David Drake

Written for the Tor/Forge May 2010 Newsletter

THE MOTORCYCLE WAY TO COMPLEX PLOTTING

Writers use various tools in their work. One of my tools is my motorcycle.

Well, plural: my motorcycles. Bikers learn quickly that if they expect to ride every day, they’d better have two. (And that’s if they’re Japanese, as both of my current rides are. More exotic bikes tend to be two-wheeled versions of owning a Lotus Elan.) continue reading…

Cover art: Donato

My friend Mark Van Name is, among other things, a business consultant. After I sold the final trilogy in the Isles Series to Tor but before I started work on the three books, he asked me if I would like him to do a business analysis of the Isles fantasies. I said I would appreciate that. (It would never have occurred to me to ask.)

Mark shortly provided a written report, which he went over with me. I won’t describe his methodology, but even if it hadn’t seemed valid on its face, I would have accepted it anyway: Mark is an expert on the subject; I am not. I don’t argue with experts in their own fields. continue reading…

How complete do you make the plot of a story before you write it?

I do very heavy plots. I usually have at least 10% of the story/novel wordage in the plot. Here’s an example: the plot for The Far Side of the Stars, with the working title The Far Side of Heaven. Scenes were re-ordered numerically as I wrote the book.

Do you write sequentially, from beginning of the plot to the end?

I do plots beginning to end, and I do very long plots, but there’s not a right way.

Did you take the plot of THE SHARP END from Kurosawa’s Yojimbo or from Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars?

No, I took the plot from Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, his first novel (a fixup from novellas he’d written for Black Mask magazine in the late 1920s). Kurosawa took Hammett’s plot for his fine Samurai film (I’m told there may have been a Japanese gangster novel as an intermediary, but I haven’t seen it myself), and Leone then turned Kurosawa’s film into the first of his Spaghetti Westerns. I’m familar with (and like) both films, but I read Hammett before I saw them and have reread him often since then. I’m a little surprised to be asked this question so often, because my credit to Hammett in the front of the novel is explicit. Apparently a lot of people expect more originality of the film industry than I do.

Dear People,

I intended to start this newsletter by saying that I’d completed the plot of the next RCN space opera and am at work on it. Those things are true (we’ll get back to them), but in my mind the big news is that I’ve returned from BookExpo America (BEA) in the Javits Center on Manhattan.  continue reading…

Video Interviews:

In 2008  Blackfive TV did a six-part series of video interviews, sponsored by Baen Books. They are all posted on the Baen Webscription site, and at the Blackfive TV blog site.  You can also find them on YouTube.

Dave talks about his background, writers who influenced him including early SF writers, his military service in the Blackhorse in Vietnam and Cambodia, how he started writing military SF, working with Jim Baen, and generally about his writing career.  He ends with a message for the troops.

Dear People,

Folks frequently ask me how long it takes to write a novel. (People ask me a lot of questions that presumably seem simpler from the outside than they do to me.) The answer depends on a lot of things, in particular the length of the novel. (I average about a thousand words of rough draft per day; thus a novel of 135K words takes around two weeks longer to write than a similar book that was 120K words long.)  continue reading…

Dear People,

Foof. I _did_ finish IN THE STORMY RED SKY, the latest RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera, as I said in #45 that I hoped to do soon. Usually by the time I’m three-quarters of the way through the rough draft, I start to come out of the Slough of Despond (“This book is crap. People would find a phone book more interesting. My career is doomed.”) This book was more of a stretch than most, and it depressed me more and longer than most do.  continue reading…

Dear People,

For a moment I thought was going to start somewhere else, but no: the big news this time is still that I’ve finished the plot for the next RCN (Leary/Mundy) space opera and expect to begin writing very soon. My working title is IN THE STORMY RED SKY, but that may change. Possibly to CRUISER CAPTAIN. I’ll run options by my demon support staff soon.  continue reading…