Category Archives: First Draft Blog

Every Word’s a Choice – Part 3 — Verbs Do the Heavy Lifting

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Some languages get their power from colorful imagery (Arabic, for example). Others—like Chinese and English—offer strong verbs. Are the verbs in your stories doing all the work you want them to do? Weak verbs produce flabby prose.

Avoiding Weak Verbs

The various forms of the verb “to be” are weak verbs. “To be” verbs—is, are, was, were, and so on—do only one thing, they establish that something or somebody exists, they do not tell us anything more. They embody no action. Other weak verbs include forms of have and do, as well as shall, will, should, would, may, might, must, can, and could. As an editor, I like sentences that get to the point. “There is” and “there are” are weak ways to start a sentence. Instead of plunging readers into the action, they put distance between you and your reader.

“To be” verbs slip into our writing in other roles too. You use them when you want to suggest a continuing action, one that takes place over time, like “She was eating a sandwich while he talked,” though you could just as well say the more direct “She ate a sandwich while he talked.” Compare this pair of sentences. Which arouses more interest?

He was driving erratically. versus
The car veered over the center line and back right, nearly clipping the curb.

“To be” verbs also appear in passive voice constructions. Editors constantly tell writers to “avoid the passive.” Passive constructions hide the responsible actor (like the famous “Mistakes were made.” By whom?). Of course, if you’re writing a mystery, you may want to obscure the guilty party! The passive does work occasionally, but, as a general rule, steer clear. (Find some passive voice myths punctured here.)

Sensory Verbs—Do You Need Them?

Verbs related to one of the senses—heard, saw, smelled, tasted, felt—often end up being filter verbs. They put distance—a filter—between you as the author and your readers. If you write, “Jack heard the front door slam,” you tell readers three things: the door slammed, and Jack heard it, and some unseen narrator is telling them so. You’ve put a little narrative gap in there. If you simply write “the front door slammed,” the reader hears it too. Directly. Much more engaging. Another comparison:

She saw a man’s shadow on the bedroom wall. versus
A man’s shadow inched across her bedroom wall.

Your Prose Isn’t a Movie

As you picture the action of a story in your mind, you may be tempted to describe all your characters’ movements for clarity. But readers easily follow everyday actions involving sitting, standing, turning, walking, etc. without having them spelled out. There’s no one right choice in handling everyday actions. The important thing is to think about it. Make your choice consciously. For example:

He stood up from the chair and walked through the door, out into the hall. versus
He left the room.

No one will think he dragged the chair out of the room with him. Of course he got up. And he couldn’t have left the room without walking through the door. You can cut to the chase unless there’s a reason not to. Another one:

She rose from the kitchen table, shuffled to the stove and picked up the coffeepot, turned back to me at the table, and filled my cup. versus
She poured me another cup of coffee.

If she poured the cup of coffee, all the other actions are implied, and you can move along, unless there’s a compelling reason for all the detail. Maybe she is very weak or infirm, and doing all that is a Big Deal. Maybe the reader knows she’s put something harmful in the coffee, so the minute attention to the action is deliberately dragging out the suspense.

More on verbs next Tuesday.

Part 1: Introduction to “ Every Word’s a Choice”—finding the best words to tell your story. The series is based on a talk I recently gave at a writers’ conference. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11484
Part 2:  Using effective nouns to establish a relationship with readers. https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11501

The HEAT is On!

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Last month at the annual conference of the Public Safety Writers Association, which comprises police, fire, federal law enforcement, emergency services and other professionals—mostly retired, because when else would they have the time and energy—and people like me who write about them. I’m on the Board of the organization because I do the newsletter.

The conference itself was preceded by a day-long workshop on the craft and business side of writing. Treasurer Kelli Peacock gave a nice presentation on subplots.

I liked the way she explained it, and will admit to not necessarily planning particular subplots, but ending up with them anyway. Kelli said that, just as in real life, the characters in our stories—even short stories—generally have a lot going on in their lives. Subplots complicate their lives and your store and put situational pressure on a character.

As an example, she cited the movie Titanic, where the doomed romance between wealthy Rose (Kate Winslet) and steerage passenger Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) was the main plot, but the subplot revolved around the class differences aboard ship, which created extra situational pressure. A good subplot is “always in the room,” even when characters are doing and talking about something else. SA Cosby’s wonderful novel Razorblade Tears is always about interracial relations, even when Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee are busy tracking down their sons’ killers.

In that way, subplot is similar to subtext, which is what is really being said. I had a friend whose mother was super-critical and always hated whatever she wore. One say, her mom looked her up and down and said, “Now that’s a nice outfit!” No simple compliment, that, but rather a critique of every other outfit she’d ever worn. Subtext can be subtle (unlike my friend’s mom), but subplot involves obvious thought and and action by the story’s characters.

While subplots can meander along, seemingly unconnected to the main story, often they eventually converge to muddy up the main action, or somehow reinforce the theme of the main story. To me, there’s a big difference between plot (what happens in a story) and theme (what it means). If you’re puzzled about what the significance of a story is, the subplot may reveal it. There’s the famous dictum by E.M. Forster that a plot is a narrative of events that emphasizes causality, whereas a story is just the sequence of events. I and others believe he got it exactly backwards. A plot is merely a sequence of events; a story contains the understanding of those events. Subplots and subtext, then, are powerful contributors to story.

Kelli advises wrapping up the subplot after the drama of the main plot is resolved, to give readers “a place to collect themselves after the emotional high of the climax and to savor the fact that order has been restored.” Resolution of the subplot is an extra treat, she says.

Subplots must have been on the conference-goers minds as a result, because twice someone mentioned what a great movie Heat was for subplots. (That’s the Michael Mann film starring Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and the late Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore, and many other.)

Coincidentally, our local movie theater was playing it last night, and I went. And, yes, it was full of subplots–the personal lives of the gangsters and the principal cop that run in parallel with the criminal activities and the revenge the gangsters take for stuff that went badly wrong, which are corollary to the main plot. All these story lines enrich what would have otherwise been a rather typical heist film and make the audience (me, at least) root for both sides. See it if you can.

Further Reading
The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot by Charles Baxter. Highly recommended.

Every Word’s a Choice — Part 2 — Nouns Name the World

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To get the most out of this series of posts on ways for writers to “find the best words,” you may want to give a read to Eric Bogle’s bush ballad, “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda.” The first four verses illustrate many points I’ll be making. Many versions of the song are on YouTube, but reading it is probably best at first, because it’s free of the singer’s interpretation. It’s just you and the words. Like your readers and your words.

Once you’ve read it, I hope you agree the songwriter chose words that effectively create a moving lyric. It’s full of descriptive language. Which individual words strike you? Here are two that particularly strike me:

  • “tin hat”—doesn’t sound like it would give much protection does it? To me, “tin hat” immediately conjures an image like that above. Vulnerability.
  • how about “corpses”? Most times we’d say “bodies” here, but corpses is so much more powerful. We all have a body, we think of our bodies, we don’t think of ourselves as a “corpse.”

Nouns Name the World

Chances are, some of the words you picked out from the song are powerful nouns. Picking the right noun is the first step in establishing a relationship with your readers. Think back to how nouns were described in elementary school: Nouns NAME THINGS. The right noun tells readers what you’re talking about.

You probably recognize “Waltzing Matilda”—it’s called the “unofficial national anthem of Australia.” But do you know what “Waltzing Matilda” actually means? It isn’t a ballroom dance. In Australian slang, “waltzing” means traveling on foot. Americans use “waltz” to signal an easy accomplishment, often one a person is rather smug about: You might write,

“The detective waltzed into the squad room, grinning. ‘I solved the case!’”

What about “Matilda”? – Not a girlfriend. A Matilda is a backpack and sleeping gear. So to go “waltzing Matilda” is to hike the country carrying your possessions with you.

We know what the “outback” is—thank you, Outback Steak House. What about Murray’s green basin? The Murray is Australia’s longest river. Since so much of the country is desert or semi-arid, the green along the river is precious. The Circular Quay, near the end of the song, is Sydney Harbor.

Now that we’re oriented, let’s examine some of the other things its nouns do. A number of words here serve as touchstones—or anchors—for the reader—particularly for an Australian hearer, but for anyone who knows a little history. Touchstones bring you and your reader onto the same page. They build rapport between you. They let you inside their heads, linking your story to things they already know and have feelings about.

Two of those touchstones provide the first signal of what’s coming: 1915, Gallipoli. Most people born in the 20th Century will know instantly the song is about World War I, even if Eric Bogle hadn’t then written “marched me away to the war.” The instant the verse lands on “Gallipoli,” we know tragedy looms. (And notice where this ominous word is strategically placed—at the end of the line for maximum impact.)

But even if you’ve forgotten that terrible battle, plenty of details fill you in. The songwriter pulls you in deep with “Johnny Turk was ready.” This reference is a little more esoteric, unless you’re a history buff. The ill-prepared Australian troops were ordered to march ashore with virtually no covering fire because their officers were overconfident. Plus their maps were wrong. Plus their intelligence was bad. They simply believed the Turks were no match for troops with British leadership. They believed the Turks would NOT be ready, but it was the British who weren’t prepared. So, that line is a little jab at the Brits.

In our song, many of the specific geographic touchstones—the outback, Murray’s green basin, Circular Quay—are well-known to Australian hearers. Eric Bogle could use them because he knew his hearers would understand what they were—and what they stood for.

Americans have significant touchstones too. If we mention any of them, we’re likely to evoke a particular feeling. We don’t need a lengthy explanation of certain times (9/11, D-Day), places (Pearl Harbor, Selma), events (the Kennedy assassination, Hurricane Katrina), mindsets (The Depression) or geography (The West, Martha’s Vineyard). You can make a connection with most Americans with just those words.

Obviously, you have to be judicious. You don’t want to evoke the wrong thing. Referring to Ruby Ridge could pull up a range of feelings. Readers might also have unpredictable reactions to Waco, Watts, Chicago 1968.

Do you use touchstones in your writing? Could you? In her book The Final Episode, Lori Roy uses a fictional touchstone to anchor her story: the kidnapping of a young girl twenty years earlier. Everyone in the book knows and remembers the details of the crime and has had their lives altered because of it.

I’d be interested in knowing what touchstones you may have used.Part 1:Introduction to “ Every Word’s a Choice”—finding the best words to tell your story. The series is based on a talk I recently gave at a writers’ conference. Find it here:https://vweisfeld.com/?p=11484

Every Word’s a Choice — Part 1

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Last week, I gave a presentation at a writhing workshop sponsored by the Public Safety Writers Association—an organization for public safety professionals (police, fire, EMT, military, etc.) who write and the authors who write about them. It’s a great group for any crime writer because you can get all your procedure-strategy-mindset questions authoritatively answered.

I think I took a different tack than the “grammar lesson” people may have expected, and instead focused on words, using the best words, and using them better. Words are our smallest writing elements, and I started with this quote from Mark Twain:

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning”

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting some of the information and resources I assembled for the workshop, but first I’ll answer a basic question: Why focus on such a small unit of our literary output? I focused on the words we writers choose, because they are fundamental to improving our skill as  writers. They are fundamental to making that connection with our readers that keeps them turning pages and coming back for more.

Some of the information in this series may be in the category of “helpful reminders,” like the chime that reminds you to fasten your seat belt. Some of it may be new, or at least strike you in a new way. And all of it, I hope, builds your appreciation for the magic you create when you write your stories. Think about it: You go from a blank sheet of paper to something with meaning and impact for your readers.

I’ve come to realize that the black squiggles I put on paper are only half the job of writing. All readers, with their assumptions, experiences, understandings (or lack thereof) perform the other half. They’re what bring my work to life and allow it to entertain, inform, and, sometimes, reflect. Pulitzer-Prize Winner Robert Olen Butler says the author’s job is to set up a dream, then author and reader experience the dream together. Grammar errors, poorly chosen words (even typos), jolt readers out of the dream, and they may not come back.

Words are how we authors communicate our thoughts, our emotions, our stories. There’s no body language or tone of voice to clue readers in to what we were thinking when we wrote a particular passage. For that reason, we need to take our words seriously, so that we evoke in our readers the feelings and understandings, the tension and the resolution we strive for. Words are our tools. Above is a word cloud of my presentation, the tools I used that day. How long is that new story, that book? 85,000 words? 90,000? Well, then, the author has 85 or 90,000 chances to get the words exactly right!

I hope you’ll go with me in the succeeding weeks on this “Every Word’s a Choice” journey.

Permissible Laughter

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In a thought-provoking interview with award-winning Lebanese-Canadian novelist, journalist, and visual artist Rawi Hage a few years back, he talked about how it’s the writer’s job to push the limits, to not settle for being only entertaining. For me this resonates with the idea that authors shouldn’t try to bang out the next “The Girl Who. . .” book, but strike out into some new territory. Of course, for many, it seems, they run up against a failure of imagination or an excess of anxiety, which is why when a particular book catches on, it will have so many clones. In a contradiction bound eventually to fail, many authors try to recapture that uniqueness.

Think, for example of Dan Brown’s books and all the religio-cryptic thrillers that came afterward. Or all the books where a discrete set of people with a shared past and rivalries and bitter secrets are stranded on an island, in a remote area cut off by a storm, or wherever, and . . . they start to die. Or the Gone Girl clones, or, rather, would-be clones.

Hage said he thinks of himself as “a confrontational writer,” and the more marginal he feels about a piece, the better his writing is. In other words, he’s not trying to please everyone. “Writers who try to please and go by the rules and try to do the right things, they tend to fail,” he thinks. It’s an interesting stance to take, and difficult for authors, when the publishing industry seems increasingly risk-averse.

He talked interestingly about the way the Arabic language affected his writing. He read a lot of Arabic poetry as a young man, and it’s very visual, perhaps making up for strictures on visual representations of people and animals in the culture generally. It’s a “very elaborate” language, he says. Writing in English, he pared back.

Even so, he brings “bags and bags of history, travels, concerns, revenge; a mixture of the emotional, the experiential, and the cultural” to his writing. That comports with my view of writing as like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand disparate pieces of the kinds he mentions, and seeing what picture they create. He wisely infuses that mix with dark humor too. Pavlov, the protagonist of his fourth novel, Beirut Hellfire Society, says, “Laughter should be permissible under all circumstances.”

Like to Write? Just Dig In!

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Looking through my stack of old Martha Stewart Living magazines (guilty pleasure), I’ve found some gems. Not just tempting cocktail recipes (try the bourbon-Canton ginger liqueur-splash of lemon juice and garnished with star anise at the holidays), but also a lovely article on “the writer’s garden.” I don’t know how Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Lawrence, Edith Wharton, and Edna St. Vincent Millay found the time—maybe your name has to start with “E”—but their gardens were lovely. Getting away from the desk and doing something totally different, that’s interesting but doesn’t require 110 percent of your mind, nourishes creativity, I’ve found. Fresh air helps too. At least that’s what these writers seem to have learned.

Edith Wharton’s tilled the soil in the Berkshires and said “Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than novelist.” Her home in Lenox, Mass., is now a National Historic Landmark, and you can visit, see all she did to develop its three acres of formal gardens, and go back to your B&B for a nap. Pictures at the website.

A little less constrained, perhaps, are and were Edna St. Vincent Millay’s gardens in Austerlitz, N.Y., where she once hosted what Living called “Bacchanalian parties.” The poet worked hours each day in a writing shack she built in a pine grove, which she planed. In her case the gardens definitely nourished creativity. Was the “shack” tax deductible?, I wonder. Her large estate, Steepletop, is open to the public. Website here.

In Jackson, Mississippi, you’ll find Eudora Welty’s home and the beautiful garden her mother originally planted and her lifelong connection to it shows up in her work. Welty, says the garden website, “mentions more than 150 kinds of plants in her stories, and the garden includes many examples of her favorite flowers, camellias. Although the carefully selected plants create a year-long “parade of bloom,” including many roses, I found a photo that features my favorite, irises.

Meetings, Meetings, Which to Choose?

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So many enticing meetings for crime and mystery writers of every stripe in this season. Some national, some regional, some hyper-local! It’s hard to know where an author should lay their travel budget bets. In the past few years, I’ve put my money toward the Public Safety Writers Association’s annual July conference in Las Vegas. (The hotels are cheap at that time of year, and since the temperature outside is 115, I’m not tempted to wander away from the excellent sessions. And I don’t want to miss the fun prize-drawings!)

The attendees are current and former public safety professionals—police, FBI, CIA, EMTs, fire fighters, military—and people like me who write about them. I can’t tell you how much extra confidence it gives me about my writing, when I’ve been able to check some tricky bit of action with someone who knows what they’re talking about (i.e., not what I see on tv). Many of the friends I’ve made through the group are happy to do that.

I enjoy the conference presentations too. Most important, they’re interesting and informative, especially when presenters talk about their experiences, scary or funny or sad. What I’ve learned from those is not only how a particular individual responded to a particular situation, but much more helpfully, how they think. So, when I put my character into a situation, I can extrapolate. None of us can experience first-hand all the things we subject our characters to (and thank goodness for that!), and we have to extrapolate their reactions from our own experiences and from what we know about how others have reacted in parallel encounters.

I consider this a tough crowd of expert authors, so I’m pleased to say that two of my short stories have won prizes in the PSWA’s annual competition, and my novel came in second one year (beaten out by the estimable James L’Etoile, who any crime writer would not mind being bested by). When this audience respects my work, I know I’m doing something right! My cousin once asked me, suspicion in her voice, “How do you know so much about crime?” I, of course, refused to answer and just gave her a sly look. But now, I suppose, my secret’s out!

Don’t Go in the Water?

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One of many memorable scenes in Fredrick Forsyth’s thriller Avenger (which I’ve listened to three times!) occurs when the hero spends several days scouting the encampment of the villain and sees a stream running along the property, an obstacle he’ll have to cross to get inside. Every day, a worker comes out and throws chickens into the water, which are immediately devoured in a frothing mass of piranhas. Eeeew.

But, do piranas have a bad rap? Before you decide, or before authors enlist them to be aggressors in their fiction, you and they might check out Ronald B. Tobias’s article, “Roosevelt’s Piranhas” in the February 2025 issue of Natural History. Piranhas acquired their deadly reputation after Teddy Roosevelt made a trip to Brazil and observed piranhas devour an entire cow in minutes with their razor-sharp, blade-like teeth. What he didn’t know was that this demonstration had been carefully staged for maximum mayhem. He was “the victim of a hoax,” Tobias writes.

A few factoids: most of the 30 to 60 piranha species are vegan; a piranha can detect a drop of blood in 50 gallons of water; they keep rivers clean by “disposing of” dead or dying animals; the bite of a fully grown black piranha is, pound for pound, more powerful than that of the Tyrannosaurus rex; Latin Americans eat them to treat problems of sex drive (men) and reproduction (women); they’re banned in 27 US states, where officials worry they might escape into the wild and breed—piscine pythons.

The red-bellied piranha, called Roosevelt’s Piranha, is about a foot long and weighs three pounds. It’s not so big, but it’s the numbers that will get you. They travel in shoals that can include hundreds or even thousands of fish. For the most part, they are relatively harmless, “except for a few scary weeks of the year,” Tobias says. In the wet season, the river waters flood vast areas, where many animals live, and fish food is plentiful. As the land dries up again, all these well-fed fish are channeled back into a much shrunken area, trapping predator and prey. Once that limited food supply is gone, the fish attack each other—“the cannibal fish Roosevelt saw in Brazil.” That is definitely not the time to take a swim. As the water polo team in Wednesday Addams – Piranha Pool learned.

Curse of the Curse-Word

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The New York Times recently published an interview by Matt Richtel with Timothy Jay, “a scholar in the science of swearing,” which I read with interest. Probably every author comes up against the dilemma of whether and how much cursing their fictional characters should do. Some worry that libraries will turn their books down and some readers will complain, others (especially crime writers like me) may think that they’re not writing about nuns and clergy (or maybe they are), and a few choice curse words make dialog more realistic. And some just let ʼer rip.

There’s an argument that larding speech with cursing not only substitutes for a more thoughtful and meaningful word—in other words, promotes laziness in thinking as well as speech—and, possibly worse, in some opinions, dilutes the effectiveness of a well-placed “f—!!”

Jay says that cursing has become much more commonplace, “as part of the whole shift to a more casual lifestyle.” Yes, the advice columns receive letters from parents who’ve taken young children out to dinner, only to have the experience spoiled by loud cursing from a neighboring table. Handling that isn’t always easy or pleasant for the parents or restaurant staff called upon to intervene.

Social media, once again, takes some of the blame. In one study of Twitter posts published in 2014, profanity occurred in about one word of every ten—about twice the rate of spoken language. Now that Twitter is X, and many folks have abandoned the platform to the true believers, that rate may be higher. A story in today’s Washington Post reported the abuse a blind government worker received after being ridiculed by Musk on X. Unkind, people.

Online a person “can be aggressive without any physical retaliation” or personal consequences, as Jay points out. This no-restraints atmosphere contributes to another problem: the way women are increasingly attacked and harassed online.

Biometrics has shown that taboo words create a stronger emotional reaction in people than other words; they have effects on both speaker and hearer. However, Jay does say that his research group at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts has recorded more than 10,000 people swearing in public. Most of it, he says, is casual and “pretty harmless,” and has never resulted in aggression or violence. He views it as part of the perpetually evolving state of language.

For writers, who care and think about words more than most people probably do, it would be hard to lose the impact of a good swear word just when you need it, emphasis on those last four words.

AI-Generated image from Vocablitz for Pixabay

Not Paranormal, Just Different

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An interesting recent discussion between two indigenous American authors got me thinking about the issue of paranormal. (And, not for the first time, wondering what’s “normal,” anyway, in these times?) Some elements in the books of Ramona Emerson of the Diné (Navaho) tribe and Marcie Rendon, a member of the White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa (Ojibwe)—both multiple literary award-winners, by the way—might fit into a broad paranormal category, but they reject that characterization.

Emerson is the author of two books in her series featuring Rita Todacheene a forensic photographer, able to see in her mind the circumstances of the crimes she is meticulously documenting. (Find her remarkable books here and here.) Rendon, who is also a playwright and poet, writes the popular Cash Blackbear crime series, featuring a young Ojibwe woman, whose guardian is a sheriff, which brings her into occasional contact with violent crime. The fourth book in Rendon’s series, Broken Fields, will be available March 2025. Blackbear’s visions and intuitive abilities help in solving crimes, and the author explores the problem of missing and murdered indigenous women. In both authors’ books, you find a rich source of information and perspective on the protagonists’ cultural milieu.

In a recent webinar, Emerson interviewed Rendon, and they mentioned the “paranormal” issue. Publishers and agents when musing about what they’re looking for in manuscript submissions today increasingly mention their attraction to paranormal elements. It’s not clear exactly what they have in mind. But it is something both women claim to not write. They haven’t decided to paste on some not easily explained or supernatural element. “It’s just part of who we are,” Rendon said, “a different belief system.” In it, dreams are important, she said, and they discuss them each morning. In my dream last night, I was looking for something I couldn’t find—typical!

Her character Cash Blackbear’s visions let her see beyond objective reality. In the Ojibwe culture, such thinking is part-and-parcel of daily existence. In part, that’s because the wisdom of the ancestors guides them through life, and people talk to and “see” their ancestors frequently. And not only because they are “surrounded by spirit houses” (little houses built atop graves mounds). Despite these frequent contacts, interactions with ancestors or the spirit world are done within certain parameters, certain specific rules. Personally, I’d like to understand more.

Naturally, because this is such a different way of thinking, acceptance is hard for people raised in a culture that emphasizes rationality and scientific proof as the keys to understanding the world. From the inside, as Emerson portrays Rita Todacheene, this different way is also hard to simply dismiss.

Another recent book that draws on this type of thinking is Jennifer Givhan’s 2023 novel, River Woman, River Demon. Givhan is a Mexican-American and indigenous author whose story weaves together the otherworldly and the everyday swirling around a murder. It isn’t a novel I would ordinarily gravitate to, but Givhan made it a powerful story, and I’m glad I read it.

Reaching for my more comfortably familiar analytic hat, I can’t help wondering whether stories like these are achieving resonance in this era when the rational seems to have flown out the window. Maybe people are seeking a little wisdom from unconventional sources to help them get through. But that would be selling these books short. These are compelling tales from a less conventional point of view that deserve to be read and thought about in any time period.