Category Archives: writing

Writing Tips: 38 Ways to Improve

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Click-bait headlines like “The Six Grammar Mistakes Almost Everyone Makes” or “Ten Rules for Writing Mysteries” lure me in every time, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when a savvy friend forwarded me a blurb for The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes by Jack Bickham. It was originally published in 1992 and reprinted in 1997. Anyone familiar with this book or him?

Amazon lets me take a look at the table of contents, and it’s charmingly aggressive: Chapter 10, “Don’t Have Things Happen for No Reason,” (so unlike real life, then); Chapter 16, “Don’t Let (Characters) Be Windbags,” (no BOGSAT* here); Chapter 28, “Don’t Worry What Mother Will Think”!; and, something every writer needs, Chapter 37, “Don’t Give Up.”

I have a shelf full of writing-advice books and some are really excellent. And some are more excellent at some times than others. A lot of this advice kind of passes over my head, but when I’m faced with a particular story problem, even one I can’t quite define, the same advice I’ve read many times before finally hits the bulls-eye. A book organized like Bickham’s would at least help me focus on what I think is the problem, though I may be wrong!

While a lot of story constraints and possibilities have changed since 1997—social media, cell phone ubiquity, as examples—the fundamentals of character development, plot clarity, and scene construction stay pretty much the same, unless you’re writing experimental fiction (which I find generally unreadable).

Bickham, who wrote and published more than 90 novels in various genres—crime, espionage, westerns—and under various names, died in 1997. He’s was a University of Oklahoma professor and was awarded the university’s highest honor for teaching excellence. I think that comes through in the down-to-earth approach he takes in this book. If you find you like The 38, he’s written five other books on such craft specifics as scene and structure, short stories, and the like.

If you know this book, tell us whether you found it useful.

*BOGSAT: Bunch Of Guys Sitting Around Talking

Image by Markus Winkler for Pixabay.

Fiction as “the Humanizing Act”

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Author KL Cook began his writing career as an actor, unlike so many of us who always knew we wanted to be writers. When he finally began to write, he immediately recognized that his theater training was perfect for fiction writing. Perhaps it’s the practice in taking on different characters’ personas in a deep way, figuring out how each one relates and reacts to the others, learning to put oneself inside the story—being not an observer, but an “experiencer.” He’s said, “I think of writing as performance—something that ideally enchants, haunts, and persuades through the senses.” This is a strategy all writers can practice. If you were your character on stage, how would you be? relate?

From his theater background, which included studying and performing the works of Shakespeare, he found the kind of complex characters authors strive to achieve. “You can never reach the bottom of them,” he says. Hamlet, Iago—they contain mysterious contradictions. It would seem that the struggle to try to understand them is what prepares writers for creating their own story characters.

Cook’s principal character in the award-winning novel, The Girl from Charnelle, is a sixteen-year-old girl. He says that while writing the book, he sometimes felt as if he were such a girl. But he had some false starts. He wrote the whole 400- page novel in the third person, then rewrote it in first person and wasn’t satisfied with the result. The narrator had to look back at her sixteen-year-old self make some judgments and interpretations that took some of the tension out of the story. So he switched it back to third person, in what must have been a tear-your-hair-out decision! Revisions, revisions, all along the way. The message here is that even changes that require some massive amount of work like these, help you get inside your characters and understand their stories better. Whatever, it worked, and gained great acclaim.

Having made that switch myself in one novel (which has multiple point-of-view characters, only one of which changed) and one short story, I can attest that it involves much more than switching pronouns.

Writing a character very different from yourself requires seeing the world in a different way—part of the challenge and the fun of it! “The only limitation is imagination,” Cook has said. This sound like a more controversial point of view than it once was, now that we’re in the era of sensitivity readers. At the same time, I believe, as Cook has said, that “Access to other lives is why fiction is such a great humanizing art.” People different from us.

Inhabiting characters different from oneself requires giving them their due—making them neither cardboard cutout villains nor perfect specimens. You find out in my novel, Architect of Courage, that the main character has been having an affair. Worse, when he finds his lover dead, he panics and does a very human thing—he panics and runs. But how to make that situation real, not cliché? I tried to make his situation believable in the first chapters by clearly describing his wife and his lover, who were totally different in personality, appearance, and behavior. Neither was a bad person. No bitchy wife or scheming younger woman. It had to be plausible that he could, as he eventually realizes, love them both, independently.

KL Cook’s award-winning books span genres. His first book Last Call, is a collection of linked stories and a novel about the lives of a Texas panhandle family (and I should read them, because that’s where my grandparents lived!). He’s published other short story volumes, a book of poetry, and essays on fiction-writing titled The Art of Disobedience. Sounds like another worthy read. He’s an English professor and co-director of an MFA program at Iowa State University.

Criminal Justice in Indian Country

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Good news for Walt Longmire fans! David Heska Wanbli Weiden says the portrayal of law enforcement in Indian Country that you may have absorbed from Craig Johnson’s books or the (terrific!) television series, are on the money.

A Zoom presentation arranged by the Southeast chapter of Mystery Writers of America this week featured Weiden. He is a lawyer, member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, and author of the 2020 crime novel set in Indian Country, Winter Counts, which won numerous awards. (I’m still thinking about the recipes using indigenous ingredients the new casino chef was trying out!)

Weiden reminded viewers that the 577 Native American nations in the United States are exactly that—sovereign nations, and enrolled tribe members have dual citizenship. In any enterprise involving humans, of course, differences arise, and tribes have varying approaches on how to determine membership. So, if you’re writing a story that involves Indian Country, you’ll have to ask questions. While some laws apply across the board—for example, tribes do not have the right to prosecute felony crimes that take place on their own lands—other variations in criminal justice policies and practices do pop up.

In a felony crime, the tribal police must involve the FBI. In the case of Weiden’s home reservation (Rosebud), two FBI agents are assigned, yet are located a hundred miles away in South Dakota’s state capital, Pierre. Agents assigned to reservation work are not necessarily native; he gave the impression they are unlikely to be. These are not considered plum assignments, and agents rarely stay long enough to learn, appreciate, and respect the culture they are policing. Equally important, tribe members don’t develop a relationship of trust with the agents. And, of course, these situations play out against the backdrop of a difficult, neglect-filled history.

Even if the FBI makes an arrest, prosecutors may decline to pursue the case. In fact, Weiden says, they decline to prosecute as much as half the time or more, even in cases of murder and sex abuse. By contrast, outside Indian Country, only about ten percent of cases are unprosecuted. These enforcement and prosecution patterns are one reason private vigilantism has arisen. The protagonist of Winter Counts, Virgil Wounded Horse, is just such a vigilante, with all the dangers such a path exposes him to.

Debut Authors’ Struggles

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It turns out that the thrill and satisfaction of a rocket launch is rarely replicated in the launch of books by debut authors.The Bookseller, a London-based magazine about the book industry, reports on a survey of debut authors regarding their publishing experience. These findings may strike a chord with debut authors everywhere. More than half of the survey respondents said the ordeal negatively affected their mental health. Less than a quarter described an overall positive experience.

Most of the 108 respondents (61%) wrote adult fiction, and 19% wrote non-fiction. About half used an independent (that is, small) publisher, while almost half (48%) were published by one of the four majors. It seems to have made no difference which type of publisher an author used, as the negative effects on mental health were between 44 and 47% for the two groups. Statistically, the two percentages were probably about equal, especially given the rather small number of authors in the survey.

Perhaps dissatisfied authors were more likely to respond to a survey like this, but at least they also identified specific problems that publishers might be able to address. Chief among them were lack of support, guidance, and “clear and professional communication from their publisher.” Often authors didn’t know whom they should take a problem to. Googling staff directories is hardly ideal. Said one author, “it felt like a parent/child relationship with a lot of gaslighting and fake conversations”; and another, “infantilizing,” “opaque answers wrapped in praise and flattery.”

Still, there were bright spots. Comments from authors who reported a positive experience judged it a “great collaboration” (suggesting effective communication in that instance) or a good relationship (ditto).

About half of the debut authors organized their own launch events, though in one apparently unusual case, the publisher offered to pay part of the cost. Again, authors expected more support—public speaking training perhaps, and more information about events they were booked to speak at.

In many cases, support simply disappeared after publication of the debut or dwindled with each subsequent book. A few authors reported they were dropped without explanation (another example of poor communication). These longer-term problems may be heightened by significant staff turnover at publishing houses. Authors who have good, responsive agents may be able to get help from them on problems of sustainability and continuity too.

All told, not a pretty picture.

Oldest Female Debut Novelist Tells All

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Guest Post by Bobbie Jean Huff

I was twelve when I wrote my first novel. It was four pages long, and in it Martha, the butt of bullying by her eighth grade classmates, graduates top of her class. Not much else happens, but with the novel’s completion I had accomplished a major life goal.

Nearly sixty years later I started another novel. For two years I basically lived in the quiet room of the Ottawa Library, and then another year in the Princeton Library, ignoring cracks from my sons about posthumous publication. That novel was published a year ago.

Writing it, I discovered, was actually the easy part of the publishing process. The next step was finding an agent.

I’d been warned by my editor. She told me that as an older author I might have trouble finding an agent. She knew a Canadian agent who prided himself on never taking on a debut novelist over the age of 45.

The reasoning behind this: first novels typically don’t sell—or so I was told. If a novelist is to succeed, it’s usually the second or third book that pushes them over that hill.

In view of all this, I thought it best to hide my age. My Twitter profile pictured an older lady, her white hair done in a braid. My name was beneath it. My Facebook profile showed that same lady holding a newborn who was clearly a grandchild—or worse.

I needed to get younger, and fast, so I called my niece and suggested lunch. A few days later, if you checked my profile pictures, you would have seen a young woman with her blond hair piled on top of her head with a purple claw clip.

And so, the younger me proceeded to search for an agent. This took time: multiple query letters, various extracts from my novel (fifty pages to this one, the first chapter to another, the full manuscript to another). Persuading an agent to even take a look at your finished manuscript is nearly impossible for a debut author, whatever her age. You might as well send it to www.themoon.com

But an agent did respond. The upside of the pandemic: she suggested a phone call instead of a meeting, and courtesy of contemporary hearing aid technology, phone calls to my phone go directly to my ears (providing I remember to charge the hearing aids each night).

People say I have a young voice. When the agent said, “Tell me about yourself,” I told her that I moved down from Canada to New Jersey a few years before, to be near my four sons. And that when I was in Ottawa, I had written and published essays and poems and short stories. Also, I said, I played church organ. Then I quickly changed the subject to the writing I was currently doing.

Here’s some of what I left out: My sons are all over forty, I have five grandchildren, and some of my organ playing has been for the funerals of close friends.

I signed with her. There then followed a month-long nerve-wracking process: submission of the novel to publishers, the offer, the negotiation of a contract, the unbelievably lengthy period of time that passed before signing, and then, yikes; a request from the publisher for a photograph!

No photo, no publication? I panicked. Then I recalled an author photo I had seen years before—was it Margaret Atwood’s? That picture featured a lone hand holding a pen. I contemplated doing that, but then decided no, I was tired of all this. I’d send the damn photo, but before that I’d do The Big Reveal. I called my agent and said, timidly, “There’s something you need to know.” And then I told her, fully expecting that as soon as those two awful words—seventy-four—were out of my mouth, she would gracefully bring the conversation to a close and I’d never hear from her or the publisher again.

That night I called my third son. “Of course they knew your age,” he said. “They only had to type your name into Google.” I tried it and discovered he was right. Google even knew my birth date. But superstitiously I waited until publication day to replace the photos of my niece with pictures of the old lady with the white braid.

British novelist Martin Amis was once quoted as saying, “Octogenarian novelists on the whole [are] no bloody good. You can see [them] disintegrating before your eyes as they move past 70.” (It should be said that Amis’ most recent novel, Inside Story, was published in 2020 when he was 72.)

Then there was Simone de Beauvoir: “A novel is the least suitable form of literature for the elderly writer, because they risk simply repeating things and are past imagining new possibilities.”

When The Ones We Keep was published last year, it occurred to me that at 76 I might be the oldest traditionally published female debut novelist. I’ve spent some time searching “oldest debut female novelists” and the same names keep popping up: Laura Ingalls Wilder, 65 when she published the first book of her Little House series, Mary Wesley, 70 when she published Jumping the Queue, and Harriet Doerr, 74 when Stones for Ibarra came out. Then there is Delia Owens, whom everyone thinks is the oldest female first novelist. But Delia was only 69 when she published When the Crawdads Sing. Compared to me, Delia was just a puppy.

Now, once again, I am searching for an agent and a publisher. By the time The Ones We Keep was published, I had another novel ready to go. My agent loved it and submitted it to my publisher. Early indications were good, and I was told that the editorial staff were over the moon about it. But the sigh of relief I heaved was premature. To everyone’s shock, Sales and Marketing gave it the thumbs-down.

I was crushed.

That rejected novel has now been paused. My agent told me that, based on its rejection, another publisher would only wonder why my own publisher didn’t want it. Instead, I have a third “slim” novel (aka novella) ready to go. My job now is to find a publisher who will like it enough to take the risk of publishing an “older” author. If I succeed in finding that publisher, all well and good (and I will continue the sequel I’ve already started to The Ones We Keep).  But if I don’t? I will never know whether it’s because I am, as de Beauvoir put it, “past imagining new possibilities,” or just, according to Amis, “no bloody good.”

Regardless, I no longer try to hide my age, which is now 77. After all, anyone looking at my book jacket can figure that one out.

Bobbie Jean Huff’s essay, originally published in Bloom, has created a stir in the Author’s Guild community, whose members have set up a pair of meetings to discuss it further. Good job, Bobbie!

The Long Creative Life

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Hong Kong (now U.S.) author Xu Xi has published essays, appeared in and published anthologies, and novels, including The Unwalled City: A Novel of Hong Kong. In sum, fifteen books. In an interview, she shared some thoughts about the creative life that would encourage authors, both aspiring and experienced. “Being a writer is also an issue if you’re not published” (or, perhaps, not published where you want to be). And it’s hard to break into U.S. literary journals, short story publishing, “never mind selling novels.”

Xu found that living in New York City, enough people were trying to be an artist of some kind—musician, painter, actor, novelist—that made life easier. They understood her. They understood her day job was just a way to put groceries on the table. This is a heartfelt validation of the importance of “community.” Some of us find it in groups of other writers. Some find it in groups outside the writing community.

Still, Xu had to reach a point where the daily demands on her were not primarily about relationships, family, and work, in order to be free to write beyond herself. She quotes Confucius’s description of the various decades of life, which culminate at the point that you can “follow [your] heart’s desire without overstepping the line.” Alas, the Master said that point comes when you reach an advanced age, which maybe is why we hear about authors (like me!) whose first book is published after age 50. Not that that’s a piece of cake, either.

Xu, who is past 50 herself, says she thinks of writing “as fate, destiny, the thing you were born to do but didn’t know how to go about or weren’t quite ready for when you were younger.” Interestingly, in her day jobs she was considered a quick study, but she finds the process of writing, “incredibly slow.” Nevertheless, she finds pleasure in learning how to improve, which is long-term and yields incremental improvements. It’s fulfilling in a deep, “things are right with the world” sense, which more quickly mastered accomplishments often lack. How many times are authors pitched on “this book,” “this course,” or “this software” that will lead them down an immediate and short path to success?

International artists who write in English, Xu believes, are one way for readers to better understand both the universal aspects of life while appreciating differences in human experience and building empathy with people whose perspectives are different. This comes to the fore in her writer’s guide and anthology, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories.

At some point Xu realized she “could waste an enormous amount of creative time and energy on all kinds of ‘okay’ things, and, as well, produce work that might actually prove more readily publishable.” That choice would mean other work would suffer—work that require a deeper examination of our interior selves to reach for the fundamental, rather than the superficial. Such works don’t demand that you stretch your writing muscles. Xu is willing to do this and thereby is, she believes, writing to the future of the English language.

Xu Xi is the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

You’re Leaving? Story Endings

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The First Line Monday facebook page is a painless education on what works and what doesn’t as the first line/lines in a novel. And, how much people’s opinions about working/not working vary! All writers are advised that the openings of their books, if that not one single line, are critical in finding agents, publishers, and readers. What about the ending? That’s important too in a different way. It’s the author’s last chance to make a point or an impression. Or not.

I’ve written about endings before—endings and ambiguity, book endings that disappoint. Here I’m going to do what the facebook page does and just provide the last lines as a standalone. The big difference is, of course, that by the time you get to the last line, you’ve (most likely) read the rest of the book. So you interpret the words much differently than you would a first line. You have context. Still, some lines work better than others in planting a lasting seed.

Here are a few:

“The automonk carried the empty wicker basket up the beach. Eiko followed.” (Ray Nayler’s wonderful The Mountain Under the Sea). This line conveys a since of “ok, life goes on here,” in its quotidian way, which is a very hopeful place to end. Read the whole book and find out why!

“That’s where we are. Well past the Christiansburg exit. Past Richmond, and still pointed east. Headed for the one big thing I know is not going to swallow me alive.” (Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, Dickens’s David Copperfield adapted to today’s also-not-very-kind-to-children-in-difficult-circumstances world—a fantastic book). The reader knows the “one big thing” is the ocean (and so much more of life) and that Damon believes it “won’t swallow me alive” because he’s protected against drowning, but also because, in other aspects of life, he’s developed the skills and relationships to save himself. A perfect summation of the entire book.

“And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.” (Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch). Opinions about this book vary, and this last sentence is a good example of why I think the whole final quasi-philosophical section is just Too Much.

“There’s nothing as exciting as a fresh new start when the page is blank and the future is all for the making!” (Janice Hallett’s clever The Appeal). The last words are from Izzy, the clueless instigator of a lot of bad stuff, and the exclamation point represents her perfectly.

“He is far from England now, far from these islands, from the waters salt and fresh. He has vanished; he is the slippery stones underfoot, he is the last faint ripple in the wake of himself. He feels for an opening, blinded, looking for a door: tracking the light along the wall.” (Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light, third in her trilogy about Tudor England’s Thomas Cromwell). I frankly don’t know how she wrote this; I would have been weeping all over my typewriter, but to have to write the moment of Cromwell’s death after so many intimate pages, I think this, with its poetic tone, really works.

“Kate found her seat. Never looked back.” (Cara Black’s Three Hours in Paris). This ending certainly fits, because through the whole of this WWII thriller, Kate doesn’t seem to think about consequences.

Do you have some favorite endings? Ones you thought really worked well?

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Loving the Long Creative Life

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Hong Kong (now U.S.) author Xu Xi has published essays, appeared in and published anthologies, and novels, including The Unwalled City: A Novel of Hong Kong. In sum, fifteen books. In an interview, she shared some thoughts about the creative life that would encourage authors, both aspiring and experienced. “Being a writer is also an issue if you’re not published” (or, perhaps, not published where you want to be). And it’s hard to break into U.S. literary journals, short story publishing, “never mind selling novels.”

Xu found that living in New York City, enough people were trying to be an artist of some kind—musician, painter, actor, novelist—that made life easier. They understood her. They understood her day job was just a way to put groceries on the table. This is a heartfelt validation of the importance of “community.” Some of us find it in groups of other writers. Some find it in groups outside the writing community.

Still, Xu had to reach a point where the daily demands on her were not primarily about relationships, family, and work, in order to be free to write beyond herself. She quotes Confucius’s description of the various decades of life, which culminate at the point that you can “follow [your] heart’s desire without overstepping the line.” Alas, the Master said that point comes when you reach an advanced age, which maybe is why we hear about authors (like me!) whose first book is published after age 50. Not that that’s a piece of cake, either.

Xu, who is past 50 herself says she thinks of writing “as fate, destiny, the thing you were born to do but didn’t know how to go about or weren’t quite ready for when you were younger.” Interestingly, in her day jobs she was considered a quick study, but she finds the process of writing, “incredibly slow.” Nevertheless, she finds pleasure in learning how to improve, which is long-term and yields incremental improvements. It’s fulfilling in a deep, “things are right with the world” sense, which more quickly mastered accomplishments often lack. How many times are authors pitched on “this book,” “this course,” or “this software” that will lead them down an immediate and short path to success?

International artists who write in English, Xu believes, are one way for readers to better understand both the universal aspects of life while appreciating differences in human experience and building empathy with people whose perspectives are different. This comes to the fore in her writer’s guide and anthology, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories.

At some point Xu realized she “could waste an enormous amount of creative time and energy on all kinds of ‘okay’ things, and, as well, produce work that might actually prove more readily publishable.” That choice would mean other work would suffer—work that require a deeper examination of our interior selves to reach for the fundamental, rather than the superficial. Such works don’t demand that you stretch your writing muscles. Xu is willing to do this and thereby is, she believes, writing to the future of the English language.

Xu Xi is the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Hear That Thunder? Writing Tips

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As author Benjamin Percy relates in Thrill Me, his book of essays on the writing craft, his childhood books were portals for escape. “Suck me into the tornado, beam me through an intergalactic transporter, drag me down the rabbit hole,” he says. Although he’s studied the tenets of literary fiction, he strongly believes the “What happens next?” engine more typical of genre fiction is what propels readers through most novels. Thrill them.

This is one of those books, like Donald Maass’s The Emotional Craft of Fiction, that you can benefit from rereading at different stages of a writing project. Insights glossed over earlier will suddenly make sense as your new work evolves. Here are just a few of Percy’s thoughts that particularly resonated with me this time around.

While a story will have a big goal—solve the puzzle, catch the killer, marry the prince, win the battle—it also needs lower-order goals, at the scene or chapter level, to keep the plot moving. (I’d add here that, sometimes, the protagonist’s goal is subconscious. Maybe Mary believes her goal is to gain the prestige of the job promotion and new title, but what she’s really yearning for is recognition in her father’s eyes.) Working toward a lower-order goal—baking a cake, fixing a carburetor, shopping for a dress, staying out of the path of a hurricane—maintains a story’s momentum and can steer you through what otherwise might be a too-long scene of dialog, the dread BOGSAT: Bunch of Guys Sitting Around Talking. Deadly. Frowned upon.

Another well-used (because it’s effective) device to keep the readers focused on what happens next is the “ticking clock.” It needn’t be as literal as a real clock counting down the seconds until the bomb goes off, but it will be some kind of critical deadline (apt word, that). In James Wolff’s new spy novel, The Man in the Corduroy Suit, the protagonist has two weeks to find out whether a former MI5 employee was actually a spy. To keep the investigation secret, he can’t make any obvious moves, so it’s slow work. He’s just getting started when the deadline is changed to one week. The metaphorical ticking clock can be an important impending visit, a wedding that shouldn’t come off, the start of the school year, the fate of a kidnapped child—anything with outsized importance in the mind of the protagonist.

It’s a long and rocky fictional path to relieving the tension caused by the ticking clock, and at times it may seem like a toss-up whether the protagonist will actually succeed. Once one obstacle along the path is resolved or one question is answered, the writer must keep ʼem coming. As Percy says, “a good story is a turnstile of mysteries.” It may seem the protagonist can never—or rarely—catch a break along that rocky path. And there’s that thunder rumbling in the distance, that clock ticking.

My next novel is set in Rome and has two principal narrators. Genie Clarke is an American travel writer who has inadvertently made herself the target of a group of gangsters, and Leo Angelini is a Polizia di Stato detective trying to protect her. One ticking clock is the ultimatum the head of the gangsters has given his men: “Get her.” Could there be a romance between Genie and Leo? This possibility has its own ticking clock: Genie’s imminent return to the States. Let’s hope this book gets published so you can find out what happens next!

Try Thrill Me for yourself and see what insights you can pull out for your WIP.

(The Amazon links to books above are affiliate links. I receive a small compensation for the recommendation if you click through on them and make a purchase. The product cost is the same to you whether you use an affiliate link or not.)

Writers as Fisherfolk

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It’s stretching a metaphor to call writers fisherfolk, but in for a penny . . . If you can stick with me here, I’d say we cast our nets through research. What I like best about the research I do for my short stories and novels is that it gives me ideas, it lets me connect my story to reality, and readers respond because the story seems so “real” to them. Even if a bit of background work gives me only a single word, it will be the mot juste. Our net-casting—our research—happens at several levels—trolling for ideas, diving into the facts, and weighing the catch.

Trolling for Ideas – When readers ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” and a writer says “everywhere,” they mean that every news story, magazine article, museum exhibit, and anecdote goes into that great filing cabinet wastebasket in the brain and comes out, maybe, someday, in some form or another. Very likely, it won’t be identical, it may not even be recognizable, but it will be “inspired by.”

An example: In my novel, Architect of Courage, the protagonist learns a heinous crime was not the fault of the person he blames, and a police detective wisely advises him to let it go. “This will be hard to wrap your mind around. It changes things,” the detective says, adding, “Time and again I see people who can’t give up their theories about who’s to blame for a crime. They hang on for dear life.” This idea came from reading an FBI agent’s blog about the British family of a young woman murdered in Perugia, Italy, a crime for which American Amanda Knox was wrongfully convicted. Despite numerous and lengthy legal proceedings and much evidence exonerating Knox, the dead woman’s parents steadfastly believed in her guilt. The psychology of this case, if not the factual situation, bore directly on my thriller.

Diving into the Facts – Writing page after page and chapter after chapter requires a different, much more focused type of research. Maps, reference books, photo research, the Internet—all keep the writer out of blooper territory. Are there one-way streets in Brussels? Which way do they run? How long does it take to get from the Hotel Sofitel to the American Embassy by cab? What does the hotel neighborhood look like? My architect protagonist is mostly in Manhattan, but he travels to Brussels and Tarifa, Spain, too. I was amused and flattered when a friend contacted me asking for Brussels travel tips. I’ve never been there. The setting just seemed so real to him. (Success!) The facts I uncovered, in turn, led to new ideas and situations that fostered the story’s development.

Weighing the Catch– So, the author has written “The End.” Is it? Probably not. Now that the story is down on paper and the dilemmas of the plot and characters are solved, what more is there to do? It’s time for the big picture. Beta readers help (think “audience research”). In Architect of Courage, I also needed a more specific review of the way police work. Yes, I watch tv, but on the off-chance its depictions of policing aren’t 100% accurate, I sought help. I spent an afternoon with a former NYPD detective and terrorism expert going over every paragraph and every line of dialog that involved law enforcement. “Would a detective say something like this?,” “Is this how it’s done?,” “Does this make sense to you?” Blooper-patrol again, though my questions weren’t just about what do cops do, I was hoping for—and received—insights into how they think.

Your Further Research:
I like Benjamin Sobieck’s The Writer’s Guide to Weapons. It provides “just enough” information.

Need a foreign word? Try the Word Reference website—lots of idioms associated with a word, and online forums with native speakers where you can ask questions. Especially helpful with slang. Many languages.

If you’ve read Architect of Courage and wonder where something or other came from, feel free to ask! And if you haven’t read it, you can order it here. (affiliate link)