Day: April 16, 2012

fantasy · General · reading · Teaser Tuesdays

Teaser Tuesday: Cetaganda

Sonia Lal30 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

* Grab your current read
* Open to a random page
* Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
* Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My Teasers:

“Ivan . . . left with a lady.”

“What, again? Here? Now? Does the boy have no sense of time or place? This isn’t Emperor Gregor’s Birthday Party, dammit.”

– Cetaganda by Lois McMaster Bujold

General

N is for No Ideas

Sonia Lal16 Comments

It’s not that I’ve no ideas for short stories right now; I’ve several. It’s that I am not entirely sure how to write them down.

Where do I start? What character do I start with?

It’s not like writer’s block (which I don’t believe in anyway.) Writer’s block is supposed to be when a writer has no ideas at all about a story. You stare at the blank page and your mind is blank, too. You got no characters, no plot, no world, nothing. Not even the seed of an idea.

You need to start at the beginning, right? But where is the beginning? That’s the question. I don’t know.

Personally, I think this means I just to think about the story a little bit more. Or maybe I will just write the scenes I do and worry about the beginning later. No one ever said the story has to be written linearly. I could jump around the timeline and piece it all together later.

There is trouble with that approach – making sure all the pieces fit and follow each other and don’t develop a big gaping hole – but I am not sure what else to do.

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