"Mercedes Lackey - Fiddler Fair" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

Some of the things in them I winced at when I read againтАФI had no idea of how to write a well-viewpointed story, for
instance, and someone should have locked my thesaurus away and not given it back to me for a while! And insofar as
the march of technology goesтАФthe earliest were written on my very first computer, which had no hard-drive, a
whopping four kilobytesтАФ(thatтАЩs kilobytes, not megabytes)тАФof RAM, and had two single sided single density disk
drives. I wrote five whole books and many short stories on that machine, which did not have a spell-check function,
either. On the other hand, if ewe sea watt effect modern spell-checkers halve on righting, perhaps it that was knot a
bad thing. ItтАЩs just as well; if it had, it would have taken half a day to spell-check twenty pages. So for those of you
who are wailing that you canтАЩt possibly try to write because you only have an ancient 286 with a 40-meg hard-drive . . .
forgive me if I raise a sardonic eyebrow. Feh, I say! Feh!
I held down a job as a computer programmer for American Airlines during seven of those ten years, and every
minute that I wasnтАЩt working, I was writing. I gave up hobbies, I stopped going to movies, I didnтАЩt watch television; I
wrote. Not less than five hours every day, all day on Saturday and Sunday. I wanted to be able to write for a living,
and the only way to get better at writing is to do it. I managed to slow down a bit after being able to quit that job, but I
still generally write every day, not less than ten pages a day. And that is the answer to the often-asked question,
тАЬHow do you become a writer?тАЭ You write. You write a great deal. You give up everything else so that you can
concentrate on writing.
There are many fine books out there (the title usually begins with тАЬHow to Write . . .тАЭ) to teach you the mechanics
of writing. Ray Bradbury has also written an excellent book on the subject. You only learn the soul of writing with
practice. Practice will make you betterтАФor it will convince you that maybe what you really want to do is go into
furniture restoration and get your own television show on The Learning Channel.
Here are the answers to a few more frequently asked questions:

How do you develop an idea?
Mostly what we do is to look at what we have done in the past and try to do something different. As for finding
ideas, I can only say that finding them is easy; they come all the time. Deciding which ones are worth developing is the
difficult part. To find an idea, you simply never accept that there are absolute answers for anything, and as Theodore
Sturgeon said, тАЬYou ask the next questionтАЭ continuously. For example: one story evolved from seeing a piece of paper
blowing across the highway in an uncannily lifelike manner, and asking myself, тАЬWhat if that was a real, living creature
disguised as a piece of paper?тАЭ The next questions were, тАЬWhy would it be in disguise?тАЭ and тАЬWhat would it be?тАЭ
and тАЬWhat would happen if someone found out what it really was ?тАЭ

Do you ever get тАЬwriterтАЩs blockтАЭ and what do you do about it?
When I get stalled on something, I do one of two things. I either work on another project (I always have one book
in the outline stage and two in the writing stage, and I will also work on short stories at the same time) or I discuss the
situation with Larry. Working with another personтАФsometimes even simply verbalizing a snagтАФalways gets the book
unstuck. There is a perfectly good reason for this: when you speak about something you actually move it from one
side of the brain to the other, and often that alone shakes creativity loose.

How do you do revisions?
I may revise the ending of the book between outlining and actual writing, but that is only because a more logical
and satisfying conclusion presents itself. I am really not thinking of anything other than that. The only other revisions
are at the request of the publisher, and may vary from none to clarifying minor points or further elaborating a minor
point. In the case of clarification, this amounts to less than 1,000 words in a book of 120,000 or more. In the case of
elaboration this usually amounts to the addition of 5,000 words to 10,000 words, generally less.

Would you call your books тАЬcharacter driven?тАЭ
I think that is quite correct, my books are character-driven. To me. How people react to a given situation is what
makes a story interesting. History is nothing more than a series of peopleтАЩs reactions, after all, and many тАЬalternate
historyтАЭ stories have been written about тАЬwhat would have happened if.тАЭ The ideaтАФthe situationтАФis only half the story.
What the characters do about it is the other.