Beth Hudson's Blog, page 3

What Are Stories For?

Stories are an integral part of human existence. We create stories from the time we are old enough to understand words until the time we can no longer understand them. Our dreams are filled with stories, whether everyday or fantastic. Stories define how we understand the world. But what are they for, and why are they so important?I’m no psychologist, nor am I a neurologist or an anthropologist (with the exception of my single semester of grad school in anthropology). What I am is a writer, an...

The Cost of Writing

Why are books so expensive? Fifteen to thirty dollars for a fiction hardback, ten to twenty-five for a trade paperback, and a mass market paperback can run you over ten dollars. Even e-books can cost you five to ten dollars, or even more depending on how popular the author is, or how ambitious the author/publisher is. Who has that kind of money to spend? Isn’t it just a collection of words? Why not just dig up a torrent and read it for free? What does that really hurt?Of course, I’m an author...

Bland or Beautiful: Standing Out from the Crowd

Recently I’ve been entering some Goodreads giveaways, because, free books. Since ideally I’d like to get books I want to read, I check out the book blurbs ahead of time, and I’m seeing some patterns. It’s easy enough to avoid the ones that simply state their sub-genre (for instance, I’m not big into Paranormal Romance), but there are more subtle clues that I probably don’t want to read something. Ignoring for the moment those blurbs that are just badly written, making me avoid them for fear t...

Guns-on-the-Wall

If a writer tailors their writing toward a reader, rather than writing something intended to be purely private, they need to keep the reader’s expectations in mind. In a sense, there is an agreement that the writer enters into with the reader; an agreement that the writer will give the reader what they need in order to make sense of the story. To this end, the writer uses all their tools; characterization, setting, action, worldbuilding, and all the others that the writer carries around in th...

Precise or Purple: How Much Detail Is Too Much?

This is a hard question, because tastes differ a lot from writer to writer and from reader to reader. Between Hemingway and Melville is a gigantic gap, and both of them are rightly considered as masters of American literature. As a reader, I’m not terribly fond of either, though I can appreciate their respective techniques. There are also books I have loved which have lush detail, and books I have loved that have sparser, targeted details. But certainly there is more than one way to write a g...