Writing · Thoughts
Essays and reflections on writing, culture, history, community, and the ideas that stay with us.
Doing a Tarot read for one or more of your characters is a terrific way of seeing them in another light, giving you ideas for their personalities and histories, and providing a little more depth to the way you write them for your readers.
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My brain sometimes feels like it’s about to explode. Mostly this has to do with my distress at the state of the world and my ever-present naïve wonderment at the greed and cruelty of so much—or so it seems—of humanity.
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The first thing is to remember that you’re on a panel of colleagues, not contestants. You are not in competition with each other. Everyone knows that, in theory, but in practice we’re all so accustomed to the ever-present necessity for self-promotion that we often forget it’s not a zero-sum game up there.
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Survival comes with guilt, of course, when so many others didn’t survive, or had their lives ruined by physical and psychological wounds. How can one dare to enjoy anything when so many are hurting, dying?
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One of the reasons people enjoy reading mysteries is the sense of justice they impart. Real life is unfair, but in these stories evil is punished and the just are vindicated, if not completely healed. I think Nordic noir provides a similar feeling, but it’s contextualized; it’s not the norm, and the multi-layered stories don’t all have neat and tidy endings. The story will go on.
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I’ve always been fascinated with abandoned human structures, but as I mentioned, I’ve never seen any that rose and fell within my own lifetime as completely as malls, and so I find myself drawn to photographs and videos of these gargantuan empty places once echoing with so much life.
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Mr Bates vs the Post Office: The Real Story is a four-part miniseries chronicling sub-postmaster Alan Bates’s legal battle against the Post Office, which had falsely accused him and some 3,500 others of defrauding the UK’s postal service.
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My first drafts are a mess. I have an occasionally faulty memory, and so nothing exists in my world until it’s written down. Because of that, I have all sorts of ideas I throw into the mix of a first draft. Some won’t stay the course. Some are frankly contradictory to other ideas I slammed down elsewhere in the manuscript. A few take on the glitter of inspiration and stay in place through publication.
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When placed around a word or phrase as in these examples, they’re called “scare quotes” ... and, man, are they scary!
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One of the joys of reading is the opportunity to live alongside someone else for a time. Hear their thoughts. Be affected by their questions. Wonder why they did one thing and not another. And it’s nearly impossible to do that while still hating them as part of a group.
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Language is communication, and stories tell us where we’ve been and—at their best—where we’re going.
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We can regret some changes and applaud others; but they’re going to happen, with or without our approval, whether or not we’re prepared for them.
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Ali’s in law enforcement. You don’t scream your head off in the middle of the night and not expect a reaction. I was probably lucky he hadn’t drawn a gun or something.
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When I was wondering what context to give my protagonist Sydney’s next set of adventures, it occurred to me that I hadn’t yet explored the world of art.
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I’m always talking about how the stories we tell and the stories we read or hear or view both reflect and shape who we are. Usually I’m talking about enlightenment—learning something about ourselves, delving into issues such as pain or love or agency. But sometimes, the stories teach us facts.
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Something caused us to stop writing—out of ideas, out of time, out of flow, out of inspiration—and we’re finding it difficult to re-enter the zone, to reconnect with the love.
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As writers, one of our obligations, I think, is to be the vehicle that enables readers to ask these questions in a safe fictional space. Raising the questions in fiction doesn’t make them any less real, or any less urgent, or any less difficult, but it serves the same function as fairytales and horror stories, the option of experiencing fears without also experiencing immediate and life-threatening danger.
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We like to see justice done, especially when we perceive that the real world isn’t playing fair with us.
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It’s probably true, as they say, that every story has already been told... and retold... and retold. Like the people in marketing say, though, it’s all about spin. And you could do worse than to re-spin some of the classics. I’m not talking Shakespeare: he’s a little cliché by now. No: I’m going further back, to the fertile ground of Greek and Roman mythology.
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I’m not worried—yet. AI can’t do what I can do—yet. Computers can’t just create stories in a void; instead, they’re given a massive number of exemplars—works that are similar to what the computer is tasked to create—which is then broken down into data. AI reads the data using statistical algorithms to recognize patterns and relationships.
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