"Holly Lisle - Mugging The Muse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

you've created him well enough, one of these days you'll try to plug him into
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 MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY 32

a scene and he'll look at you and say тАЬI'm not doing that.тАЭ) And even while
you're angry with him, you'll be thrilled that he's real enough to stand up for
himself.

And don't do a superb job of developing your main character and ignore
everyone else. At barest minimum, you should feel that you have intimate
knowledge of the two or three characters who take center stage in each of
the first three or for scenes you've planned .


тАв Know your conflict.

This should be fairly obvious, but I overlooked it in most of those thirty-
page false starts. Conflict is the engine that drives any novel, and if you try
to write one without first making sure you have an engine, you're not going
to get far. Write out your conflict. (Or conflicts.) And don't go for the big
generalities. тАЬGerri versus men,тАЭ is a conflict, all right, but when you're
stuck on chapter five and you look at your notes for something that will help
you get back on track, something along the lines of тАЬGerri's hatred of her
father drives her to take up with dependent men that she can then abandon,
and the man she has now abandoned intends to kill herтАЭ might actually aim
you in the right direction again.



тАв Embrace a theme.
Know whether the story you are writing is about good versus evil, or about
the transcendence of love, or about anything that can go wrong going
wrong. You'll find additional themes as you're writing that will add depth
and resonance to your main theme, and sometimes the main theme will shift
focus part way through the book, but if you don't know what the theme is to
begin with, you won't have any control of it when it shifts. And theme more
than anything else is what will unify the beginning of your book with the
end.



тАв Determine a voice.
For salable novels, you need to resign yourself to either first person (Let me
tell you about the time I found a diamond in my soup, and almost got killed
by a hit man.) or third person (The stranger picked up his spoon and stirred
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 MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY 33

it through his chili. He chuckled and glanced up at the waitress. тАЬLet me tell
you about the time I found a diamond in by soup, and almost got killed by a