J.K. Rowling’s Magic Bookshop
The most beautiful bookshop in the world is surely Lello e Irmão in Oporto. It is the bookshop J.K. Rowling used to visit when she was an English teacher in Portugal in the eighties (as I was), and the one whose spectacular staircase—a neo-Gothic carved extravaganza—inspired the one at Hogwarts. For this reason alone, perhaps sadly, it has become a site of pilgrimage for Potter fans (Continue Reading)
If you asked me ten years ago what genre I’d be writing when I started writing novels, I would not have said thrillers. Yet from a dozen false starts, I picked a thriller for the first novel I tried to complete. That became The Expendable Man, which some still rate as my best story. And what is the genre of the story I’m working on today? You guessed it––a thriller.
Thrillers are one of the most competitive genres these days in terms of sales and numbers of books published––along with romances and mysteries. Why? What is it that attracts both writers and readers to this genre? I have some ideas. Let’s see if they make any sense. (Continue Reading)
6/17/2016 – HopeWorks: Healing Through Art
Michael Caine once chastised an actor who had delivered a particularly wooden performance by saying, “Acting is about emotions; why don’t you show some?”
Poetry is also about emotions. Last night I attended an outstanding poetry reading at the monthly meeting of the Howard County (MD) Chapter of the Maryland Writers’ Assn. The poems read had appeared in the Dragonfly Arts Magazine, a publication of HopeWorks, Howard County’s sexual assault and domestic violence center. The poems are reflections on life, love, trauma and hope, and (Continue Reading)
6/10/2016. CAN A MOVIE BE AS GOOD AS THE BOOK?
I love movies almost as much as I love books. And, thanks to Netflix, I 
watch as many of them as I can. Unfortunately, movies based on high-quality fiction rarely seem to achieve the richness of the original novels. Nevertheless, novels have become popular sources for movies. Of the eight movies nominated for the 2016 Best Picture Oscar, four were based on novels. Three of those offered stories that didn’t interest me, but I was eager to see Brooklyn. In my opinion, it was an all-right movie, but even though I haven’t read the novel, I kept thinking the novel surely offered so much more. The main character, Eilis Lacey, was appealing but not engaging. (Continue Reading)
6/7/16 — A Cozy and Guilt-Free Escape
I owe a debt of gratitude to public TV because PBS made me a fan of cozy mysteries. I didn’t even know the term when I first met the writer Dorothy Sayers through Ian Carmichael’s portrayal of Peter Wimsey, the upper-crust dilettante who solved murder cases with wit and his trusted valet.
Some people restrict the term cozy mystery to stories that occur in small towns, like Miss Marple’s village of St. Mary Mead, but I think that’s too limiting. The distinction, I think, is what action takes place off the page or off the screen. Cozy mysteries are family entertainment; there’s no graphic violence, no graphic sex, and no reason to cover your eyes. (Continue Reading)
Touring Thomas Wolfe’s childhood home in Asheville, NC recently, I saw, like many others before me, how his childhood translated into his novels. I also saw how growing up here had in many ways been perfect soil for a budding writer.
A kid separated from his siblings to grow up in a boardinghouse, share bedrooms with guests, and help his enterprising mama serve up stews would have plenty of material to ponder, and time to ponder it. Having a maverick but grief-stricken mother and the temper and passion of his father on hand didn’t hurt either. I wondered whether I might find equally conductive conditions in the childhood homes of other writers. (Continue Reading)
A New Path for Literary Fiction
We need a revolution, not just in politics, but in literature. It’s long been apparent that most fiction writers are stumbling blind down one of two dead-end streets—either trying to rewrite the nineteenth century novel, or else writing so-called ‘experimental’ fiction, usually based on postmodernist principles, often cleverly enough, but for me most of them are unreadable, because they’re little more than cerebral and linguistic games. Obviously I’m generalizing, and naturally there are exceptions. Still, I stand by my thesis: most current fiction, especially in America, and especially if we consider the literary stars, is neither engaging nor significant, and I want to consider why that is and what can be done about it. (Continue Reading)
5/17/2016 – The Rogue Wave
Last night I watched the movie, Abandoned, about four men lost at sea for more than 100 days after a rogue wave wrecked their sailboat. When they were finally rescued, the media expressed intense skepticism. People didn’t believe their story until a close examination of the wrecked boat proved the sailors told the truth.
The movie brought back memories of living on a motorsailer called the Hardtack for three years back in the seventies. A motorsailer is a hybrid between a sailboat and a powe
rboat. Our boat was a heavy, double-planked classic yacht designed by famed naval architect John Alden. The single mast was stepped to the full keel and 58 feet high. However, the boat also had a heavy-duty Caterpillar diesel engine. (Continue Reading)
5/7/16 — Novelists Still Intrigued by World War II
What is it about war that produces such compelling literature? And what is it about World War II, in particular, that continues to capture us like none other?
As long as there has been war—and that’s since the beginning of time—storytellers have been trying to capture the experience, first to preserve it for history (think epics like Homer’s Iliad) and then to try to make sense of it. They have tried to explore it as tragedy (Shakespeare’s Henry V), as philosophy (Tolstoy’s War and Peace), through psychology (Pat Barker’s Resurrection), as memoir (My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell) and even as comedy (Joseph Heller’s Catch 22). (Continue Reading)
5/4/16 – WRITING ACROSS GENERATIONSNothing is quite so thrilling as seeing your writing come alive—except perhaps bringing it to life with the help of your own offspring. In my case, the thrill came from seeing a play I had abandoned decades ago reborn when my composer son offered to write music for it. By writing across generations, we created something far better than anything I could have imagined on my own. (Continue Reading)
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. (Continue Reading)
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. (Continue Reading)
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? (Continue Reading)
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. (Continue Reading)
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. (Continue Reading)
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. (Continue Reading)
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.
(Continue Reading)
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 (Continue Reading)
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? (Continue Reading)
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? (Continue Reading)
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. (Continue Reading)
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. (Continue Reading)
I just finished reading Sarah Ruden’s acclaimed translation of The Golden Ass, a 2nd century 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? (Continue Reading)
February Guest Blogger is Millie Mack, author of the Faraday Murder Series featuring amateur sleuths C
arrie 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. (Continue Reading)
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. (Continue Reading)