A reader here asks: “I would love to hear more about your tips for students on how to start the research process and lessons you have learned on how to sift through the vast amount of information on the internet.” Research is a puzzle for many people, I think, because they approach a subject without
Writers approach the stories they write in many ways. Some make detailed outlines. Character studies. Plot everything from A to Z. In quite another fashion, others improvise as they go. There are times I work out plot details ahead of time. But I don’t do that very often. I tend to be of the improvising
In my new book, Catch You Later, Traitor, my protagonist, Pete, lives out his fascination with American noir detective fiction. In particular he admires Sam Spade, the gumshoe hero created by Dashiell Hammett in his book, The Maltese Falcon. In the course of my story, Pete now and again slips into noir fiction style to describe
Catch You Later, Traitor is, in many respects, a detective story. My hero, Pete, is a great admirer of Sam Spade, the hard-boiled detective from The Maltese Falcon, as created by Dashiell Hammett. Not only does Pete decide to become a detective to solve a major mystery, from time to time he takes on a
My forthcoming book, Catch You Later, Traitor, is all about secrets. Family secrets. Political secrets. Secrets among friends. Secrets between brothers. It was a very difficult book to write, in part, because I had lived some of those secrets when I was a boy. Moreover, I lived on the edge of a world that told
You have been working steadily, and you have decent pages under your belt (or your book) and all of sudden, the writing seems to have weakened, and it happens just when the end is in sight. Fatigue has set in. Writing fatigue. The truth is you are writing badly. What to do? Keep going. Even if
In Willkie Collins’ quite wonderful Victorian novel, The Moonstone, (T. S. Eliot said it was the first and best detective novel) there is a character—the head servant—Gabriel Betteredge, who, when perplexed by a problem, opens up his ragged copy of Robinson Crusoe and arbitrarily selects a passage which tells him what to do. This is a
It is coming on to three years (!) since I began Wordcraft. I have been told by many of you that you find what I write of interest and use, both for your own writing, in the classroom and library. I never want folks to think I am laying down rules. Everything I put down
Have I lived a life of historical fiction? My dictionary of literary terms defines the historical novel as “A novel in which the action takes place during a specific historical period well before the time of writing (often one or two generations before and in which some attempt is made to depict accurately the customs
The most powerful tool, I think, the writer has is her or his intuition. What is most often thought to be intuition is direct or immediate insight. And, indeed, if you are a successful writer you are often asked what “inspired you” to write such and such. This inspiration is often thought of as, “The