Fellow novelists out there, sweating away at your fictional plots and characters, have you ever stopped and asked yourself “Why bother?” The world is on fire. People are starving. Wars are ripping through whole countries. And we write stories that aren’t true, which large numbers of people read avidly. Are we helping at all—or are we downright hurting by distraacting from real life’s stakes? Considering that fiction has been around since the time of the Egyptians at least, I suspect … Read More »

Interviewers have frequently asked me, “Where do you get your ideas?” — as if there were some mysterious wellspring from which imagination bubbles that spews out a whole plotted book. We can call this inspiration. Where does it come from? In fact, in the deeper sense, that’s not an easy question to answer. I certainly don’t understand the workings of my own brain well enough to say what childhood encounter might have spawned a certain character. But since I write … Read More »

As my friends (and probably my readers) can tell you, I’m no enemy to baroque language. I do love me some rich descriptions! But that’s not the same as wasting words, throwing them away on redundancies. While not everybody needs to write like Ernest Hemingway, a certain frugality with those precious little words keeps the writing clean and comprehensible. Let’s consider a few examples. Stating the Obvious Take the adverb aloud. It’s useful to indicate that something is not silent. … Read More »

I recently decided to stop being so anthropocentric and incorporate a dog into the cast of my protagonists. This took a bit of courage, because a) animal characters can be cutesy and maudlin, and b) all the animals in books I read as a kid got killed in the course of the story, and I can’t take any more, OK? But, used correctly, the animal character can be just as powerful a presence as a human. If the temptation to … Read More »

Here are some thoughts mainly (but not exclusively) meant for those who write in a close third-person or first-person point of view. We’ve all internalized the advice to stay in a consistent point of view. You know—not to see things Mr. POV can’t see (like his own face) nor to read other people’s minds. But there’s a different sense in which a writer has to think about voice, and not just in dialogue. Because each personage in a book, like … Read More »

A long time ago, I wrote about this topic, but now that I find myself writing cozy mysteries, I think I need to reflect on it again. Genre books should be good. Should even flirt with being “literary.” Because, let’s face it, there’s no excuse for writing bad books, no matter what kind. Laws That Never Shall Be Broken The informal definition of a genre book—whether romance, cozy, police procedural, or thriller—is that it follows certain closely constraining rules. And … Read More »