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.
It’s that time of year when writers throw themselves into a panic over conference pitch sessions with editors and agents. As a veteran of approximately five million of these sessions, I wanted to weigh in on what has worked best for me. The most important thing to remember is that you’re not going to…
I’ve never been much of a person for scenery as my friend Diane can tell you, which is probably because I spent many decades in Kansas where the scenery is very subtle, vast oceans of field and sky, and you can only distinguish landmarks after thirty years’ careful study. One of my challenges as a…
In my current work in progress, I established early on that the main character doesn’t drink coffee. She mentions it to just about the first person she encounters, and so you would think I could remember this fact about my own character. But the other characters keep offering her coffee, and my poor main character…
If you’ve been following along, you might think when I refer to watching things blow up, I am using the phrase in a metaphorical sense, but today I actually mean it in the literal sense. That is to say, I have been watching Mythbusters on Netflix. If you’ve ever watched this show, you know…
People tell me their stories. They always have, even when I yawn and put my head down on the table or exclaim, “Look at the time! Gotta run!” Even when I say, “I’ve heard this story a thousand times, Marvin.” Even before they find out I’m a writer or that I’m an editor. They tell…
“True originality eschews its trappings.” That’s about the only thing Freud ever said that I agree with. Being a creative person — writing books, painting pictures, developing the theory of evolution — is incredibly time-consuming. It’s hard. It’s an awful lot of work. If you’re spending all of your time on appearances, on the trappings, you simply don’t…