Patricia Wrede

The most important thing, though, is to figure out how you write—whether you’re a page-a-day-at-nine-a.m. slogger or a burst writer who can crank out ten thousand words in one marathon session at the computer but then has to sit around doing nothing for a week or two in order to recharge.

Or there’s the sort who sort of graze constantly, producing a paragraph here and a sentence there all through the day or week, feeling as if you aren’t getting anything done until you get to Friday and notice that you have written an entire chapter when you “weren’t working.”

f you just look slantwise at normal, everyday things, it becomes a habit after a while, and pretty soon you have more ideas than you know what to do with.

Anything can be the start of a story if you look at it right—but you have to be looking at it, not at “I want a story.”

Nearly every writer has what I call a “default setting” for most of the basic pieces of writing. They tend, for instance, to automatically write in first- or third-person, or from multiple viewpoints.

This is a big part of figuring out your process and your defaults—figuring out whether you get the most out of learning specific pieces and then putting them together later, or from just jumping into the deep end and trying to not drown.)

Career writers are constantly torn between playing to their strengths (which often means writing the same kind of story over and over) and developing their weak points so as to have a broader range of possibilities available.

developed a large fan base that is perfectly happy to have the same thing over and over.

Still others begin pushing all their limits as hard as possible right from the get-go, striving to get their skills up to some arbitrary level before they allow themselves to relax, and others only push in one area at a time.

My first novel defaulted to an awkward (in retrospect) multiple-viewpoint /omniscient format; for my second, I deliberately chose to write single viewpoint, tight third-person. My current default values are for plot-centered, tight third-person, single-viewpoint, stand-alone stories that take place over a relatively limited time period, usually a few days to a coup