 Lucienne Diver
read all posts by Lucienne DiverSo, I’m stalling, because I know I have to write a piece for Magical Words for today and I have absolutely no ideas. Nada. Zilch. Not because I don’t have a lot to say. (Just try to shut me up.) But because I’ve done so many blogs and articles and talks at this point that I feel I’ve said it all.
I’m playing around with ideas. Maybe I’ll have Tori Karacis, my PI who can literally stop men in their tracks, aka the heroine of my Latter-Day Olympians series, interview me in a shameless self-promotional gambit. (Plug: the second in the series, Crazy in the Blood, comes out in print in July and the third, Rise of the Blood, releases in digital in September.)
I can hear it now:
Tori: Hey, chicky, so you went to Greece and all I got was this lousy book? (See Rise of the [...]
Continue reading Thanks, Mr. Hart
 Diana Pharaoh Francis
What do you do when you read a book (or start reading it) that everyone on the planet seems to like and get and you don’t?* Stop reading is the obvious answer, but I’m a writer, and I can’t stand the idea of giving up on a book. I also hate thinking that I’m not getting the book somehow. That I’m at fault, because if everyone else is falling in love with the book, why can’t I? It’s also a writerly quirk where I want to dissect the way a book works. I don’t dissect books that I like because I enjoy them and because it’s easy to see what works (for me, that is). It’s really tough to figure out how a book works if you don’t like it. Especially that hard-to-define something that captures the heart and imagination of a reader. That something that we all want to [...]
Continue reading Only Words Will Show the Way
 Faith Hunter
read all posts by Faith HunterOn Monday, our own Mindy Klasky started a series on how she writes a synopsis, which I am dying to read because … uh … I have no idea how I do it. I mean, I do it, I write them, but I don’t know if I do it right. I know I must have my own way of constructing a synopsis because I have never read anyone else’s synopsis. Synopses. (shrugs) I’ve learned a lot from the other writers here at MagicalWords.net, and I am looking forward to her process.
Through MW, I have discovered one major way in which Mindy and David (and probably everyone else for that matter) do character research and planning in the pre-writing phase. They have their characters histories fully fleshed out, sometimes down to their childhood sports injuries, their pets’ names, the schools they went to (the characters, not the pets) and their [...]
Continue reading Character Preparation … Stuff I Don’t Do
Diana Pharaoh Francis
One of the things that this investigation following the Boston bombing has reminded me of is character building. This is the writing disease, to connect even awful things to writing. Graham Greene said every writer has to have a splinter of ice in his heart, that he has to be able to be inside a terrible situation and still observe and record. As I look at how the cops are trying to piece together these men and understand the how, why, when and so on, I realized how similar that is to what writers do.
Don’t think she’s not got a motive and means. She’s just looking for opportunity.
I have a character in my WIP. (Wow, how crazy is that? Having a character in my WIP? Moving on, Dr. Obvious . . . ). Anyhow, I began with what she looks like and her name. As I started [...]
Continue reading Writers as Cops
Diana Pharaoh Francis
While at Norwescon, I was on a panel talking about rogues, heroes and anti-heroes. Apparently the subject is still bugging me, because I feel the need to continue it here, talking about anti-heroes in particular. The usual anti-heroes that I think of when the subject comes up is Elric of Melnibone and Thomas Covenant. I hate Thomas. Never liked him. Couldn’t get through the first book even. But I loved Elric. It’s been so long since I’ve read those books, though, that I can’t tell you why. They are all packed up and waiting for my eventual move that I can’t get to them either and have another look.
The conclusion of the panel was that anti-heroes do good accidentally or only selfishly. They frequently cause chaos. We talked about how heroes and anti-heroes can both be dark and do horrible things, sometimes for good, sometimes for not so good [...]
Continue reading Hero or Anti-hero?
Faith Hunter
read all posts by Faith HunterI was listening to an NPR show one morning on the way to the lab, (a rerun, surely) and they were talking about books, interesting characters, the psychology of loss, and Scrooge. I never got the name of the show, but it had a varied and almost dissonant cast of professionals, including a psychologist, a book reviewer, and the host, among others. If I hadn’t been driving I’d have taken notes, but it’s a long winding country road to the lab, and so I didn’t. What I did was let the ideas being tossed around by the guests ferment in my brain and combine with the thoughts from the post that I wrote on the 6th about Chaos and Order. This could be part two. Or not. We’ll see how it plays out.
In the previous post I said that: Order without chaos is entropy, and entropy is death. That [...]
Continue reading Of Loss, Brokenness, and Scrooge
Diana Pharaoh Francis
I watch The Next Great Baker. The final episode was last night or so–I recorded it, so I’m not remembering exactly. Anyhow, it got to the end and it was down to three different women. One of whom, Gretel-Ann, sabotaged one of the other bakers (not for the first time during the competition), and that baker ended up losing the semi-final because of it. Specifically she turned the oven to the wrong temperature so that the cupcakes were ruined and she hid baking sheets so the other two bakers wouldn’t have enough. Since the competition was based on how much each could produce and sell, obviously that hurt the others.
So there she is in the final. The last two have to bake a big cake all about Las Vegas and it should also tell a story. We get down to the presentation and GA tells a sob story about [...]
Continue reading Next Great Baker and Building Characters
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