by Melinda Snodgrass | Apr 15, 2016 | About Writing
There have been questions about how I plot and outline. I learned this technique when I was working on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and it’s used on every television show. I use it for the movies I write as well. And then it occurred to me — this could work for novels too. Not in as much detail, not every scene, but the big scenes, the “tent pole” moments could be laid out. I’m going to actually put up a photo of the next Imperials novel, but please...
by Melinda Snodgrass | Mar 29, 2016 | General
So I hosted a cream tea on Friday. George R.R. had urged me to do something to welcome Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer to Santa Fe and to give them a chance to meet some of the cool people who live here. George also wanted to show off my house which is very beautiful with an 80 mile view out the glass wall of the living room. It sounded like a fun idea so I invited a group of novelists and screenwriters. Including Ed Khamara — he wrote Lady Hawk and Enemy Mine, Bruce McKenna — he...
by Melinda Snodgrass | Mar 27, 2016 | About Writing, Blog, TV & Movies
I’ve done a lot of adaptations. It’s a tricky skill, but fun. You have to take from the underlying material the essential themes, the emotional sense of the work, keep the characters relatively intact, but be willing to make changes because film and print are two different mediums and they tell stories in different ways. The emotional impact is ultimately the same, but how you get there is different. You have to know what to cut and what to expand. Right now I’m watching...
by Melinda Snodgrass | Mar 20, 2016 | TV & Movies
I just finished watching Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace back to back. Guess what — Quantum isn’t a bad movie. The problem was that it was the second half of a movie that got broken into two parts. Quantum seems to pick up like one day after the end of Royale, but for viewers two years had passed and by then we’d forgotten a lot of the details. Bond is killing his way through people as he tries to find out who was behind Vesper’s death, but his rage and obsession...
by Melinda Snodgrass | Mar 16, 2016 | About Writing
I’ve been doing my final rewrite of the second novel in my space opera series. I’ve only got a couple of chapters to go before it’s as cooked as I can get it. Late this afternoon I went back to a scene that had stumped me earlier in the day. I realized I had used internal dialog where a son is reflecting on his father’s devotion to the ruling class and how the son rebelled against that. The moment just felt flat to me and then I realized, both men are in the same space. Why not have them...
