by Melinda Snodgrass | Oct 30, 2014 | About Writing
On Tuesday evenings I go over to Len Wien and Christina Valada’s house for dinner, and then Len and T and I watch three TV shows back to back — The Flash, Agents of SHIELD and Person of Interest. Len has dubbed it Action Tuesday which is a great name for it. Person of Interest continues to be the best show on television (more on that later), but it was a moment in AOS that caught my attention and made me think again how much easier it is to write a script where shorthand and...
by Melinda Snodgrass | Oct 16, 2014 | About Writing
I ran up against an interesting problem today while I was working on the space opera. Given the trouble we ran into on Star Trek: The Next Generation I should have seen it coming, but it really hit home today. Contented characters aren’t very interesting and the problems that afflict them are usually of the emotional variety and that’s hard to dramatize. I’ve got two view point characters in this book (I touched on the problems that may cause in my last post) but today a...
by Melinda Snodgrass | Oct 12, 2014 | About Writing
You may not know it but a lot of writers like to set challenges for themselves. Can I write a novel or short story strictly following the fairy tale format? Let me see if I can write an unreliable narrator. I’m going to tackle first person (much harder then you think). So the writing challenge I set for myself with the space opera was having only two view point characters — my hero and heroine, and alternating scenes between them. So I’m closing in on 60,000 words and...
by Melinda Snodgrass | Jul 28, 2014 | About Writing
I’m having one of those days where I am questioning everything about this current novel. I finished a book that is just one action event after another, and my book has none of that because it’s set in the first year at a military academy, and it’s establishing all the relationships and the world and setting up all these hooks that will pay off later. The violence will take place on the sports field, and in a duel, and training exercises gone wrong, but the big kabooms...
by Melinda Snodgrass | Jul 3, 2014 | About Writing
I had an interesting experience on Tuesday. I went to work in the morning, and started rereading the scene I had written the day before. The scene had been fighting me, and I couldn’t figure out why. As I reread I suddenly realized that this particular professor wasn’t giving a standard lecture. He was reacting to a profound change that had occurred at this military academy, and that this was off the cuff. I went back and just subtly changed the emphasis and the focus. Most...
by Melinda Snodgrass | Jun 8, 2014 | About Writing
I’ve discovered something about writing today. I’ve discovered what’s really hard. Especially when you are not in a contemporary setting, but instead creating a future world. If you’re writing a historical you can research and there are answers to tiny niggling questions. You don’t get to do that in your own future history. You have to make it up whole cloth, and damn it slows you down. I’m working on my space opera and the first book is set at the...
