Thoughts
I write a lot. Essays. Articles. Blog posts. All of them sharing what I’m thinking about. Maybe you think about these things, too.
Good-bye to a storyteller
Best known for a crime fiction series with supernatural elements set in the Welsh borders, he wrote what I think of as multidimensional stories—stories you can read and enjoy on a superficial level, but which can also draw you in deeper to consider your own beliefs and values.
What happens when you get a bad review?
Every book, at one time or another, gets a bad review.
Why not read a classic mystery?
You’ve probably heard me talking about the “golden age of mystery fiction.” So… what exactly am I talking about?
Be afraid… be very afraid!
Stories are never about what they’re about: they always allow the space for us to bring our own emotions and experience — and, here, fears — into the mix.
When the Beginning isn’t the Beginning
Even as we tend to identify with the detective in a mystery, there’s also a part of each of us that also understands the fear or need that drove the killer to act, to protect themselves in the only way they saw possible.
When Great Artists do Terrible Things
So at the end of all this I’m still left with a sense of ambiguity. Is there a way to hold both of these truths together? To say of someone that they are both great and awful? Or do we feel that listening to their words, now that we know the truth, becomes somehow tainted?
Is Technology a Writer’s Friend?
I really liked this book. It was fun to write. But it took me rather a long time to write it—this was quite a while before I became a fulltime writer. And something happened between my starting the novel and finishing it.
Worried About Code-Switching? Try and Go a Day Without It!
Where it becomes an issue worth examining is when people’s dialects or versions of a given language are perceived by the dominant culture as somehow inferior to the “real” version of the language. To “fit in,” they’re forced to change how they speak.
Write Like an Actor
How would an actor approach your protagonist? How would they take your description and the situation into which you’ve plunged the character, and make that character unforgettable?
Why Stories?
Yes, it’s true: I live in my head. Wherever my current story ideas take me. To Cuba or Nepal or California. With people who sing, or tend cows, or—sometimes—commit murder. And those places and those people are real. They may not even make it out of my head, but for the time they’re there? They are still very real.
What’s in a Name?
My characters come to life as I write, not before. They shift and morph and often change the entire narrative arc of my stories. They become who they are in chapter five, or eight, or ten. So the name I started with generally just doesn’t fit the character as they emerge, as they talk with other characters, as they make choices, as they tell me where the book needs to go.
Anything Can Happen
My brain sometimes feels like it’s about to explode.
Mostly this has to do with my distress at the state of the world and my ever-present naïve wonderment at the greed and cruelty of so much—or so it seems—of humanity.
Stuck? Try a Character Tarot Read!
Doing a Tarot read for one or more of your characters is a terrific way of seeing them in another light, giving you ideas for their personalities and histories, and providing a little more depth to the way you write them for your readers.
Don’t let your head explode
My brain sometimes feels like it’s about to explode.
Mostly this has to do with my distress at the state of the world and my ever-present naïve wonderment at the greed and cruelty of so much—or so it seems—of humanity.
Author Panels and How to be a Good Literary Citizen
The first thing is to remember that you’re on a panel of colleagues, not contestants. You are not in competition with each other. Everyone knows that, in theory, but in practice we’re all so accustomed to the ever-present necessity for self-promotion that we often forget it’s not a zero-sum game up there.
Did You Have a Good War?
Survival comes with guilt, of course, when so many others didn’t survive, or had their lives ruined by physical and psychological wounds. How can one dare to enjoy anything when so many are hurting, dying?
Nordic Noir is Having a Moment
One of the reasons people enjoy reading mysteries is the sense of justice they impart. Real life is unfair, but in these stories evil is punished and the just are vindicated, if not completely healed. I think Nordic noir provides a similar feeling, but it’s contextualized; it’s not the norm, and the multi-layered stories don’t all have neat and tidy endings. The story will go on.
Meet Me at the Mall?
I’ve always been fascinated with abandoned human structures, but as I mentioned, I’ve never seen any that rose and fell within my own lifetime as completely as malls, and so I find myself drawn to photographs and videos of these gargantuan empty places once echoing with so much life.
Truth (and Action!) Through Storytelling
Mr Bates vs the Post Office: The Real Story is a four-part miniseries chronicling sub-postmaster Alan Bates’s legal battle against the Post Office, which had falsely accused him and some 3,500 others of defrauding the UK’s postal service.
Get Your Wheels on the Ground
My first drafts are a mess. I have an occasionally faulty memory, and so nothing exists in my world until it’s written down. Because of that, I have all sorts of ideas I throw into the mix of a first draft. Some won’t stay the course. Some are frankly contradictory to other ideas I slammed down elsewhere in the manuscript. A few take on the glitter of inspiration and stay in place through publication.