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You’ve fallen in love with your protagonist, but will your readers?

Many, if not most, authors love their main characters because to some extent they are a more perfect version of themselves. Your protagonist may be the person you wish you were, particularly if you made him or her brave, resolute, compassionate, and clear-headed. However, after sharing your hero’s story with the public, have you been surprised when readers don’t love your character as much as you do?

Have readers said they liked your plot, but were not sold on your protagonist? There’s a reason this happens and there are things you can do in your next book or short story to create characters your readers will love––perhaps even more than you.

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A Philosopher on Writing

4/26/16 — A Philosopher on Writing

One of my favourite philosophers, Schopenhauer is especially interesting for writers because he has a cogent Aesthetics and addresses writing specifically, which few other philosophers do. For instance, he declares that there are three kinds of author. The first are those who write without thinking; this is the largest group. Who can doubt this, even among writers of so-called literary fiction? Most tell stories merely for the sake of it, so as to “express themselves.” The second group consists of those who think while writing, in order to write. These too are common, according to him. Lastly, there are those authors who think before writing, and write because they have thought. Rare, says Schopenhauer.

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IF YOU LOVE BOOKS, DON’T READ THIS

4-04-2016 – IF YOU LOVE BOOKS, DON’T READ THIS

As a writer who spends endless hours alone glued to a computer, I’m well aware of the lure of Facebook, Twitter, and other digital distractions. And yet the more diatribes I read about social media addiction destroying civility and civilization, the more I am reminded of many age-old critiques of book-reading. So, at risk of incurring the wrath of book lovers everywhere, I have to ask: are books and social media all that different in their potential to distract us from our friends, family, and even ourselves?

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Does Fiction Need Philosophy?

Does Fiction Need Philosophy?

American writers rarely seem to have any formal philosophical training, wrote David Joiner to me recently (I am paraphrasing). Reading Flanagan’s biography of Yukio Mishima, he had been struck by how strongly and consistently the Japanese novelist’s work had been infused with his ideas, which amounted to a coherent philosophy concerning beauty, purity, and honour. Joiner, who is himself an accomplished novelist (Lotusland, Guernica Books, 2015), speculated that all great fiction probably has an underpinning of philosophy.

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What I Learn for Fiction

3/17/2016 – What I Learn for Fiction –

We mystery writers strive for accuracy in our fiction. This need propels us to listen to experts, surf the Internet, read unusual books, and sometimes make pests of ourselves.

In pursuit of accuracy, I asked the fire chief of a large metropolitan area what exactly was the protocol in responding to an emergency. His answer added depth and reality to that scene in my novel. I paid $250 for an eyewitness account, published in 1782, of traveling in Morocco, which helped immensely when I wrote my historical novel, Shadow of the Rock. All of us writers joke about what someone would think if he read the history of our Internet searches on poisons, guns, missing persons, fingerprints, burglar alarms, DNA as evidence and similar subjects.

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What makes a good book series?

3/7/2016 What makes a good book series? And why do readers love them?

Check the best seller list on any given week and you’re bound to find lots of familiar authors writing about familiar characters. The heroes of mysteries and thrillers often lead the pack (Jack Reacher, Alex Cross, Lucas Davenport), but series characters also dominate in fantasy and even appear in literary fiction (John Updike’s brilliant Rabbit series). That’s no surprise. Picking a book to read can be difficult and sometimes it’s easier (and safer) to spend a few hours with a character you know in the hands of an author you trust.

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WHERE GO THE BOOKS?

3-04-2016 – WHERE GO THE BOOKS?

No one was more surprised than me—a self-confessed book hoarder—when I let stack upon stack of books go free from my home. It all started when my 20-something daughter, packing up her childhood room, confronted me with a hallway of books that had lost their shelving status. My chance for redemption had at last arrived.

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Can Fitness Help You Become a Better Artist?

Can Fitness Help You Become a Better Artist?

Living as we do in a world of Cartesian duality, most people would probably say, of course not. You use your mind when you’re writing; the body is irrelevant. It’s taken for granted that mind and body are distinct things that have very little to do with one another. And in the West, most people are much prouder of their brains than their bodies; I’ve never understood why, since both are largely inherited

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Vampires, Werewolves, and Psychics, Oh My!

2/17/2016 – Vampires, Werewolves, and Psychics, Oh My!

Vampires, werewolves, zombies, psychics—all have been popular in books over the years. Now a fellow writer is working on a novel with an otherwise normal protagonist who gains awareness of his extrasensory abilities.

Shades of J.B. Rhine. My critique group buddies know I am no fan of fantasy. My eyes glaze over at the first paragraph, but where does extrasensory perception, ESP or parapsychology as it’s known to its friends, stand? Fantasy or science? Being skeptical of all things psychical, I’m not sure how to take my friend’s writing. In the words of Hercule Poirot, I believe, this has given me furiously to think. What is going on in the world of extrasensory perception?

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So You Want to Be a Writer

So You Want to Be a Writer

Here is the story of one man’s journey to becoming a writer.

Do you think you can write 3,000 words a day, or could you write every day for fifty-two years?

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2/10/2016. THE GENDER BIAS BLIGHT IN NOVELS

2/10/2016. THE GENDER BIAS BLIGHT IN NOVELS

Think about the novel you’re reading now. Is the main character or protagonist a man? If the protagonist is a man, does the story also have strong female characters and do they get a reasonable amount of time in the spotlight? If the protagonist is a woman, how are the men defined? How often are they seen? In some of the very best novels, both classic and contemporary, most of the good parts are taken over by characters of one gender or the other. In fact, the high quality of writing in some novels helps mask the disparity in gender importance. Readers just don’t notice that the most interesting characters are all men—or women.

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Another Look at Catcher in the Rye

2/7/16 — Another Look at The Catcher in the Rye

I don’t recall how old I was when I first read J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye–fourteen or fifteen, perhaps. Everyone seemed to be reading it then, and afterward, everyone seemed to adapt Salinger’s writing style. English classes became tedious as student after student read his “original” composition in an imitation of Holden Caulfield’s voice.

All of us wanted to be Holden Caulfield. We wanted to travel through New York as he did — alone, with money in our pockets, and at all hours. We wanted to read the books he liked, drink scotch, and call out the phonies. We liked that he was a straight talker, glib and slangy, a no-holds-barred kind of guy, our generation’s John Wayne.

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WORLD’S FIRST NOVEL—AND THE WINNER IS…

I just finished reading Sarah Ruden’s acclaimed translation of The Golden Ass, a 2^ndcentury AD, a classic and wonderfully ridiculous work that has been called the world’s first novel. And then it dawned on me: just recently I had read (and blogged about) a couple of other first novels of sorts, The Tale of Genji and Don Quixote. I started wondering: just how many novels have claimed this title?

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COMING FEB. 1—GUEST BLOGGER MILLIE MACK

February Guest Blogger is Millie Mack, author of the Faraday Murder Series featuring amateur sleuths Carrie and Charles Faraday. The third book in the series–Take a Byte Out of Murder—is now available. She enjoys everything mysterious including books, videos, plays and especially jigsaw puzzles where completion of the puzzle reveals the solution to a crime.

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A (Less Insular) Reading List for Students

Having taught in an American university writing program for a dozen years, I am convinced that what my students need more than anything is to read more, and to read differently. Many of them do read a lot, but they are reading American writers and very little else. Recently I discovered that two of my most gifted graduate students had not read Graham Greene, which flabbergasted me. And this is not their fault–it’s the fault of the professors who keep feeding them the same predictable stuff. The obvious weakness of the contemporary fiction scene in the US (and of “Program Fiction”) is its homogeneity and its insularity.

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THE PATHOS OF THINGS

THIS IS NOT A REVIEW BY SONIA LINEBAUGH

This is not a review of British author Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Five stories of Music and Nightfall. It’s a meditation on impermanence inspired by his writing.

Mono no aware is the Japanese idea of the pathos of things, expressed by Ishiguro as sensitivity for a past that seeps into the present of his characters’ lives. Their lives exist as words on paper, bound up in paragraphs of unresolved melancholy, tied inextricably to the falling of the day.

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January 17 – Always Learning

I am an avid reader of mysteries. No apologies. And I find I enjoy women writers more than male writers because I am often irritated by the usual male mystery writer’s lavish descriptions of fawning, willing and pulchritudinous women. Fantasy land. The acknowledged “grand dame” of mysteries is, of course, Agatha Christie. So it was with interest that I found out about a book called A Is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie by British chemist Kathryn Harkup. Amazon reviewers give it 4.5+ stars. Each chapter features a specific poison beginning, of course, with arsenic and continuing on to veronal.

This is by way of introducing the topic of the latest meeting of the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime, an association of mystery writers and fans.

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READING AND WRITING THROUGH THE YEARS

Flipping through The New York Review of Books the other day, I realized my reading habits had changed drastically. Once upon a time I read every page from cover-to-cover – even the personal ads (in fact, I met my husband by answering one of them). What had changed wasn’t the The New York Review of Books. What had changed was me.

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Happy Holidays!

12/17/2015 – Happy Holidays and the best to you in the New Year!

Holiday messages surround us. We hear of Hanukkah candles lighting the stand against oppression; the Christian carolers singing of peace and brotherhood; and the Kwanzaa message celebrating family, community, and culture. Muslim festivals are at other times of the year, but their message of celebration and good wishes also spring from the well of kindness, hope, and good cheer.

But the most powerful tool we have toward peace and a better world is the written word. As Martin Luther said, “If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write.”

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The Novels of Paul Auster

12/7/2015 — Reading and Appreciating Paul Auster

I’ve become a big fan of the American writer Paul Auster—and not just because his first novella, City of Glass, was rejected by seventeen publishers before finding a home and launching a prolific, thirty-year literary career (and yes, that means I’m a bit late in joining his fan club). I read the New York Trilogy (which includes City of Glass) last year and loved it, but it was only last month that circumstances led to me to pick up another Auster novel, Invisible (2009), which I found even more fascinating.

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