writing
Turkeys and writers
Happy Christmas, everyone. And as you’re sitting at your table tomorrow, bloated and dyspeptic and stunned by the tryptophan in your roasted meleagris, you may find yourself wondering, How did Laurie King come to be a writer? Well, if you are able to stagger as far as your computer screen, you can have your answer,…
Read MoreTo everything, a season
There are as many styles of writing as there are writers—and I don’t mean the words on the page; I mean how they get there. I have writer friends who work set hours, every day without fail, year around, as if they were clocking in at a warehouse or office. I know others who take…
Read MoreListening to the story
This part of writing, the rewrite, is why I’m glad I don’t have to produce two or three books a year. And it’s why I’m glad (well, almost glad) that I’m not a writer who locks herself into an outline. Because what I’m doing now is listening to the story. The first draft gives me…
Read MoreEnd games
I’m finishing my trio of posts over at the Well Read Donkey today, on endings. While also working ten hour days refining the final draft. I wonder if my post over there makes the least bit of sense?
Read MorePlots & PostIts
I’m over at Kepler’s Well Read Donkey again today, talking about plots, problems, and PostIts (with a photo of the last, a small avalanche of the yellow lined PostIts I use, then fold in half when I remove them so I know it’s a point I’ve finished with.)
Read MoreCongratulations, Ms King, it’s an ending
Yesterday was crunch day. I’d worked my way through the rewrite, incorporating half a tree’s worth of PostIts and a brick of graphite, and reached the final scene. I wrote it back in April, which as you may or may not remember was a busy time anyway for LRK and her e-world, and although there…
Read MoreThe City and The Writer
So there I was, smack in the middle of the kind of plot problems that come when you’ve written a complicated first draft through some really difficult times, when the ever-clever Rick Kleffel asks me to talk into a microphone for him. He was doing an NPR piece for All Things Considered about a pair…
Read MoreConferences I love
Corte Madera is a small town on the freeway just north of San Francisco, out of the main summer fog belt but close enough to feel its cooling effects. Every July, Book Passage runs a mystery writing conference, limited to around 80 people, although it seems as if the published writers outnumber the would-be writers,…
Read MoreThe devil’s in the details
I hate plots. Why do I need a plot, anyway? I have 300 pages of all these great scenes with all these grand characters, and then I have to sit down and do a rewrite that makes sure it all makes sense. Because a mystery novel kind of needs to make sense. Mainstream fiction can…
Read MoreWeek twelve: research
The excellent Tony Broadbent, whose books I adore (surely Jethro the cat burglar and Mary Russell met, sometime?) asks, what is the proper collective noun for a set of Russells? A hive? A buzz? A sting? He nominates honey-pot—and please note: pot, not bucket. The lady in question has posted a Myspace blog today, for…
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