Whut asked Lois McMaster Bujold:

I've seen that you plot by thinking "what's the worst thing that can happen to THIS guy," but I wanted to ask if you could dive into how this blossoms into a full novel?

Lois McMaster Bujold "How do I write my books?" is a short question with an answer much too long for this tiny typing box. I have answered a bunch of questions on my writing process earlier in this column, but, alas, no search function. You might try scrolling back a ways.

But this oft-quoted dictum is actually about justly matching plot to character, not about random character-torture as is often misconstrued. "What's the most interesting thing that could happen to this character next (or, for the more active sorts, "that this character could do next") that I haven't already done?" is closer to my real start-point/s.

I have a bunch of stuff on my process already written out at length in The Vorkosigan Companion (at Kindle https://www.amazon.com/Vorkosigan-Com... and other e-vendors.) This was pulled together in the mid-00s, so the parts where I talk about making printouts on paper of my drafts for editing are now obsolete -- it's pixels all the way since the mid-teens -- but the creative/organizing parts are still much the same.

(Also check your local library -- I see mine still has a copy available.)

I was glancing over the volume for the first time in a while, to be sure it contained what you'd asked for on writing process, and was most struck by what's happened to the ebooks market since the huge game-changing impact of Kindle -- at that time I was still on the early ebooks vendor Fictionwise, later bought up and absorbed by Nook.

Ta, L.

(I should probably make a blog post on the Companion. I bet a lot of newer readers don't know it exists.)

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