I knew some of this before I began. Not in depth, and not as a coherent body of knowledge—more as fragments encountered at random, in craft books read out of sequence, in advice absorbed before I had the experience to evaluate it. What the novels themselves taught me was different in kind: not information, but […]
Lessons Learned Writing Novels: What Each Book Taught Me Read More »
People sometimes tell me that archaic English is unnecessary. That it creates distance. That modern readers want transparency, immediacy, a prose that gets out of the way of the story. I understand the argument. I disagree with it not on grounds of taste, but of accuracy. When you set a novel in the fifteenth century,
Dead Languages and Living Prose: Why Archaic English Is Not an Affectation Read More »
To this day I have not written a villain who is purely evil. I do not believe such a creature exists—not in life, not in honest fiction. At some point even the worst among us had a parent or a sibling who loved them, a pet that did, a life punctuated by trauma and loss
Writing Villains Who Show Their Human Side Read More »
There is a difference between visiting a place and being taught by it. Tourism gives you impressions. Fieldwork—the kind that involves returning in different seasons, taking measurements, sitting alone in churches until the silence becomes uncomfortable—gives you something harder to name and more difficult to acquire: an understanding of how a place works upon a
Five Things Cortona Taught Me About Writing Sense of Place Read More »
There are readers, and there are novelist-readers. The two experiences are not the same. A reader surrenders to the story; a novelist-reader surrenders and watches himself surrendering, noting every mechanism that eases or impedes the fall. I cannot pick up another author’s book without half my mind standing apart, pencil in hand—not exactly to judge,
Reading Like a Novelist: What I Look for in Other People’s Books Read More »
The question of point of view is the first serious decision a novelist makes, and it shapes everything that follows—the texture of the prose, the range of the story, the emotional distance between reader and character. Writers have many options: first-person, second-person, omniscient third, limited third, close third, or some combination of these. For my
Why I Write in Close Third-Person POV Read More »
