 DavidBCoe
read all posts by DavidBCoeI’ve been staring at my computer screen for close to an hour, trying to figure out what to write for this week’s post. Every idea I come up with seems to be something that one of my MW colleagues or I have written about recently. This is one of the problems with writing a weekly post for a focused blog site like MW. With my personal blogs, if I’m bored with writing about writing, I can write about baseball or my kids or politics. I can’t really do that here. So what to do.
Well, my solution for this week is to write about ALL the ideas I came up with as I tried to find a topic. Instead of writing 800 to 1,000 words on one subject, I’m going to write a couple of hundred on several. You’re free to respond to any or all of them.
1. [...]
Continue reading On Writing: Potpourri — First Lines, Short Fiction, Dialogue
DavidBCoe
read all posts by DavidBCoeWe talk about character a lot here at Magical Words. And I mean A LOT. I’ve written about the ABCs of character, befriending characters, character development, creating minor characters, and character descriptions. Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote about characters we love and hate. That’s half a dozen character posts, and those are just from me.
There’s a reason for this, of course. Character, as any professional fiction writer will tell you, is the key to good storytelling. A story with poorly drawn characters is simply doomed to fail; a story with weak plotting or worldbuilding can often be rescued, at least partially, by stellar character work. Character development is an author’s bread and butter.
The problem with all of the stuff I’ve written about character is that it fails to take the next step, and that’s what I want to write about today. This may seem so [...]
Continue reading On Writing: Character Dynamics
DavidBCoe
read all posts by DavidBCoeI’ve been asked quite often why I never went back to write more books in my first series, the LonTobyn Chronicle. There are several reasons — I had other things I wanted to write, I had completed the story I set out to tell, I felt that I outgrew the worldbuilding — but probably the main reason is that I got bored with my lead characters, Jaryd and Alayna. They were both so . . . nice (and I say that with as much of a sneer as I can manage) that after a while I just wanted to slap them both. They were virtuous and kind, generous and wise beyond their years. Their faults were superficial, their magical powers the stuff of future legend. They were, in short, just the sort of people I would wind up hating in real life. By the end of the series, they seemed [...]
Continue reading On Writing: Characters to Love, Characters to Hate
DavidBCoe
read all posts by DavidBCoeFirst off, sorry for the delay in getting this posted. I was at Marcon this weekend, with Faith and Lucienne, and had a wonderful time. We got to see Daniel and Donald, and we met a few new people as well. Fun time. As soon as I got home, I was off to a Passover Seder at the home of a friend, so I didn’t get the chance to write this post ahead of time, as I usually do.
Second, check out the IGMS advertisement just to the right of this post. That is the artwork for “A Memory of Freedom,” by D.B. Jackson. It is the feature story for this month’s issue of Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. This is a Thieftaker story, and that figure in the ad is one artist’s rendering of Ethan Kaille, the lead character of the Thieftaker books. I hope you’ll visit the [...]
Continue reading The Writing Life: Fear, Want, Dissatisfaction, Defiance
DavidBCoe
read all posts by DavidBCoeA while back, I wrote a post on the value of ambition in which I discussed various forms of ambition and the ways each of them had benefited my art and my career. I would like to offer a companion piece to that first post, by focusing on a second quality — tenacity — that a) has served me well over the years, and b) manifests itself in different forms.
Tenacity: noun — Persistence in maintaining, adhering to, or seeking something valued or desired. (from Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.)
There are actually a couple of other definitions of the word, but this is the one that most fully gets at the essence of what the word means to me. And hey, it’s my post . . .
Writing is an endeavor — and a profession — that can be absolutely brutal on those who tend to give up [...]
Continue reading The Writing Life: The Value of Tenacity
DavidBCoe
read all posts by DavidBCoeA couple of weeks ago, I posted about aspects of the writing/publishing business that had surprised me over the course of my career. I touched on a lot of the unpleasant surprises that the business throws our way; I have to admit that it wasn’t my most uplifting post. In response to what I wrote, one of our loyal readers, known in these parts as Pea Faerie, asked a terrific, albeit sad question: At what point do you throw in the towel?
I thought I would address that today, because the fact is nearly every professional writer faces this question at one point or another in the course of his or her career. This is a hard business, and our careers rarely follow a linear path upward. I would urge you all to re-read Misty’s beautiful post from a few weeks ago, in which she so eloquently addressed her own [...]
Continue reading The Writing Life: When Do You Give Up?
DavidBCoe
read all posts by DavidBCoeEighteen years ago this month, I received a call from an editor at Tor Books asking me if I could please send his way all the completed chapters and outlines of what would become my first published novel, Children of Amarid. It took a while to get the contract settled, another fourteen months passed before I turned in the completed first draft of the book, and it took two years after that (revisions, polishing, production issues) to get the book out in stores. But still, this is the eighteenth anniversary of what I think of as the beginning of my writing career.
In the time since, I have published eleven more books and several short stories. I have two more books in production and several others written and still looking for a home. My career has seen high points, low points and everything in between, and I have learned a [...]
Continue reading On Publishing: Five Things About the Business that Surprised Me
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