I just read a charming book, and I’d like to be able to write one. But what exactly is charm? The word comes (from Latin by way of Middle French) from carmen, an incantation, and even today it can mean an enchantment, a magic spell. Yet we often also use it in a different, more secular sense to mean —I  quote the Oxford Dictionary here — “the power or quality of delighting, attracting, or fascinating others.” Although, with all due … Read More »

This is one of those questions that readers and writers have very different opinions about. Those who teach writing are pretty united in saying that it’s a bad idea to start a book with a dream. “But it seems so clever,” you say. “There’s that zingy moment when the character wakes up and the reader realizes that none of what she’s learned so far really happened.” Set Up for a Let Down Well, yes. But there’s also a certain element … Read More »

One of the things I love best as a reader is those books that create such a colorful sense of place that the setting becomes another character—so much so that a change in scene would change the feel of the book altogether. What would Inspector Brunetti be without Venice, right? Its geography shapes the action; its history shapes the people. Anyone who has ever visted that amazing city of water can immediately picture the ambulance taking off down the canal … Read More »

These thoughts are aimed at those who are writing a series, as I have been. It’s begun to feel like I’m writing the same book over and over! Why? Because the characters and their sitz im leben need to be reintroduced each time, in case (a very likely case) someone picks up Book Three without having read Books One or Two. Just how much grounding in the continuum of the series is necessary for each episode? That depends on the … Read More »

New York may be the city so nice they named it twice, but when it comes to novels, most readers want a point well made once and not battered home in multiple forms. There are several ways this can happen. One is by showing and telling the same fact. Here’s what I mean: She was steaming with frustration. “Why can’t you ever be on time?” she cried. Nothing is really incorrect about this, but it could be tighter. Her words … Read More »

Silence. Try to picture it: a novel with no dialogue. That would seem cold and distant indeed. Dialogue is showing, not telling what the characters think. It gives us their own tricks of speech, carries the weight of their emotions, lets us literally hear their own voices. Well done, it adds to the force and immediacy of the story. But if we neglect it, dialogue can drag down the pace, unravel the characterizations, even take readers out of the fictional … Read More »