Why the past is the toughest assignment of them all… Writing Tip: How to Write About the Past “Don’t you know, you can’t go home again,” as Thomas Wolfe was famously warned, but I have done so, for my writerly sins, returning at the age of thirty-five with my young family to the small rural […]
Category Archives: Writing Tips
From Spenser to Sherlock Holmes: How authors deal with aging detectives…
From Spenser to Sherlock Holmes, how to keep detectives young while writing a book a year…. Age is a tricky concept in crime novels. What I’m referring to is the age of the sleuth figure. When this sleuthing person gets involved in tracking a killer, it’s essential for the sake of believability that he or […]
THE LOCKBOX IN EVERY AUTHOR’S CLOSET
THE LOCKBOX IN EVERY AUTHOR’S CLOSET I was a curious kid. When I was thirteen, I became convinced I was adopted. I couldn’t possibly share the DNA of the people who sat around the dinner table at our house each night. My dad sold insurance. My mother was a stay-at-home mom. My five siblings […]
Writing a short story is the key to being a better writer…
About a year ago, Colin Kearns, my editor at Field & Stream, asked me if I were interested in going to Cuba. Havana, tooling through Old Town in a pink and white Chevy Bel Air, Papa Dobles at the El Floridita, fly fishing in the Bay of Pigs, and the world’s most beautiful women everywhere […]
Writing Tips: Who Needs Rules to Write?
Writing Tips: Who Needs Rules to Write? “There are three rules for writing a novel,” W. Somerset Maugham once quipped. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” Anyone who’s set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) knows this to be true. However, that’s never stopped members of the literati from offering advice in […]
Why are readers fascinated with Secret Societies?
Thrillers and secret societies seem to be a perpetual trend. What lies behind this fascination? The first thing I’d like to say is that while I am a terrific fan of a good secret-society thriller, Dominus is a story that I wrote, in part, to challenge some of the assumptions of that genre. It’s not […]
Essential Writing Tips: Giving characters their own voice
Giving Characters Their Own Voice As long as there have been creative writing classes, aspiring authors have received the same advice: Write what you know. Unfortunately, unless you know a lot — and even if you do — that advice will only take you so far. You’ll still face the issue of building […]
Finding the Way In: How to find the perfect setting for books without getting lost…
Finding the perfect setting for books… For some years now, a large part of my creative life has taken place in a dismal collection of offices, spread across three floors, in a fictional borough of London that nevertheless exists in the real world. I’ve never set physical foot on these premises. The closest I’ve come […]
I Don’t Know How to Write a Book, yet I did!
They say that all you need to write a book is a good idea. And I didn’t have one. It was June 2012 on a cold, crisp afternoon in the shaky isles of Middle Earth, or as I affectionately call it, New Zealand. I was huddled under a blanket on the couch staring blankly […]
Murder in the Fjords…
Murder in the Fjords… I have enjoyed telling creepy stories since I was a child. I’ve always had this voice in my head that asks, “What if …” When you write a crime novel series with a recurring protagonist, one of the most frequently asked questions you get from readers, journalists, and panel participants—and it’s […]
Keep on Writing!
(Keep on Writing! An order that needs to be heeded by aspiring writers) How do you go about writing a story that’s several hundred pages long? “Seriously, how do you do it? “some people ask me in astonishment, as if writing were some kind of magic and all those pages of text just erupted from […]
Writing Tips from J.A. Jance
If you want to be a writer, read! Why people who don’t read books still want to write them is more than I can understand. If you want to be a writer, write what you love and respect your readers. If you look down your nose at genre fiction and are only writing a mystery […]