  Furthermore, there can be an enormous amount of disagreement when you get down to actual cases. 

There are so many different facets of writing that can be given primacy, that what one person says is a...

The Big Three

Years ago, when I was an unpublished wannabe, I was at a local SF convention trying to learn the True Secret of Writing from the professional writers in attendence. One of them (I think it may have been Gordy Dickson) threw out a piece of advice that has stood me in good stead for all the years and books since.

The advice was this: There are three main things that any scene in a book or short story can do. 1) It can advance the plot. 2) It can explain the background or backstory. 3) It can...

Questions from the mailbag

Why don't you do a collection of Enchanted Forest short stories, like Book of Enchantments only all Enchanted Forest?

Well, mainly because I'm a novelist. Short stories are really hard for me; in thirty years as a writer, I've written roughly fifteen publishable short stories. Ten of them are in Book of Enchantments; three more were for the Liavek anthologies and probably wouldn't make much sense on their own. To do an all-new anthology, I'd therefore have to write at least eight more stories ...

Kate and Cecy sequels, part II-Caroline's view

I asked Caroline to do a guest post on her view of writing Kate and Cecy, particularly The Mislaid Magician. And this is what she says:

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Pat said, "You're going to kill me."

That's the way I remember my first encounter with THE MISLAID MAGICIAN. Pat Wrede and I were just finishing up with page proofs for THE GRAND TOUR - quite an undertaking, given that going over the changes involved conference calls with Pat, me, and Karrie Oswald, our Harcourt editor.

Pat and I were meeting for lunch. Pat's w...

Writing a sequel - Kate and Cecy

Alex asked "how you felt about the stand alone getting a sequel with the Kate and Cecelia books. I think you did an amazing job with escalation with these books, but did you have a hard time creating the right level of escalation?"

Well, for starters, "getting a sequel" isn't quite the right phrase. The first Kate and Cecy book, Sorcery and Cecelia, was put out by Ace/Berkley, who were not all that thrilled about the book at the time and most definitely did not want a sequel. So the book...

The escalation problem

The comments on the last post started getting into endings and the escalation of threat, particularly as related to series books, and I discovered I had quite a lot to say on the subject even though I haven't written a long-running series myself.

The first thing is that not all trilogies or series are the same. Some are accidental - the writer wrote a book that was supposed to be a stand-alone, and then everyone wanted more, more, more. Some are episodic - monster/murder/McGuffin-of-the-week (...

The skeleton in the closet

There are a couple of ways of looking at plot, ranging from the bird's-eye view at a macro level to the order of scenes, and events and incidents within scenes. The one most people run across first - and one of the most useful ways of looking at it for many writers - is the macro level plot skeleton.

The basic plot skeleton works like this:  your protagonist has a problem — solving the murder, stealing the Hope Diamond, restoring the True King to the throne, winning the love of a good...

Working at what isn't free

In the comments on the last post, S.A. Cox said "Historically, however, with both writing and teaching, one of the main keys to my development has been trusting my instincts about what is working and what isn't, and then working like a dog at what isn't."

My experience with trusting my instincts has been good; maybe I'll have more to say about that some other time. What I really wanted to talk about here was the "working like a dog at what isn't working" part.

The first step is diagnosis, which ca