How a Book Is Born, Part 12
In which I decide to kill off a character. And then rescind the decision.
In which I decide to kill off a character. And then rescind the decision.
I usually spend some mornings each week at my favorite coffee shop, working. The change of scenery is good for me, and sometimes if I have to spend one more hour in my own house, I won’t be responsible for my actions. But occasionally I go somewhere else, because sometimes (not too often!) change is…
When I decided a few years ago to seriously pursue my lifelong dream of becoming a novelist, I knew it would take a lot of time and effort and a certain amount of sacrifice. Those were all acceptable choices to me, considering what I hoped to gain at the end of it. What I didn’t…
So yesterday I was talking about the difficulty of setting priorities when you have a lot of competing demands and some of the work may prove unnecessary in the long run, but if you don’t do it, you may starve and how this whole situation leads to dithering and spending time doing less important tasks…
This week I heard from a lot of people who are disenchanted with the books they’re writing or have written. Most of the writers I know work in nonfiction, which you sell on the basis of a proposal, and once you have a contract, you write the book. It’s a tough slog, but you sort…
When I first started writing about Lucinda, the female protagonist of The Wanderer series, I gave her a love interest, Lord Stephen, and then I gave him a personal bodyguard named Simon. Originally I thought I would give Simon a love interest of his own in one of the books of the series, and I…
I am trying to find the language I want to use to talk about doing the work in such a way that you get better and better at it. By that I don’t mean you find shortcuts and keyboard macros. I mean you learn to tell the story in a more emotionally resonant way, or…