• “The smartest historical sci-fi adventure-romance story ever written by a science Ph.D. with a background in scripting 'Scrooge McDuck' comics.”—Salon.com
  • A time-hopping, continent-spanning salmagundi of genres.”
    —ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
  • “These books have to be word-of-mouth books because they're too weird to describe to anybody.”
    —Jackie Cantor, Diana's first editor

Tag Archive for ‘Diana Gabaldon Building a Scene Legos’ rss

Building Scenes

Somebody had asked me (well, and everybody else), on the Compuserve forum, what the “legos” of building a scene are. How do you do it? Given that there are undoubtedly as many answers to that as there are writers…this is a brief example of how _I_ do it. Fwiw. [g] [Section ? God Willing and the Creek Don't Rise] OK, I began this—oddly enough –with the first line. I had a good-sized chunk—25,000 words or so—written and assembled, which (again, oddly) begins the book. That was neatly tied off, in structural terms, though. So I needed a way into Whatever Happens Next. So I began with the worms. Claire’s generally the default voice for me, and since at least part of What Happens Next would be on the Ridge, unless I specifically “heard” Jamie or Young Ian, it would likely be her explaining what the state of the wicket was. So I began to sink into her. Well, I knew it was now spring, because we’d been waiting for the […]