Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 87

What you get for free

Every writer has something - some part of writing, however tiny - that comes easily (or at least, more easily than the rest of it). For some it's action scenes; for others, it's deep characterization; for others it's plot or dialog or structure or theme. But there's always something.

What this means is that, for the first couple of stories or novels or X-many-thousand words, one can safely ignore the freebie and concentrate on learning all the other stuff that one didn't get for free. More than t

Quote unquote

Just for fun, I thought I'd put up some of my favorite quotations about writing, writers, and publishing. Feel free to chime in with yours!

"There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."  - W. Somerset Maugham

"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,

"And every single one of them is right!"   - Rudyard Kipling   (This one is practically my motto.)

 "In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is

Thanks, bro…

So last weekend, my brother and his family came to visit. We had a lovely time, despite the fact that they all had colds.

You see where this is going already, don't you?

But to really understand this, you have to know that when I get a cold, I usually have a week of being utterly miserable and unable to do much of anything, followed by six to twelve weeks of sounding like death while actually feeling pretty good. During this phase, all my friends make nuisances of themselves, telling me to nap and

You ought to be a writer

Every once in a while, I run across people who are baffled and frustrated by the behavior of certain talented friends of theirs.  "They can write great stuff; why don't they?"  "Their fanfic is great; why don't they try to submit stuff professionally?"  "They've sold a bunch of books; why don't they quit their day job and write full-time?"

In all of the cases I'm familiar with, the short answer to all of these questions is "Because they don't want to."  That one isn't interested in writing; his c

From the road

Part of the way down Wisconsin (if you're coming from Minnesota via I94), there's a spot where they were doing road work about six months ago. They finished up the first part, but apparently they want to do more on the same stretch at some unspecified future date. Because instead of removing the big orange sign that says "SINGLE LANE AHEAD," they just put some kind of tape over the letters to block them out.

Except the strip of tape they used wasn't quite long enough to cover the whole line. So t

The Good Guys

To my mind, a purely altruistic, goody-two-shoes hero is even more boring and unrealistic than a purely evil villain. Maybe because at least the villain is getting something out of being a villain? All those armies to order around, and castles, and power, and so on.

 OK, people do wake up in the morning and think "Today, I am going to be Good, because it is the Right Thing To Do!" Or at least, we want to think there's somebody out there who does. So the uncomplicated Good Guy is a little more bel

Cats. Why did it have to be cats?

Cazaril, my Maine Coon/Tabby rescue cat, has been seriously annoyed with me lately. I think it's all the travel - he really doesn't like being left home with just Nimue for company.

So he's been trying to get me up several times a night. To play with him. (How I know this is, I made the mistake of gettng up once, because I thought I'd forgotten to feed him. I hadn't. He ran into the living room and stood over the feather toy expectantly. At 3 a.m. Darned cat. Yes, I know it was dumb to encourage

Getting stuck, part II

I probably should have posted this first, if I was going to blog about getting stuck. Because one of the more important things a writer needs to do when they're stuck, before trying to apply any of the techniques I was talking about, is to figure out why they are stuck.

Diagnosis is important, because different kinds of stuckness require different solutions. For instance, about 95% of the time when I get stuck, the reason is one of the following: 

a) an attack of insecurity (oh, god, I can't write

On writing exercises

Back when I was in 7th grade, I took a summer sewing class. On the first day, they showed everybody how to work the sewing machine and then gave us pieces of paper to "sew" with a dull needle and no thread, so we could learn how to guide stuff through the feeds.  I waited until the teacher was gone and then started my actual project; I didn't see any point in sewing paper, when I already knew from the demo how the whole thing was supposed to work. 

Okay, my first seam was a little more wobbly tha

Getting Stuck

I've been getting quite a few questions in the mailbag recently about writer's block, and invariably they end with the anguished plea, "How do you know what happens next?"

Which is a lot of the problem right there, in my opinon. Because "What happens next?" and "What do I do next?" are among the most useless questions most writers can ask themselves. They won't help most people get unstuck, because getting the answer is getting unstuck, all at once. 

It's like having a car that's well and truly st