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Keeping track

When writ­ing a nov­el a good mem­o­ry is vital. And more than any­thing else what you must remem­ber is your own work. The char­ac­ter who limps on page six must limp again on page one hun­dred and fifty, unless you can explain it away. And if you do ref­er­ence that limp on page six, you

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Halls full of memories

I have writ­ten a few ghost nov­els: Some­thing Upstairs, The Book With­out Words, Devil’s Race, plus a few short ghost sto­ries. My read­ers often ask, “Do you believe in ghosts?” My answer is, “No, but I believe in ghost sto­ries.” (See blog posts for Novem­ber 15, 2012 and Decem­ber 11, 2014). Each year I read,

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Thriller

Forester (Aspects of the Nov­el) famous­ly wrote; “The King died and then the queen died is not a plot. The king died and then the queen died of a bro­ken heart is a plot.”  We want to know why and how her heart was bro­ken. Almost all nov­els have some degree of plot sus­pense, the

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School of the Dead

I have just received a gal­ley of my new book, School of the Dead, which will be pub­lished next year by Harper­Collins. The term gal­ley is a 17th cen­tu­ry word, from the French, galée, which, as the OED has it, is “an oblong tray of brass, wood, or zinc, to which the [printer’s] type is

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At the Morgan

If you are a bib­lio­phile, and I am noth­ing if not that, one of great places to vis­it in New York City is the Mor­gan Library on Madi­son Avenue and 36th Street. It was built by bank­ing mag­nate J.P. Mor­gan (1837–1913) who was also a book col­lec­tor of vast resources. In this beau­ti­ful renais­sance style

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The Influence of Playwriting

Avi_The Influ­ence of Play­writ­ing  from Mackin Edu­ca­tion­al Resources on Vimeo. Thanks to Mack­in­Via for this excerpt from a longer inter­view I did with them recent­ly. You can view more of Mack­in’s videos here. If you haven’t already read Catch You Lat­er, Trai­tor, here’s more about the book. And, in this par­tic­u­lar excerpt, I talk about

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Books as objects of beauty

I believe that books for young peo­ple should not only be great fun to read, but they should be beau­ti­ful objects. The book as some­thing fine to hold, and take in with eye, and hand, is an enhance­ment to the plea­sures of read­ing. The fact is, how­ev­er, the qual­i­ty of book pro­duc­tion is declin­ing. At

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The story behind Old Wolf

Peo­ple often ask me for the ori­gins of a par­tic­u­lar book or sto­ry. In fact, the oth­er day I was read­ing to my wife a short sto­ry I had writ­ten. When I fin­ished my read­ing she told me she liked it and then asked, “How did you get the notion for that?” I had to

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Sisyphus

If you check my blog post for Octo­ber 2, 2012, you will see some­thing about one of my most impor­tant writ­ing men­tors when I was still a teenag­er, Lee Hays. In that blog I recount one of the most mem­o­rable things he (or any­one) ever said to me about writ­ing. Since it was told to

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Reading groups rather than writing groups

The New York Times recent­ly quot­ed Stephen King as say­ing, “If you lis­ten to some­thing on audio, every flaw in a writer’s work, the rep­e­ti­tion of words and the clum­sy phras­es, they all stand out. As a writer I say to myself, how will that sound?” I some­times think that instead of writ­ers’ groups—which are orga­nized around

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