What makes a mystery great? I grew up reading mysteries by Agatha Christie; I own each one she wrote. What about them appealed to me and millions of other readers? How does one write a great mystery? I don’t write mysteries, but I know what I like to read. Below I have listed things that,…
Do they really listen to music while they write? Why did they choose to include the Boston Molasses Flood of 1919? How did they go about developing the wide array of characters in the book? How do they manage to keep all the different storylines straight? Before each episode of your book, you named a…
Do your genes or jeans determine what color eyes you will have? During the Middle Ages, was a professional clown a gesture or a jester? If an item is gold in color, is it gilt or guilt? genes, jeans Genes are the basic physical units of heredity. The genes passed down to her by her…
Wasteland Gods was my first novel, and so when I first began writing it, I had already taken a huge leap out of my comfort zone, which at the time was short stories. Generally speaking, there is no right or wrong way of doing anything so long as you succeed at doing it. The method…
I get asked all kinds of questions about my writing: “What kind of tree would you be if you were a tree?” “What animal best describes your writing style?” “What color best describes you?” I had a good deal of trouble with that last one. Dearheart, my wife, assures me I’m orange—a burnt, dark, orange…
If you want to vote in the affirmative, would you vote eye, aye, or I? Would you put a needle through an eyelet or an islet? Would you put eyes, ayes, or ice in your drink? If you say something in a joking manner, are you being facetious or factious? Is a pseudonym a factitious…
I recently finished my sixth draft of a new novel, which takes place in the Iraq war. I’m ready to show it to agents as I look for new representation. At the recent AWP Conference in Los Angeles, I attended a panel called “Agents on Agenting,” where afterward I asked Noah Ballard, an agent at…
Describing a character in your story is usually an easy task. After all, you can see the character clearly in your mind. It’s as if this person is real and standing right in front of you. He might even speak to you, allowing you to hear the sound of his voice. Let’s say, in this…
A teacher of English literature was lecturing a class of adolescents on one of the syllabus’s prescribed modern novels. She selected a short passage which included the following two sentences: “Vanessa’s passage was impeded by the building’s front door. The door was blue.” She read the sentences aloud and said to the class, “What did…
If I were to have a nightmare, I’m pretty sure that it would be about commas. There are so many rules about how to use this little punctuation mark correctly that it can drive a person insane. Some of these rules are easy to remember though. What is a comma splice? Splice means to join…
