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5 Forensic Science Myths

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forensic

Mystery: why is this trainer so clean? (photo: West Midlands Police, creative commons license)

CSI’s wise-cracking investigators, expensive cars, and sexy co-workers with great hair? High on the drama scale, low on reality. Crime and mystery writers striving for drama and accuracy have to get past such exaggerated expectations. Deborah Cole, a forensic scientist with the New Jersey State Police, spoke to a recent meeting of the Liberty States Fiction Writers Group about forensic science myths.

The first is how television has primed people to believe that forensic science is infallible. The reality is that it cannot always provide definitive answers. Nor is it true that scientists never make mistakes or mess up the chain of custody. Sometimes “a good defense attorney can find holes,” she said. (Interestingly, criminals have become aware of the power of forensics and have learned from tv how to cover their tracks more effectively.)

Response is not as fast as people expect. Some states have only one crime laboratory, and crime labs are often small and outfitted with, well, not-the-latest equipment. As a result, they may have a backlog of testing to do, which adds to the time needed to complete tests (or whether they are ever completed at all, with unexamined rape test kits a prime example). Some tests themselves take a long time to produce results. Tests for different toxic substances must be conducted individually, and all this may take a month or more to complete.

Forensic scientists do not interrogate suspects and witnesses, regardless of what tv suggests. Not their skill set. And they certainly don’t make arrests. They may be called to a high-profile crime scene, but they aren’t there first (unlike in the UK’s Midsomer Murders tv series where the ME and crime scene team is always working away—with findings!—by the time the investigating detectives arrive). When they do visit a scene, they collect evidence to bring to the lab for analysis by someone else.

One scientist cannot handle an entire case. Forensic scientists are specialized (in the lab, their focus may be toxicology, chemical analysis, ballistics, and so on), which means that the evidence from a single case may be tested by a number of different scientists. The New Jersey State Police lab employs 130 scientists in different disciplines, and they are involved in some 35,000 cases a year.

Another reason one person can’t do it all relates to the Locard exchange principle: “whenever two objects come in contact with each other, there is always an exchange of material.” The practical application of this principle is that material from the clothing, floor, furniture, car, or other environs of the crime, which is gathered from the scene, from the victim, and from the suspected perpetrator (if there is one) must all be processed in different rooms and even by different people, in order to avoid cross-contamination.

Finally, Cole said (and she laughed when she said this), tv gives the impression that every day is exciting!

Further Information:

♦Useful for writers: http://www.forensicsciencesimplified.org/onducting Forensic ♦Research: A Tutorial for Mystery Writers: http://www.writing-world.com/mystery/forensics.shtml
♦Forensic workshops, including “TV v. Reality”: http://www.crimemuseum.org/forensic-workshops
♦Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us about Crime, by Val McDermid (2015)

 

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What I’ve Learned about Book Reviews (by writing them): Part 1

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books, reading

5-star books of 2015 (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

You may have read some of the book reviews I’ve written for vweisfeld.com and Crime Fiction Lover. Perhaps you’ve wondered what criteria I use in assessing a book and assigning the stars. For one, you may have noticed that most books reviewed cluster in the 3-4 star range (good to excellent). There’s a reason for that. I really don’t read books at random; unless they promise to be pretty good, they aren’t on my reading pile. Another way to say this is, there’s so much good stuff out there these days, why waste time on schlock?

Offhand, I can think of only two one-star reviews I’ve given, and those books were gifts, well-intended, of course. At the same time, a book has to be really a cut above—usually by having strong literary qualities or a truly compelling story—before I give five stars. Proof of this “high average” is that I’ve reviewed 36 fiction/memoirs so far this year; of these, 18 were four-star, while five were five-star. In 2014, I read 56 books, and gave 22 of them four stars and only half that many five stars. The stars are explained on this website’s “Reading . . .” page, as follows:

Book Review Rankings

***** Highly recommended
**** Excellent read
*** Some flaws, but good
** Take it or leave it
* Save your $

While good reviews are important to writers, book reviews are mainly for readers, so I try to focus on the factors that make a book a good reading experience. And, because they’re for readers, **no spoilers!** in my book (and movie) reviews. This probably doesn’t please my friend who turns to the back of a new book and reads the last chapter first.

It’s generally helpful to signal the genre of the book (some people love sci fi and other hate it, for example) and provide a short synopsis of the book’s set-up. This lets prospective readers know whether it’s the kind of book they would like in general, and whether the subject matter is likely to interest them.

Summary Judgment

First, I think about the overall impression a book makes. When I reach the last page and think, “Now THAT was a good book,” assigning the stars is easy. But it isn’t enough to tell other readers “it’s awesome” or “meh” and be done with it. Writing these reviews has helped me figure out why I have these overall impressions.

An important component of this summary impression is the idea or theme a book explores, which is accomplished by bringing together all its elements (plot, character, etc.) in a coherent, if sometimes invisible, way. Invisible or barely visible, because no reader wants to be lectured at. Ideas and themes must be presented artfully, something numerous critics (not me) felt Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior did not achieve, and which Neal Stephenson’s novels do so well. As the old Hollywood saying has it, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”

Ideas and themes are what a book is fundamentally about, and what it is about is not the same as plot. It took me a long time to learn that in my own writing. People would ask, “So, what’s your book about?” and I’d say, “It’s about a New York City architect who finds his mistress murdered and then what all happens as he tries to figure out why.” Now I say some of that, but I add “and what it’s really about is a man trying to regain his self-respect.” The “what a book is about,” stripped of plot intricacies, is the universal that readers respond to.

Tomorrow: Component Parts, Errors, & You

5 Things Submitting Writers Should Know

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(photo: Martin Fisch, Creative Commons license)

AGNI is the well-regarded literary magazine published by Boston University, and its editor is Sven Birkerts. For the June edition of The AGNI Newsletter, Birkets took advantage of the journal’s current hiatus in accepting author submissions to reflect on what its editors hope to find when they read their “towering backlog” of poem, short story, and essay manuscripts.

How big is that “towering backlog”? Birkets says he typically receives a hundred new manuscripts a day. He made five points for writers to consider.

  1. Understand the initial screen – submissions are first triaged into three categories: those clearly off the mark one way or another (more than 60 percent); those that may have potential (25 percent); and those with “obvious appeal” (less than 12 percent), which are circulated to appropriate readers. He doesn’t say whether those 60 receive an immediate “No, thanks,” or whether they get into a process that takes the two to four months noted in AGNI’s submission guidelines. (AGNI turned down a short story of mine, and it took six weeks.)
  2. Understand the need for fit – The approximately one-third of the submissions in the “maybe” queue are reviewed for both quality and goodness-of-fit—as Birkets puts it, whether they fall within its “aesthetic profile.” Determining the likelihood that a story will be a good fit is ideally an author’s responsibility, in part. It’s why literary journals typically suggest a prospective submitter read a few copies before sending in their work. In other words, self-triage. “It does take some time to scout out likely venues for work,” he admits, “but it also takes time sending and re-sending to ones that turn out to be unlikely.”
  3. Focus on the most important – What AGNI editors look for in a cover letter is a quick statement and a short list of the author’s most notable previous publications, if any. By contrast, the first sentences of the story receive the editors’ careful attention. Birkets describes why beautifully: “As an editor confronting the day’s abundance, I want to find a reason to stop reading as soon as I can. As an editor in love with good writing, I want to find that I cannot stop.”
  4. Don’t fret about a lack of previous publications – This, he says, is not a barrier with AGNI, and, contrariwise, well established writers can be rejected because of the lack of fit noted above Birkets estimates that about half the stories AGNI publishes are by newly discovered writers.
  5. Be committed to the importance of the work – This is the hardest of his points to distill into concrete advice, but may be the most critical. He says he wants to see work that is “an authentic and necessary expression, something that couldn’t not be written.” In other words, the writing must be propelled by the author’s deep conviction of its necessity in a noisy world. “We know when we are in the presence of that and, believe me, we are interested,” he says. I have a friend whose OK novel was published a few years ago. Sometime later, I asked him whether he was writing another. “No,” he said, with astonishing candor, “I found out I don’t have anything to say.”

For my many writing friends who do have something to say, AGNI’s submissions period opens again September 1.

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Charles Baxter’s Careful Touch

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(photo: Paško Tomić, Creative Commons license)

Tin House’s blog, The Open Bar, recently published a wide-ranging interview with Charles Baxter, touching on such writers’ dilemmas as including humor, narrative voice, and creating resonance. Baxter has written five novels and five short story collections and teaches at the University of Minnesota. He also created one of my most treasured “writing bibles”—The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot.

The Tin House interviewer, Susan Tacent, starts by talking to him about humor in literary fiction and how difficult it is to achieve. “It has to look easy,” Baxter says, “light as a feather, effortless. . . . Trying to be funny is the death of comedy.” The subtlety he goes for (in an era of the cheap one-liner) relies on characters’ being unintentionally funny, especially those who usually are “terribly serious: monomaniacs are hilarious.” The Producers has been playing in our CD mix, and I can’t help but think of Dick Shawn as Hitler, never noticing how ridiculous he is. Such incongruities between characters’ and readers’ perceptions can be arranged by the author, he says, but must use “invisible wires.”

Similarly, he tells Tacent, narrative voice “should arrive naturally and not be forced” and writers develop their own unique voices, whether they are striving to or not. Some writers’ voices are overbearingly strong, while others recede. Baxter’s preference is the “pale neutrality of Checkhov’s prose.” How different are these three contemporary literary voices, which seem apparent in even a sentence or two, picked at random:

  • Everyone laughs except Bix, who’s at his computer, and you feel like a funny guy for maybe half a second, until it occurs to you that they probably only laughed because they could see you were trying to be funny, and they’re afraid you’ll jump out the window onto East Seventh Street if you fail, even at something so small. – Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Good Squad
  • He paused at some trash in a corner where a warfarined rat writhed. Small beast so occupied with the bad news in his belly. It must have been something you ate. – Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
  • There have been worse accounts of his situation. He wants to say, she is not a mistress, not anymore, but the secret—though it must soon be an open secret—is not his to tell. – Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Tacent also asks him about creating a “lush” style in fiction, which Baxter believes is achieved by following a character over a long time period (David Copperfield) or engaging several time-frames at once to create depth and resonance. His new book of short stories, There’s Something I Want You To Do, includes five stories whose titles are virtues and five that are vices. Baxter achieves that lush interconnectedness among people by showing aspects of “the same scenarios again and again, with one story’s protagonist reappearing as a minor actor in someone else’s tale,” as Boston Globe reviewer Buzzy Jackson describes it.

Baxter says the stories “seem to be suggesting that there’s another world right next to ours,” or perhaps there are competing and simultaneous realities. Such a construct veers away from what he considers the overworked idea of “the singular ego”—“both in fiction and outside of it.” Epitomized, perhaps, by the “selfie.” Or, Dick Shawn’s unforgettable “Heil, myself!”

“Accidents” of Research

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dinosaur, dig, paleontology

(photo: wikimedia)

In the May issue of The Big Thrill, writer Gary Grossman discussed how he dug deep for the themes and jigsaw pieces of his new “geological thriller,” Old Earth. There are two kinds of research that I do. One is akin to fact-checking: Exactly how should a flash-bang be described, and how does it work? On what street corner in Rome is the Anglican church? What variation of baklava do Turks eat? This kind of research is essential, in order to keep readers convinced that their books’ narrators know what they are talking about. More about my research process is here.

Although that kind of research can be a springboard for ideas, the other type of research, which Grossman describes, is more wide-ranging, more generative. Old Earth begins some 400 years ago in Galileo’s time, thought the principal story concerns characters who are present-day paleontologists involved in an excavation. As Grossman wrote, he began to feel the need for a powerful inciting incident, one that would be “profound, believable, and grounded in truth.” So he expanded his research on Galileo and discovered some of the astronomer’s less famous inventions, which turned out to be authorial gold.

These facts provided a plausible jumping-off place for plot development, an opportunity to link the historical and modern-day portions of the novel, and an imaginative yet believable motivation. They were, he says, “A wonderful accident of research.” Such interconnections in a novel create a natural resonance for the reader and make the work more meaningful. Good storytellers who use such links–in fiction and non-fiction alike–make their work both more interesting and more universal.

He terms his discovery an accident, but it’s really a case of “chance favoring the prepared mind.” It’s the kind of thing that can happen when a writer stays open to possibilities and connections. In the process, the discovery became an adventure for Grossman, as well as for his subsequent readers.

Writers frequently talk usefully about the need for balance between research and writing, since many writers so love to do research they can get lost in the byways of investigation and neglect to even open up the most recently saved file of their novel-to-be. It’s a matter of figuring out how much detail—and in Grossman’s case, how much depth—is needed to craft a story that is both believable and memorable.

Bearing Witness: Writer Bob Shacochis

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Haiti market (photo: Kent MacElwee, Creative Commons license)

The seed of Bob Shacochis’s second novel was planted during an encounter with a woman in a bar in Haiti. She asked whether he knew a voodoo priest because she had lost her soul. Shacochis is interviewed in the Spring/Summer 2015 issue of Glimmer Train. His novels are Swimming in the Volcano (a finalist for the 1993 National Book Award) and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, published in 2013 and a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Possibly you know him for five years of “Dining In” columns for GQ. Now he also teaches at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Shacochis grew up “in a very politicized world inside the (Washington) Beltway,” which must have confined his spirit like a too-tight corset, because what he most liked to read as a boy were National Geographic and books about traveling to different countries around the world. He says his writing remains an amalgam of “a kid’s curiosity about the outside world, and then the inside world of power and humanity and fallibility.” Whether America declines in power and influence or rises to new levels, literature needs to document its progress, and his books attempt to accomplish this feat. As he said in an NPR interview, he wants “to make Americans have a more visceral feeling about how America impacts everybody in the world.” A role of fiction is, thus, to bear witness to the exercise of power.

At the same time, he says, the nation’s myths need to be updated and made relevant to new generations facing what seems to be an endless cycle of vengeance and wars. The myths that shape us—like the myths of the Glorious Revolution, of the American West, of The Right Stuff astronauts, of the Silicon Valley pioneers—can be recast through fiction. Says Shacochis, “in order to have an engaged experience with our culture in the years ahead, writers need to be able to move throughout and chronicle the spectrum of art, and politics, and history.” It goes without saying that he is a strong believer in context; as context changes, myths evolve. He quotes his fellow author Jim Harrison as saying, “There are no old myths. There are just new people.”

The central theme of Swimming in the Volcano, he says, is an attempt to answer the question, “where does hate begin?” and its epigraph is a quote from Charles Newman: “Forgiveness is based on the fact that there is no adequate form of revenge.” The Woman Who Lost Her Soul starts with a different question, “where does hate end?” The principal character is initially not particularly likeable, but Shacochis hopes he’s succeeded in the daunting task of enabling his character to change enough that readers, by the end of the book, forgive her and let hate go. To do that, his story crosses continents and generations. (Read an excerpt here).

It’s interesting to contemplate what Shacochis’s approach to teaching might be, because, when asked whether writing his first novel taught him something that helped in writing the second, 20 years later, Shacochis said, “the thing that writing one novel teaches you is that writing a novel is a long haul and a lot of work.” The interviewer tried again, asking whether his books of short stories prepared him for writing his first novel, and Shacochis gave his most curmudgeonly reply of the interview: “I don’t think they taught me a damn thing, just like having an affair doesn’t teach you about marriage.”

Pump Up Your Vocabulary

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(photo art by Darwin Bell, Creative Commons license)

Stuck in a rut when you’re writing and want to find some fresh words for your ideas? Not sure where you stashed that dusty old thesaurus? If your vocabulary needs a bit of a boost, the Just English website has produced a gaggle of synonyms for the 96 words that are most commonly used in English. While the list doesn’t replace a thesaurus (online, I’m a fan of Visual Thesaurus), equally interesting is what those 96 words are.

Who would guess these most frequently used words would include crooked, idea, neat, and predicament? Some of the commonly used words cited include alternative slang definitions, which undoubtedly increase their usage, but Just English doesn’t provide synonyms for these.

Anger, angry, awful, bad, fear—they’re all there. A few more alternatives for “bad” than for “good,” but perhaps it means something positive that we have 27 alternatives for “beautiful,” and only 19 for “ugly.”

By age four, children know some 5,000 words in their native language, and children of age eight know 10,000 words. The average adult who is a native English speaker has a vocabulary of 20,000 to 35,000 words, and most adults learn about one new word a day until middle age. The New York Times is happy to help with that. A bit more challenging assortment can arrive in your email inbox from A.Word.A.Day.

Teens who read “lots” have about twice the vocabulary of those who read “not much”—more than 20,000 words, versus about 10,000. While reading builds vocabulary, and people who read “a lot” throughout the lifespan have a bigger array of words in their communications repertoire than do non-readers, what they read matters. On average, people who read fiction “a lot” have larger vocabularies than people who do not—even if they read a lot of non-fiction.

You can test the size of your vocabulary here. More than 5 million people have taken this test; I did, and my estimated vocab size is 37,000 words.

Crime Scene 101

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Television and the movies notoriously overstate the tools (especially the electronic ones) at a criminal investigator’s command, to the extent juries have developed increased expectations about the availability of forensic evidence. (Here’s a fascinating study of the “CSI Effect,” suggesting prosecutors and judges need to up their game.) At the same time, many writers of crime thrillers strive to accurately portray crime scene investigations and to make their fictional detectives follow more careful procedures than often occurs in real life.

crime scene investigation

(photo: U.S. Army, Europe, creative commons license)

Forensic investigator Geoff Symon recently talked to crime authors about evidence. He began by dividing it into two categories:

  • direct evidence, which means eye-witness accounts, with all their well-documented weaknesses and
  • circumstantial evidence, which is everything else.

Symon emphasized that circumstantial evidence is still evidence, and when a tv lawyer pooh-poohs a case, saying “it’s only circumstantial,” that’s not necessarily a weakness. In truth, unless there is a reliable eye-witness, all cases are circumstantial. Fingerprints, hairs, fibers, and blood and DNA other than the victim’s are all circumstantial evidence, and the accumulation of evidence of this type, when put together in a convincing narrative, can become absolutely compelling. Circumstantial evidence can relate to a particular category of people (say, all those with blood type AB negative or having a carpet with a particular kind of fiber), or to a particular individual (fingerprints or DNA).

Says Adam Plantinga in 400 Things Cops Know says “People watch crime shows on TV so they think the police can get readable prints off just about anything—human skin, stucco walls, quesadillas,” but “only a few surfaces are conducive to the retrieval of fingerprints.” Slick surfaces, like noncoated glass, glossy paper, and aluminum are best, he says.

Two additional considerations are avoiding contamination of the crime scene and maintaining the chain of evidence. No longer do hordes of people enter the room where a body lays, tromp around in their own shoes, and depart. (In the notorious 1954 murder of Marilyn Sheppard, “Police officers, relatives, press, and neighbors [were allowed to] troop through the house.” Subsequently, this case was a basis for the movie and tv series, The Fugitive.)

Today’s investigators recognize that “whenever you leave a room you take something with you and you leave something behind,” Symon said. Thus, the importance of hair coverings, gloves, booties, and hazmat-looking suits. Cross-contamination of the crime scene was vital to the defense of O.J. Simpson. First investigators on the scene, therefore, have a particular responsibility to document it accurately with photos, video, sketches, and notes, knowing it may be contaminated subsequently.

Similarly, the chain of custody for evidence is an essential part of “preserving” the crime scene evidence. Unless a piece of evidence has been carefully tagged, and each subsequent person who handled and tested it has signed for it, criminal prosecutors cannot claim that a trace of DNA , a hair, or other physical evidence is the same bit gathered at the crime scene and not somehow introduced subsequently.

Symon and other forensic investigators help authors by describing “reality.” The challenge for the author is to subvert reality in a believable way so their story’s plot can unfold. While in real life, procedural mess-ups may mean perpetrators are never be brought to justice, this often suits the author’s fictional purposes very well.

Fan Fic Fest

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Sherlock, Freeman, Cumberbatch

Martin Freeman (Watson) & Benedict Cumberbatch (Holmes) in Sherlock

Last night a high-powered panel of experts discussed fan fiction and its uneasy relationship with traditional media, moderated by Anne Jamison, author of Fic, and oft-quoted academic expert on this phenomenon. (She teaches the fan fic class I’m auditing at Princeton.) Fan fiction, in essence, is taking existing characters (from Elizabeth Bennett to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sometimes both at the same time) and creating new plots and storylines for them. One of its fundamentals is that people write it for love of the characters, not for money. On the panel were New Yorker tv critic Emily Nussbaum, Jamie Broadnax, creator of the website Black Girl Nerds, commentator Elizabeth Minkel of The Millions and The New Statesman, and intellectual property attorney (and fan) Heidi Tandy.

Traditional media often treat the huge and hugely diverse fan fiction universe in what the panelists observed is a mocking way, as if it were made up solely of young women who want to write about male-on-male sex. That trope is called “slash,” it is alive and well, and it really got going with Spock/Kirk fan fic. Now there’s a huge Johnlock (John Watson/Sherlock Holmes) fandom. (Find some well-written Johnlock material here.)

By contrast, the X-Files spawned a lot of het (heterosexual) fic written by people who really thought Scully and Mulder should get together. And, of course, the runaway financial success 50 Shades of Grey began as E.L. James’s fan fic based on the Twilight series.

Though sex is an important component in some fan fiction, and though a lot of it is written by young women, it’s a much more diverse field than commentators typically acknowledge. Meanwhile, there’s something unseemly, panelists agreed, about highly paid stars and showrunners snidely critiquing the writing of people who are doing it for free.

Interestingly, some tv shows are courting the fan fic community, counting on its obsessiveness to uncover Easter eggs in the story and faint clues and parallels and arcane references. Sherlock (though Benedict Cumberbatch has run afoul of the fan fic world for some of his critiques of it) uses many fan fic tropes, and the first episode of Season 3 included a group of fan fic writers as characters, creating their explanations for how Sherlock was not dead, even after the fall witnessed at the close of Season 2. Panelist Minkel has covered these developments nicely.

The Sherlock showrunners draw on many sources—not just the “canon” of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories—but all the movies, books, and other derivative works about Holmes that have been created subsequently. Fan fiction, the practice of live-tweeting shows, and other possibilities are cracking open the tv screen, and, in the future, popular programs will likely exist both within and outside their scheduled allotments.

Fan fic is a great big and raucous world, and if you’re at all curious, here are some places to start exploring or toe-dipping: Archive of Our Own (AO3), which reports it contains almost 18,000 fandoms, has more than a half-million users, and 1.6 million works; and the FanFiction Network, which used to be the most popular fan fic site, but is being outrun by AO3.

The tagline of Jamison’s book is the possibly aspirational “Why fanfiction is taking over the world.”

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Capturing the Thrills

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(photo: takomabibelot, creative commons license)

Among the workshops at the Liberty States Fiction Writers’ annual conference last weekend were two directed specifically to writers—and readers—of thrillers, led by highly-rated author Melinda Leigh and featuring Dan Mayland (espionage) and Ben Lieberman (financial thrillers). The first was on “Technical Difficulties”—and the three experts described how the ubiquity of cell phones (especially their GPS capabilities), public and private security cameras, and increasingly sophisticated facial recognition software make it harder and harder for urban bad-guys to evade discovery. (Here’s an example of the many websites and articles focused on defeating facial recognition technology.) While security and cell phone cameras were key to finding the Boston Marathon bombers, they are a black hole for story ideas, if authors want to write an accurate and believable modern-day thriller or crime story.

Similarly, a photo posted on social media may well have embedded geotags that reveal where it was taken—at the crime scene, at the perpetrator’s home, at his/her favorite hangout. This explains, I think, why so many mysteries are set in past decades—even centuries—or in small towns, where such capabilities don’t impose plotting impossibilities for their creators. I’ve had to let a protagonist’s phone battery run out, for example—imperfect, maybe, but we’ve all done it.

Understanding how such technology works, in order to construct a plausible 2015 plot requires research, and, like many authors, I’ve confessed to really loving the research I do for my books. These presenters’ second workshop—“The Thrill of Thrillers”—discussed restraining the impulse to put all that research in the actual book. Technothrillers (of the Tom Clancy/Frederick Forsyth/Michael Crichton variety, to which I am addicted ) are an exception. Too much background research slows readers down, and when they’re skipping over as much as they’re reading, face it, the thrill is gone!

Another advantage of leaving any type of too-detailed information out is, of course, that the reader can imagine a technology (likewise torture) that is more vivid, scary, or powerful (or gruesome) than the author can. You need just enough to jump-start their own creativity.

A side issue: I noticed how Amazon’s author pages for Leigh, Mayland, and Lieberman provide “Customers also bought books by . . .” information, and there is almost 100% gender concordance between the authors’ gender and that of the other authors customers reportedly purchased. Is that true? I like books by men AND women, if they are well done, and most other readers I know are the same. So, do these lists reflect real reader preferences, or just Amazon’s marketing assumption? Signed, Wondering . . . See this related post.