What writing hacks motivate this writer to write? (In their March posts, Pat Smith explains what a writing hack is , and Ann Parker offers us links to find them .) These days, I’m not sure what it would take to get me to finish my work in progress, and I don’t know exactly why. Two things that make a novel readable, according to me, are, simply put, the plot (duh!) and the characters. I wrote about characters in a post in 2018 . We all know, or so we’ve been told, there are only seven plots. In fact, I wrote about that, too, in a previous post. What can I tell you that’s different to what I’ve already written? Yes, we can take one of those generic plots and twist it any way we want. We can put the story on Mars, in the desert, or in New Orleans. We can make the setting a character by giving the place its color and vibrancy so that when we finish reading, we want to go to Paris or Rome or Charleston. But what makes me want to write is the character. My genre is suspense/thriller. Wha...

A friend on Facebook tagged me a few weeks ago to name seven books I loved. In no particular order, here are my seven choices and why I loved them. 1. Mystic River , by Dennis Lehane. To me, Mystic River is the perfect crime novel. It starts when three boys are playing in the street, and a big car pulls up. A man who claims to be a cop chooses the one boy who doesn’t live on the street and tells him to get into the car. He does. The story picks up about thirty years later, and how that one incident comes back to haunt them all. By the way, I crossed the Mystic River Bridge, now known as the Tobin Bridge, every day going to college. 2. Ordinary Grac e, by William Kent Kruger. A coming of age novel where a middle-age man looks back on his thirteen-year old life and the death of a friend and the family members who shaped his manhood. Beautifully written and evocative of time and place. 3. The Kite Runner , by Khaled Hosseini. Again, the main character looks back on his childhood ...

In one of the creative writing classes I took, the professor told students to go through their stories and find every time they used the word “felt” and take it out. He equated the common use of “he felt” or “she felt” with passive writing like the use of the verb “was.” He later explained that he didn’t mean an author could never use a form of “felt”; he just wanted authors to be aware that 90 percent of the time the usage denotes weak writing. It is telling the reader, not showing the reader. For example: “Doc ran his hands over his face like he felt tired.” How much better that would be this way: Doc ran his hands over a face haggard with fatigue. He looked like a man who had been on call for two days. That example was taken out of a published book, and here are more from another book. These are from a Robert Crais book, and while he writes one helluva story, he does tend to misuse this feeling thing. “Talley felt uncomfortable whenever someone mentioned the nursery school.” Better ...