Writers have a laundry list of things we pay close attention to, not only when writing our books but when reading others’ works. Putting aside the typos or grammatical errors – we all make those in the first hundred drafts - the two things that I watch are dialogue and info dumps. Dialogue is the force behind a good book. If it’s not done well, it can ruin a good story, no matter how good the story is. Is the dialogue stilted or natural? Would a person say that sentence or would only a writer write it? Would the speaker use that word? Those are questions I ask myself when I’m writing.

I’ve spent most of my time during the pandemic getting my next book ready for publication. To be honest, the only thing different about this particular time of my life is my concentration isn’t worth a damn. I keep switching back and forth to the online newspapers to see what’s happening, putting my work on hold as I get lost in the confusion. I have managed to finish the book, though I’m still nitpicking it. When our brilliant webmistress, Elle Carter Neal, put my book, The Scent of Murder , up on the blog as a Friday Read, it got me thinking about how to describe our characters without really describing them in the usual way. Then, as I was listening to an audio in the car, another example caught my attention. That’s when I thought about how writers describe their characters. In many cases, a few words can tell the reader more than a full paragraph. Some writers like John Sandford, of the Lucas Davenport Prey series, describe what every character looks like and what he wears on the...

Like most writers I really love my characters. I think we really have to love them to stay with them for a whole book, and especially a series. L.J. Sellers has kept her Detective Jackson series going because she still likes visiting every day with that detective and the cast of characters who continue from one book to another. It is the same with other series writers like Sue Grafton, Louise Penny , John Sandford , William Kent Krueger, and more. They/we all love our characters. In thinking about this to start writing a blog post about it, I wondered why these characters are so loved and so memorable, and I think I figured out at least one reason why. It's because we know so much more about them than the color of their hair or what kind of shoes they wear. We know how our continuing characters think and feel, so we know how they are going to react to a situation or event. We also know their back story - what happened in their lives before they started appearing on the pages o...