Patricia C. Wrede's Blog, page 88

The Big Bad

One of the things you see a lot in fantasy stories is  a villain who is purely and simply evil and knows it.  No rationalizations, no semi-plausible rationales, not even a rotten childhood to blame it on, just the Dark Lord Who Wants To Take Over The World Because He Is Really, Really Evil. There are ways of making such a character work - one would be to present him as a sociopath - but they are limited in number, and they are difficult to pull off. 

Most of the time, the thoroughly Evil Dark Lor

Check your assumptions…at the door.

Every so often, I have an encounter with readers (usually academics, but sometimes not) who are happy to tell me, in detail and at great length, all the reasons why I wrote something, or wrote it in this or that particular way. (Usually because they object to the reasons they've come up with…but I digress.)

And to date, they have always been dead wrong. Every time.

The most common incident of this sort involves discussing my "feminist agenda" in Dealing with Dragons…things like making "King of the

Better or not?

One of the plagues of beginning writers is the feeling that they are doing something "wrong."  Not wrong in the sense of technique - messing up viewpoint, for instance - but that they have made, are making, or will make, a wrong decision about "what happens next."  They are haunted by the fear that it would have been a better book if their main character had chosen Door #1 or Door #3 instead of Door #2.

In point of fact, what it would be is a different book.  If the main character stops to help t

Characters…Can't Live With 'em, Can't Live Without 'em

The new book (Frontier Magic, Book 2, Title To Come) is progressing slowly. Partly because of the perversity of the characters.

First, one of my important-but-offstage-for-a-while characters decided to be stingy about writing letters. With some reason, I admit, but if I can't get him started corresponding again, there's a whole great wodge of  planned-for plot later on that is going to look as if it's coming out of nowhere. Unless…hmm…now, that might work. It'll throw a monkey wrench into a bunch

But what does it look like? (A bit about description)

Description is one of those love-it-or-hate-it things. Some readers want more, more, more; they want to see every button and bead on the dress, every scratch on the woodwork. Other people roll their eyes and complain about slowing down the story when they run across long passages of descriptive infodump. Still others want to have their cake and eat it, too–they want to know what everything looks like, but they don't want to stop and wade through two pages of scene-setting every time the characte

Home from the ALA

The day I spent at the American Library Association convention was long and intense, full of talking to exceedingly intelligent librarians. How I know they were exceedingly intelligent is this: I do not normally talk in my sleep, but the night after the convention, I woke myself up out of a sound slumber by saying aloud the words "And what, exactly, does the term 'critical mass' mean in this context?"

I wish I could remember the dream that led me to that sentence. It doesn't seem as if it could p

The Naming of Names

One of the perennial questions I get from people, especially those who want to be writers, is "how do you come up with the names?"-meaning, usually, the "weird fantasy names" in settings that bear no resemblance to the "real world," rather than the more ordinary names like James and Cecelia I use in other books. I usually just say something along the lines of "I make them up" with variations: some are typos of real names or words, some are real names from the phone book with one or two letters c

A few words on pacing and structure

 The "different panel" at 4th Street this year was on pacing and structure. I've been pondering it since then, and this is what I think (or part of it, anyway):

Pacing is how fast it feels like things happen.  Not how fast they actually do happen; what it feels like to the reader-this is why sometimes the cure for a too-slow pace is to add more material, and the cure for a too-fast one is to cut something.  It has to do, frequently, with how much story-stuff is coming at the reader how rapidly. 

The trouble with trilogies

I have a confession to make:  I have never deliberately written a trilogy before in my life.

Yes, I know, there are four Enchanted Forest books, and three Kate and Cecy books, and the Lyra series, and so on. But with all of those, I didn't set out to write more than one book. I wrote a book, and then readers and editors asked for more.

This time, I signed on for three books right from the start. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I don't know that I can say I regret it, but it's…different

Cinderella at the Rock Concert

Last weekend, at 4th Street Fantasycon, somebody asked me for a post that I did years back on Usenet, on the difference between the way short story writers and novelists might develop the same basic story idea. Here it is:

Basically, short stories require a tight focus and a single, central plot thread; in a novel, there is more room for digression and development of more than one thing. The same basic idea can often be developed as a short story by keeping the plot/focus tight, or as a novel by