What is your style of writing? I do not mean your genre of choice or your literary voice. I mean: How do you actually work best? While there are as many ways of working as there are writers, I believe there are two major categories into which all of these individual structures fit — sprinters and marathoners. Sprinters These are the writers who may have other jobs, or small children at home, or other responsibilities that make it impossible for … Read More »

I give a lecture on occasion on building suspense in fiction, and touch briefly on applying techniques of fictional suspense to nonfiction. Characters, motivation, surprise, conflict, pacing … the same building blocks that bring fiction to life can also electrify nonfiction. If you break down nonfiction bestsellers you’ll find this true. Fabulous examples abound. The Lost City of Z (2009) by David Grann. Dead Wake (2015) by Erik Larson. In the Heart of the Sea (2000), by Nathaniel Philbrick. Let’s … Read More »

I have a friend who is not a fan of historical fiction (and yes, we’re still friends). She describes them as “those books about kings and queens.” That made me start to think about who makes the best protagonist for historical fiction: is it a real, factual person—who will generally be a public person, or someone in sufficient prominence to have left a record—or an everyday person, probably spun from the imagination? Perhaps there is no better or worse here, … Read More »

How do we write about music? This is a form of what the ancient Greeks called ekphrasis: the description of one art in another. Not all of us are musicians, but nearly everyone likes one kind of music or another. It brings something wonderful to our lives, punctuates our memories, stirs our emotions. And when I think back upon some of the most life-changing books I’ve read (Homer’s Odyssey and the Sirens’ song, anyone?), the magic of music played a … Read More »

Currently, stronger synonyms for said are out of fashion. A century or more ago, writers stretched for synonyms for said: asseverated, averred, conveyed, voiced, uttered, proclaimed … and it became distracting, even ridiculous. The current enthusiasm for just plain … may be a reaction against that excess. On the other hand, the quality of the speaker’s voice can sometimes be important information for the reader, adding texture and nuance, and conveying the character’s mood or emotion. “Over my dead body,” … Read More »

Ah, the dreaded glitch. We’ve spent months or maybe years on a story, alternately elated and despairing that we’ll ever find the end. Or maybe we wrote right through the first draft to the end and have spent that time fleshing our baby out, adding meat and fluff scene by scene or line by line. And then we see it on the fifth read-through. The plot hole big enough to fly the starship Enterprise through. Or maybe it’s only Mini-Cooper … Read More »