Category: Adventures in the Writing Life

Thought for the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

I’m personally of the opinion that revenge is morally dubious as all hell; but it undeniably makes a great story engine for a piece of fiction.  It gives your character a large and important (and possibly dangerous) goal to work toward; it implies an interesting backstory of some variety; it insures that your character is either going to have to get off his duff and do something or at the very least spend some interesting screen time justifying the fact that he isn’t; and it provides lots of hooks on which to hang moral and ethical and social debate if you go in for that sort of thing.

As plot devices go, you can’t beat it with a stick.

A Two-Plot Problem

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Most stories have two plots, the internal or emotional plot and the external plot.  Which plot is the primary one depends upon the genre and the writer. Continue reading “A Two-Plot Problem” →

It Has to Go Somewhere

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

The question of “embedded exposition” came up again the other day, and I said: Continue reading “It Has to Go Somewhere” →

Plotting in Corners

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

One of the things I like say about plot, on those occasions when I’ve been encouraged to pontificate about such matters, is that in my opinion plot is necessary but it’s not important — that it’s not the story, it’s just the ropes and pegs and tentpoles that make the story into a habitable space and not a flat puddle of metaphorical canvas. Continue reading “Plotting in Corners” →

It’s More of a Guideline

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

Everybody in this  business, it seems sometimes, has a set of Rules for Writing that they swear by.  In no particular order, then, here’s my own set of ten (bearing in mind that this list, like all such lists, should be regarded as having a bright red In My Opinion Only/This is How it Works for Me sign posted above it in flashing letters): Continue reading “It’s More of a Guideline” →

What You Do

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

True story: A few years back, I was talking with an aspiring writer who did the usual and ubiquitous Something With Computers for a living, and who was also a jazz drummer by avocation. He had, he said, been a professional drummer for a while, and had earned decent money playing the drums for groups who did the local bar and lounge circuit in his somewhat tourist-infested area.

“But I had to give it up,” he said. “I realized that if I had to do one more request for ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon,’ I was going to lose the joy of playing music altogether.”

Then he went on to ask me — because we were mostly talking about writing at the time, and people will ask writers questions like this — if I thought that he should quit his current day job and try to make it as a freelance writer.

“No,” I said. “Because if playing one too many requests for ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ nearly drove you away from jazz, the same thing would happen with fiction — because the sorry truth is that if you want to write fiction for a living, then one way or another you’re going to wind up playing ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon’ a hell of a lot of the time.”

Five Ways to Write a Chapter, and One that Worked

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

“Save the pitched-out awful pages someplace where you can find them again,” I said. “Sometimes the discarded bits turn out to come in handy later. I think I told the folks at Viable Paradise the story of The Five Different Chapter Nines and the Adventure of the Too-Short Novel didn’t I?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said, “though my memory is appalling. It sounds like a charming story. Do I have to go again this year to hear it?”

Nope, she didn’t, and neither do you. The way it goes: Continue reading “Five Ways to Write a Chapter, and One that Worked” →

Why I Don’t Write (Many) Short Stories

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

I tend to think of short stories as “one-joke stories” (in which the joke isn’t necessarily a funny one): that is, a short story has the time and the room to do only one thing, and you have to be absolutely clear in your mind what that one thing is. Continue reading “Why I Don’t Write (Many) Short Stories” →

“Who are YOU?” said the Caterpillar.

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Who am I?  I’m Debra Doyle, the “Dr. Doyle” of “Dr. Doyle’s Editorial and Critique Services”, and this is my brand-new blog.

Why am I here? As I’ve explained elsewhere:

For business, I write. About the only thing I’ve ever done for money besides writing—if we don’t count a stint working in the dishroom of the cafeteria while I was in college, which, really, let’s not—has been teaching:  Freshman composition (under the various trendy names it’s gone by over the past two or three decades), which wasn’t really that much fun; and fiction (yearly at the Viable Paradise workshop since 1997), which was and is considerably more enjoyable.

What do I do? With my co-author James D. Macdonald, I write science fiction and fantasy. We’ve been in the business for over two decades now, and seen a lot of changes in the field, but we’re still here and still writing. On my own, I do the freelance editorial and critique work that will be the primary focus—but not the only subject; I know myself too well to promise that—of this blog.

What about the “Doctor” bit? That’s real. I did my graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, and received a doctorate in English, with my main area of concentration being Old English and my secondary area being Old Icelandic. Surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly—the sf/fantasy field is full of renegade medievalists), this turned out to be excellent preparation for writing science fiction and fantasy, and for doing critique work as well.