A while back, several fans responded to a query on my Facebook author page about what I should write about at my blog. One response was: What do you like to read? Who are your favorite authors? Narrowing down the list is very difficult, because I frankly love to read so much (from suspense fiction to history to devotional books to young adult novels). But in my estimation a few novels/authors stand above the rest. Keep in mind that I’m starting with childhood and that I had a very active imagination then (still do). Today I want to talk about the highly underrated five-book series, The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander (published in the 1960s). The five books are The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron (Newberry Award Honor Book), The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, and The High King (Newberry Award Winner). Before there was The Hobbit. Before there was The Lord of…
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A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about 10 common mistakes I’ve seen in novel writing due to my day job as a fiction editor. Have you ever written or said something, taken a certain position, and then seen examples to refute it? What I should have added to that article was something along these lines: fiction writing styles change over time. When Charles Dickens wrote Little Dorrit, his writing style was popular in his day. But styles change. There’s a reason no one wears bell-bottoms today. The mistakes I cited weren’t grammatical problems; rather, they were “mistakes” according to current expectations on the part of publishers and literary agents. The word current is important to note here because who knows what the popular style will be in a decade. Maybe someday confining a single viewpoint to each scene will seem old-fashioned. Maybe the next big trend will be…
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I live in a very tiny but blessed minority. For some reason, known only to God, I get to work from home and do what I love most: work with words. Over the last few years, I’ve worked more with novel writing than with anything else, and I’ve seen a lot of common mistakes. Here are a few of the most common ones, along with solutions. 1. The Info Dump Often insecure authors feel they need to dump a lot of back story at a novel’s beginning before readers will “get” the main story. It’s logical thinking: “Before you get this, you need to understand this.” But the problem is, they tend to give the info dump in the first five pages or so, those precious pages acquisition editors look at first. (Check out The First Five Pages by Noah Lukeman.) While back story is often important for character and plot…
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Several years ago, I discovered Erik Larson’s engrossing book Eric’s Storm about the 1900 hurricane in Galveston, Texas. When I read his The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (which weds the 1893 World’s Fair and serial killer H.H. Holmes), I was hooked. So it was with great expectations that I recently read his latest book, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. Once again, Larson didn’t disappoint. Since college, where I minored in history, I’ve always loved books that wed history with suspense. Perhaps that’s why history has always played a major role in the suspense novels I like to write. If you think history is boring, you’ve never read Larson, who is a master at writing engrossing historical suspense. What adds to the intrigue is that his novels are true. Every line of dialogue in his…
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