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Having just quoted P.D. James on the subject of sex, I should also recommend this little tutorial in mystery writing. "A first class mystery should also be a first class novel," says Baroness James, which is why she is one of my all-time favorite authors. Anyone interested in writing fiction could do a lot worse than studying her brilliant Adam Dalgliesh novels. These are exquisitely written, unflinchingly honest, and relentlessly entertaining books.
“In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.”
—P.D. James
I haven't read Dan Brown's new novel The Lost Symbol and don't intend to. But like millions of other readers I did devour The DaVinci Code in a few sittings — although, having read the insipid Holy Blood, Holy Grail beforehand, I recognized the dark secret Robert Langdon would eventually unfold. I've always enjoyed cryptogram-laden mysteries ever since I first read Edgar Allen Poe's "The Gold Bug" in my junior high school library—but I've enjoyed them more as word games than as works of literature.
As a novelist I appreciate Brown's facility for headlong plotting, and the obvious, infectious joy he takes in telling his tales, but that's as far as it goes. I'd contrast him with someone like Arturo Perez Reverte who's just as talented a puzzlemaster but seems to have actually contemplated the human condition between chess matches and sips of sherry. That said, I don't begrudge Mr. Brown his continuing success. What's good for booksellers is good for us all.
This feature from Slate is pretty damn hilarious, though.
I did my revisions of The Poacher's Son using an inexpensive word processing program called Scrivener. (It's only available for Macs so if you don't have one, you can stop reading now.) It's a little tricky explaining what Scrivener is, but I'll start by quoting from Macworld's review of an earlier version (1.03):
Scrivener organizes each writing project, or draft, as a series of folders and files; each project can include relevant keywords, notes, and a brief synopsis. Outline and corkboard views provide drag-and-drop reordering of these elements, and the Edit Scrivenings button displays selected documents, or the entire draft, as a single document. It’s easy to assign custom labels for chapters, concepts, character sheets, and such, or set a status—first draft, rewrite, final draft—for individual draft items.
Another very cool thing about Scrivener is that that you don't have to switch back and forth between a bunch of applications to refer to research files. Instead you store all of your book research — image files, PDFs, movies, sound files, and web pages — inside Scrivener itself. Essentially, all of your work is available to you all the time.
Scrivener isn't exactly a replacement for Microsoft Word (although I wish it was) or Pages (which I'm lukewarm about). Eventually, you'll have to export your novel into another format, be it a .doc file or an .rtf. But it's ideal for getting your novel to the finish line.
Maybe someday I'll start getting paid for these endorsements.
Just got back from the North Woods where I was enjoying the last gasp of fishing season. There's no Internet at the remote cabin where I was staying (no running water either), so blogging was out of the cards. You take your entertainment where you can find it on a frigid autumn afternoon up north. We decided to cruise around calling for moose. This is the moose rut in Maine when big bulls starting rounding up harems of willing females. You can lure them into sight by either imitating another male, which prompts a territorial challenge that involves lots of snorting and thrashing of the antlers, or by wailing like a lonely cow looking for love. With a little work we managed to summon an angry bull moose who came rampaging out of the edge of a clear cut and chased us into our pickup truck. Fortunately we all escape being trampled into the dust. Hey, what's more fun than a stupid, self-induced brush with death?
To learn how you, too, can take your life into your hands on your next Maine vacation, read this helpful guide.
