Tag Archives: de Becker

Nonfiction – A Writer’s Ally for Nuance

Late Last Night Books

Researching a novel can involve more than history books, archives, and the other usual resources for honing details of terrain, lifestyle, time. What about describing emotions, personality, and the intangible nuances?

The subject came to mind  in riding along with a police officer on patrol. I asked the officer what resources she found helpful and that led to a conversation about lying. One book she found very useful, the police officer said, was Spy the Lie by Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, and Susan Carnicero with Don Tennant. The authors are former CIA officers who use a methodology developed by Houston to detect spy-the-liedeception in the counterterrorism and criminal investigation realms. They show how these techniques can be applied in our daily lives.

From Fact to Fiction

Late Last Night Books

10/17/2014 – From Fact to Fiction

I’ve been working on my latest novel, tentatively entitled In the Rembrandt’s Shadow, which alternates chapters set in 1999 with chapters following a painting’s provenance from 1616 to 1930. I feel as though I’m walking in a mine field of anachronisms on every page.

For instance, when were cell phones invented? My characters use them in 1999, and, yes, they were available then, but expensive. In fact, the first cell phones were released to the public in 1983 by Motorola and cost about $4,000. By 1999, they’d become smaller and somewhat more affordable, so it’s reasonable to suppose my characters had them.