Even though The New Yorker labels this as humor, I'm fairly certain it bears a strong resemblance to actual instructions some publishers are giving their authors today. Luckily for me, I'm working with the smart and savvy people at St. Martin's to promote The Poacher's Son. So far I've escaped having to pre-scorch my photos.
Dame Phyllis Instructs
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.
Sign of the Times
“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
So That's How Dan Brown Does It
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.
Scrivener Rocks
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.