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 »
I confess at the outset that my experience of other kinds of readers is limited, and what little I have is not encouraging. My dearest friend Yolis, whose loyalty and warmth I would not trade for anything this world has to offer, finds my novels a considerable trial. She endures them when I give her
Why Historical Fiction Readers Are the Best Readers To Write For 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 »
I can offer no other explanation: I close my eyes and travel. The ancient Mediterranean worlds of the tales I write lie some 9,600 kilometers from my writing desk in Rio de Janeiro, and yet, in the solitude of the working hours—the cell phone on mute, the tropical city going about its business beyond the
Rio de Janeiro and the Bronze Age: Writing Ancient Worlds from a Modern City 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 »
A stylized, black-and-white vector image of the Minoan horns of consecration is the logo of ETHORN Publishing, the imprint under which I publish my historical fiction. It is also used in a more elaborate form as the topmost illustration of the colophon pages of my novels. The symbol has been part of my literary vision
What the Minoan Horns of Consecration Mean to Me Read More »
I confess that as a child I believed the following tales were the stories of real people who had lived long ago. Only when I got older did I understand their significance as myths, though at times I am not entirely sure. The details seem too specific, too human, too particular to be pure invention.
Myths That Have Haunted Me Since Youth Read More »
