Adam Heine's Blog, page 27

The Secret to World Building

"Part of the attraction of the Lord of the Rings is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed."



                               -- J. R. R. Tolkien, Godfather of World Bu...

A Lesson on Color

Okay, I know I said we weren't supposed to hate on the haters about the whole Rue and racism thing. And I don't intend to hate, but there was one tweet in particular that, two months later, still nags at me:







So I guess "dark brown skin" is not the same as "all the way black." I'm not entirely certain what color palette they were using, but in the interest of teaching instead of hating, I'm going to give a color lesson.*



Presented here are people with varying skin color. For each image, I...

A Common Query Problem (also Kung Fu Panda)

Disclaimer: The only query slush I read is on the internet, but there's a lot out here, and I read most of it. So don't knock it.



THE PROBLEM

Every query letter is different, but I've seen a lot lately with the same problems. It looks kinda like this:



Paragraph 1: Hook.

Paragraph 2: Innocent World.

Paragraph 3: Inciting Incident (often repeating the Hook).

All his life, Po wishes he could be a kung fu master, but he gets more than he bargained for when he's mistakenly named the legendary D...

Who's Your Favorite Villain?

I am a huge fan of sympathetic and redemptive villains. So my favorite villain of all time is . . .






FIRE PRINCE ZUKO


Honestly, he had me at Agni-Kai.



Runner-up villains include:


Darth Vader
The Operative
Lord Ruler 
And climbing the charts for me is Jaime Lannister, but it remains to be seen how sympathetic he will become (before George Martin kills him).



So who's your favorite villain?

Uncle Iroh on Revision

When I talked about why I don't hate synopses, some of you were disappointed. I talked about how I got myself to actually write one, but you wanted to know how to write one well, to which my completely useless solution was "Make it sound good."



It's good advice, but not very practical. Drafting is (for me) the hardest part of writing, but revision is where real novels are made. It's something you have to be good at to make it in this business. Unfortunately, it's not something I can give an...

Getting better at something is a very, very, slowly, gradually, very, very slow thing

And that's all I have to say about that.







(Totally unrelated, my agent sister Daisy Carter is having a Q&A with our agent on her blog. So if you've got any questions for Tricia Lawrence (and maybe want to win a free book), head on over there!)

Why Should You Get an Agent?

(Remixed from a post over two years ago, when self-publishing wasn't quite the thing it is now. I'm still of the opinion that agents are a Very Good Thing. Opinions on self-publishing can be found here.)



When I first started querying, I didn't know if I should query agents or editors. I
was only vaguely aware of what agents did. Based on my experience with
real estate agents, I knew they handled the legal stuff and took a cut,
that was about it.

I wanted help with the legal stuff, and
preferr...

How I Came to Not Hate Synopses

Synopsesesssssss, we hates them! Curse them and crush them!



But then I had to write two in a row, with no time to procrastinate. I still don't like them, but I no longer fear them. Why?



Because I found an algorithm.



STEP #1: Plan the story. Or write it, in the case where you're writing a synopsis after the draft. Either way works, but writing the synopsis before the draft makes it easier to condense things, I think.



STEP #2: Write the Crappy Synopsis. Just write everything that happens,...

Legend of Korra

Apparently the follow-up series to the greatest thing ever airs tomorrow. I'm going to have to ask the entire internet to not talk about it until they make DVDs and ship a set to Thailand.







Man, being a commodore sucks.

Why Book-to-Movie Adaptations Are So Freaking Hard

Because you're squishing a whole novel -- which, if adapted scene-for-scene would be about 4-8 hours -- into a tiny, tiny 2-hour box.
Because you're turning words that can describe anything into pure sight and sound. If the characters don't say it or do it on-screen, it never happened.
Because you're taking the individual interpretations of thousands of readers and saying, "No, actually, this is what it was like."

All of which guarantees somebody will be unhappy. Honestly, I'm shocked w...