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.
Why do the Arts Matter?
In ancient Greece, art and music were deemed the only channels to communicate with the gods. I think they were on to something.
Moving Beyond Disaster-Think
Our new role: conservationists of the paintings and symphonies and books and performances that express humanity’s greatest ideas and emotions, protecting the ones that exist and creating more, no matter what the difficulty, no matter if it breaks our hearts.
The Morality of Crime Fiction
Moral crime fiction, on the other hand, is steeped in reality. It holds up a mirror to the reader and posits that under the right circumstances, we could all be a victim—or a killer.
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.
Is Technology Leaving Readers Behind?
As writers, one of our obligations, I think, is to be the vehicle that enables readers to ask these questions in a safe fictional space. Raising the questions in fiction doesn’t make them any less real, or any less urgent, or any less difficult, but it serves the same function as fairytales and horror stories, the option of experiencing fears without also experiencing immediate and life-threatening danger.