How the Pied Piper of Tucson Led Me to My Story
When I started my YA thriller Half in Love with Death, I’d already abandoned two novels about a young girl who falls in love with a man who may be a murderer. Every time I tried to write it I…
Category: Craft Discussion
Novelists, ask yourselves: Is your protagonist getting enough to eat?
Sure, you’ve shown us compelling details. The contents of your character’s medicine cabinet or their elaborate grooming rituals or how they behave in a traffic jam. But the sentient beings whose stories we tell have gotta eat. Are you using that…
Time, Time, Time: What Have I Done?
In real life, I am generally good with time. I meet deadlines. I show up Canadian punctual (ten minutes early) to events. And I am usually aware of the date and time thanks to that job I have at MIT,…
Missing Scenes
Sometimes when I’m working through a revision, I realize I haven’t given an event or a character proper consideration. The book suffers because I’ve buried in ‘telling’ certain events and characters who should have been ‘shown’ in scene. These are…
An Interview with Leni Zumas, Author of Red Clocks
Leni Zumas’ new novel, Red Clocks (Little, Brown, 2018) was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, an Indie Next pick, and one of Esquire’s Most Anticipated Books of 2018. It is electric and brilliant. If you haven’t…
By the time you read this…
By the time you read this post, I’ll have visited my protagonist’s hometown, Leipzig, Germany. I expect the city will be strange to both of us—I’ve never been there and he, Viktor, left home in 1942 to join Hitler’s army….