These are notes on various writing topics, taken from something I’ve read or based on my own ideas. I find it useful to return to these notes from time to time to refresh the lessons they offer for my writing. They also offer many opportunities for questions and discussion, which I welcome.

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* beginnings

* character development

* character development … Daniel Silva on Gabriel Allon

Old Man by William Faulkner

• “nobody told them for what or for why”
• this convict does not control his life in any meaningful way; the tragedy is that he clearly could, he has enormous capabilities, but he has no concept that this is possible for him;
• he is stuck within an almost feudal sense of his place in the world, unchangeable.
• “things had moved too fast for him”
• but he will respond to whatever happens (and much does happen), stolidly plowing on, showing great creativity but only to accomplish the task he has been set, not to improve his own lot in life;
• “he thought quietly, with a sort of bemused amazement, Yes, I reckon I had done forgot how good making money was. Being let to make it” … and later … “Then he would retire himself, he would take a last look at the rolled bundle behind the rafter and blow out the lantern and lie down as he was beside his snoring partner, to lie sweating (on his stomach, he could not bear the touch of anything to his back) in the whining ovenlike darkness filled with the forlorn bellowing of alligators, thinking not, They never gave me time to learn but I had forgot how good it is to work”
• among the few times in the story where Faulkner leads the reader to think what might have been for this convict, with all his talents and determination, but for one stupid mistake when he was 19 years old.
• and at the end … “Yonder’s your boat, and here’s the woman. But I never did find that bastard on the cottonhouse.”
• “All right,” the convict said. “If that’s the rule.” So they gave him ten years more and the Warden gave him the cigar and now he sat, jacknifed backwards into the space between the upper and lower bunks, the unlighted cigar in his hand while the plump convict and the four others listened to him.”

Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

• Andre-Louis begins as a supporter of Privilege, since this is how he was raised.
• His initial support for Equality and Freedom is borrowed from his murdered friend, but not believed, and initially, his real-life impassioned political oratory is all an act.
• Later, as an actor, he surprisingly becomes more real, interjecting purposely provocative lines, which he apparently believes, into the play.
• As a politician, he comes to believe that a new constitution will indeed save France from the tyranny of Privilege, but then comes to see that the tyranny of the resulting anarchy is even worse.
• Sabatini, a historian before he became a novelist, has thus woven an evolving historical point of view (his own?) into his adventure story, giving it a higher premise than it would otherwise have.

Silence in Hanover Close by Anne Perry

• in her 9th novel in the Charlotte and Thomas Pitt series, Anne Perry achieved her breakout novel. She did this by raising the stakes, so that the action in the story mattered in a larger sense.
• From this point on in the series, Inspector Pitt is removed from routine homicide cases and assigned instead to cases of special sensitivity and political import (issues such as Irish independence, anti-Semitism, the Church of England’s crisis over Darwin’s theory of evolution) … taken from Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass 
• the old case involves “the delicate question of a woman’s reputation, a distinguished victim from a powerful family, and treason” …
  • so we know that this case involves a broader scope than just a detective story
  • …although, as the story develops, the aspect of treason is never presented in a way that I could feel the future of the Empire was at stake, and in the end, there was no treason at all. It seems to me if you’re going to use treason as a hook, it should turn out to be as important as first implied.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

• Does God have a plan?
• Brother Juniper’s efforts to prove this were burned (and we later learn, so was he). Perhaps Br. Juniper’s massive effort to “prove” God’s plan was in itself evidence of his own doubt that such a plan really existed. Why else burn the proof?
• Dona Maria reflects the doubt of the theme in her own fears. “God is indifferent.” Then she expresses the hope and reinforces the tension of the plot. “But soon a belief in the great Perhaps …”
• Dona Maria … “I can do no more. What will be, will be … She had a strange sense of having antagonized God by too much prayer.”  This sets up the conclusion, where others (Dona Clara and the one “who had formerly been an actress”) fill Pepita’s intended role.
• Manuel “tore open the flesh on his knee,” leading to an infection from which he soon dies. An event, a twist in the plot, which ultimately leads Esteban to the bridge.
• the Perichole gets small-pox, her “beauty had passed,” and she had “never realized any love save love as passion.”

******

* metaphor and simile defined

• metaphor – 1. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in “a sea of troubles” or “All the world’s a stage” (Shakespeare). 2.One thing conceived as representing another; a symbol
• simile … A figure of speech in which two essentially unlike things are compared, often in a phrase introduced by like or as, as in “How like the winter hath my absence been” or “So are you to my thoughts as food to life” (Shakespeare).

Silence in Hanover Close by Anne Perry

• Perry has Charlotte, in her persona as Elizabeth Baranaby, sit quietly listening to conversation and asking herself a series of questions. This helps the reader keep straight what is known and yet unknown about a complicated plot.
• Similar to what I did when Detective Watson complied a list of unanswered questions in A Good Conviction.

The Writer’s Chapbook edited by George Plimpton

• John Steinbeck … say dialogue aloud as you write it. only then will it have the sound of speech.
• Tennessee Williams … when I write, everything is visual, as brilliantly as if it were on a lit stage. And I talk out the lines as I write.
• Samuel Johnson … read over your composition and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
• D.H. Lawrence … they say DHL used to write second drafts and never look at the first
• Bernard Malamud … first drafts are for learning what your novel is about. revision is one of the true pleasures of writing.
• James Baldwin … painters have often taught writers to see
• Francois Mauriac … some writers are greatly preoccupied with technique … they seem to think that a good novel ought to follow certain rules imposed from outside … the great novelist doesn’t depend on anyone but himself … a borrowed style is a bad style
• Mark Twain … the difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug
• Truman Capote… a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation
• William Styron … I used to spend a lot of time worrying over word order … then I got more and more interested in people … and story
• E.M. Forster … very few of us have the power of observing a variety of life and describing it dispassionately. Tolstoy was one who could.

Helpless by Barbara Gowdy

• Gowdy writes as if she’s on a sinking boat and needs to throw out all the dead weight. The only words that survive are the ones that matter: no extraneous evidence of her research, no long-winded descriptions, no self-indulgent frills of characterization. And the result is a page turner that finds tension … from a review by Chelsea Cain, NYT, 4-29-07

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

•  exaggeration … “tidal waves were continually washing away cities … earthquakes arrived every week … towers fell upon good men and women all the time”
• irony … “only the widely read could be said to knowthey were unhappy.’
• irony … “many people would never have fallen in love if they had not heard about it.”
• irony … Brother Juniper’s book was declared heretical, and “was ordered to be burned in the square, with its author.” So much for proving that God has a plan.

The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer

• use of metaphor reveals a writer’s grasp of life
• novels go happiest when you discover something you didn’t know, perhaps a metaphor that startles you even as you are setting it down, a truth that used to elude you.

The Instrument by John O’Hara

• Yank: “Money and I have been strangers all my life.”
  • effective metaphor, likely to be remembered, and setting the story line of what will happen now that he has money (even though this story line is never effectively developed). 
• “Somewhat like Byron, he awoke the next morning and found himself famous.”
  • The simile only works if the reader understands the reference, which is not likely.

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte

•  important characters introduced late in the story … Varo Borja (46); the girl with green eyes (98, 135, 177); man with a scar (173); Victor Fargas (142).
  • This seems to work ok, except for the unresolved plot issues, although when reading, it seemed disconcerting to me.  
• explaining technical matters … the Ceniza brothers tell Corso how a book can be forged.
  • I like the way this was done. It went on just long enough but not too long.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

• Character introduction … After beginning with Stiva and Dolly, many other characters, including the major characters, are introduced later: Levin (p.16), Kitty (p.28), Vronsky (p.39,56), and Anna (p.58).
• If you don’t know differently, you initially think that Stepan and Dolly are the major characters.
• When other characters are introduced, it’s still not clear who the major characters will be.
  • I suspect this is not a technique which would work today.
• Tolstoy ridicules the Russian bureaucracy by simply describing how it works, with no editorial comment. He trusts the reader to get it.

The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer

• most readers are quick readers, who will stumble and fall on too-complicated prose
• the essence of good writing is that it sets an intense mood, then alters that mood, enlarges it, conducts it over to another mood. Every sentence is careful not to poke through the tissue of the mood
• finding one’s own manner is elusive.
• manner comes down to a set of decisions on what word is valuable in every sentence you write.
• another element of manner is consistency. Toni Morrison can write beautifully for pages, then move along in a pedestrian mode
• find your own distinctive insights
• Henry James had an extraordinary sense of that unforeseen vibration in the almost wholly unexpected. He created a fictional world out of such insight.
• You must push your writing to find such insight, by constantly asking questions … what would the character do? … why? … the events must be true to the character 
• Hemingway could not write a good long complex sentence, so he developed a style of short declarative sentences. which seemed to work out pretty well  
• some writers always write in their own inimitable style (Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway) while others (including Mailer) go along in a variety of modes. Matisse always painted in a recognizable mode, Picasso tried a hundred modes before he was done
• describe what you see as it impinges on the sum of your passions and intellectual attainments.
• write as if everything depends on saying what you feel as clearly as you can
• do not be afraid to go with the insight provided in an unexpected and happy turn of phrase
• use your own crucial experiences as a source for your writing, not directly perhaps, where they may be too special, too intense or too concentrated, but rather by projecting your imagination through the crystal of your experience
• if you tell yourself that you are going to write tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You owe it to your unconscious to keep your promise.

Write Away by Elizabeth George

• Talking Head Avoidance Device (THAD) – those elements of a scene that illustrate character or illuminate state of mind in ways other than he said/she said; present the reader a visual element in what would otherwise be only dialogue. Can be anything. Draw from character analysis.
• manipulate language to alter the mood
• every sentence in a paragraph should be an amplification of the sentence preceding it, or should address a prevailing topic in some way
• paragraphs must be cohesive, and linked together to create a seamless narrative
• I develop my outline and write my novels in the order they’ll be read
• Note every opportunity for causal relationships to be developed
• Write the running plot outline – stream of consciousness
• By having as much information as possible before writing the scene, can concentrate on the writing

What Makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulberg

•  jargon … “two sticks short” … this jargon is never directly explained, but indirectly we learn that it is four inches or 30 lines.

The Faith of a Writer by Joyce Carol Oates

• In dramatic literature, the tauter the scene, the more emotionally effective
• if the scene is protracted or repetitive, and the (reader) gets ahead of the (story), there’s a slackening of attention;
• but if the story is too short and underdeveloped, the dramatic experience will be thin, slight, sketchy, forgettable
• the goal of the writer is to fully realize his material, to discover the ideal balance between fluidity of narration and background exposition, description, an amplification
• the story’s theme is the bobbin upon which the narrative, or plot, is skillfully wound. Without the bobbin (the thematic center), the thread would fly loose
• longer fiction (must) involve the reader emotionally
• trying always to write beautifully, brilliantly, with originality, can be paralyzing

 ******

Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

• the concluding scenes are full of tension, both political and personal, as Andre-Louis’s life is made clear to him, at age 28, for the very first time. The personal melodrama is fully submerged into the action, and it is the action which reveals it.
• who shall appear after the duel? is a question Sabatini uses twice.
  • Andre-Louis’s appearance at the Assembly after his first duel is brilliant … “his place was vacant … very few ever expected to see him again … they saw him enter, calm, composed, and bland … M. le President, my excuses for my late arrival … I have been detained by an engagement of a pressing nature. I bring you also the excuses of M. de Chabrillane. He, unfortunately, will be permanently absent from this Assembly in future.”
  • the second instance of who shall appear? transforms a dramatic tension into a comedy of errors. Aline, terrified for Andre-Louis, rushes to the scene of the duel with Mme. de Plougastel, sees the Marquis appear first in his carriage, thinks Andre-Louis is dead, and faints. The Marquis stops to help her. Andre-Louis now drives past, incorrectly interprets Aline’s condition to her concern for the Marquis, and angrily keeps on going.

Silence in Hanover Close by Anne Perry

• Pitt’s first meeting with Ballarat ends with a high degree of tension. “He (Pitt) went out with his mind seething.” This tension is immediately relieved. “Then the cold air hit his face …” The next scene introduces Pitt’s children anticipating Christmas eve.
• Veronica: “We too are taking up our lives again.” Mrs. York: “You are.” Mrs. York’s tone was charged with emotion, but … Charlotte could not define it … a warning of some sort?
  • Something is there. We want to know what it is. We want Charlotte to figure it out so she can help Pitt and he won’t be as furious with her as we expect him to be. The reader wants to know something and will keep hooked until it is revealed.  
• Mrs. York: “Family responsibilities are something one never grows out of, nor is one able to escape them.” … Charlotte had the sudden, intense feeling that the two women disliked each other, perhaps even more than that … Charlotte believed they were speaking of something quite different, and for all the tension between them and the underlying violence, they understood each other perfectly.”
  • But the reader will not understand until almost the last page in the book.  
• Pitt and Charlotte are conducting separate investigations of the same crime, but not sharing the information. This creates tension in the reader, who wants them to share.
  • I think Perry relieved this tension too soon, allowing them to share their information when it could have been sustained longer.

 The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

• in the first paragraph, it was “unthinkable” that the bridge should break.
  • This suggests a hidden reason. I began to think very early on that the bridge did not fall by accident, that perhaps someone cut the ropes. I was looking for a character in the story to commit this act, which didn’t happen, unless God, having a plan for all of us, is ultimately that character. The narrator never openly states his conclusion on this point (which would be ‘preaching’ in the literal sense), but the ending suggests it.
• Brother Juniper “knew the answer … there was no element of doubt … he merely wanted to prove it” But we’ve already been told that Br. Juniper did not know everything.
• by revealing 3 of the people who perished in the bridge disaster, but not the other two, Wilder creates a tension (who dies?) that is not resolved until well into the book.
• the Abbess “had felt not only the breath of old age against her cheek, but also a graver warning” (the lack of a successor) …
  • foreboding establishes tension … will she accomplish her life’s work? This question is never again addressed until the final pages of the story, when it is resolved. 

 The Instrument by John O’Hara

• Yank describes Jiggs. “To this man Yank Lucas owed his life, and he suspected that the man was not going to let him forget it. He was afraid of the man, his brutishness, his low-grade guile.”
  • This is a potentially useful thread of suspense, which O’Hara does almost nothing with.  ·     potential suspense is relieved too quickly.
• many suspense threads have been started in the first two chapters.
  • Will Yank fuck Zena, and if he does, will it be for PR purposes or something real? (hackneyed plot line now, but maybe not in 1967)
  • How will Jiggs interfere with Yank’s rising success?
  • Will Walton screw Yank, or vice versa?
  • What conflict will emerge between Walton and Payne? between Yank and Payne?
  • Will Zena dump Payne? Will Peggy (the agent) prove a reliable ally for Yank?
  • And, underlying all else, how will Yank change as he becomes famous and rich? Will he remain the “sweet” person that Peggy says he is?
  • Will Zena turn out to be as described?
• None of these threads are pursued in any suspenseful way. 
• Ellis to Yank: “already Barry is kind of afraid of you, and he never was of me.”
  • Good setup, but nothing ever done with it.

What Makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulberg

• foreboding … “That was the first time he ever scared me.” The sentence appears before Sammy’s words which provoked it, which follow, in which Sammy tells Manheim he doesn’t want the help which has just been offered, that the route Manheim suggests for him, which is the only way within Manheim’s power to help him, is far from matching Sammy’s ambition. “No thanks.”
• the hook … “What makes Sammy run?”  bartender: how should I know?  “But I’ve got to know.”
  • Why does Manheim have to know? Is there something in what Sammy does that he wishes he could also do? Is he jealous? Manheim’s statement “I’ve got to know” seems intended to make the reader also want to know, to establish the hook for the rest of the book.
• “My old lady at a musical show?” This unanswered question suggests a family situation that is going to play a role in the story. The fact that it is unanswered makes the reader want to know something. Keep reading!
• “The first sure sign of Sammy’s growing up …”   a hint of what’s to come. Keep reading!
• “but some day …” Sammy has a much more clear idea of his future than does Manheim, who is never revealed to have any driving ambition, at least not to make money, which . Thus ends Chapter 1, with a premonition of what’s to come.
• “Sammy Glick was teaching me something about the world.” A blatant role reversal, recognized early by Manheim, and suggesting to the reader that Sammy has something to teach all of us about the world. Later Manheim says … “when it came to knowledge of Sammy Glick I was still in the first grade.”

 Write Away by Elizabeth George

• suspense needs to be created; suspense initiates wants in the reader – the reader wants to know what’s going to happen
• a writer achieves suspense by making the reader care about something
• putting a character at risk heightens suspense
• confrontation creates suspense, either physical, psychological, or emotional
• suspense is created by a scene in which a momentous discovery (a new piece of information) is made which propels the story forward, perhaps in a new direction
• characters working against time creates suspense
• Make partial disclosures creates suspense
• Suspense is that state of wanting to know what’s going to happen to the characters and how it’s going to happen to them
• A novel has suspense only when it contains characters the reader cares about
• Give the character an intention – suspense: will he carry it off?
• If reader cares about character, will anticipate problems he’s going to face
• Create suspense by making a promise to the reader at the beginning of a novel
• Don’t play out your hand too soon!
• Anticipation in the reader adds to suspense 
• making long term promises to readers (through foreshadowing, or by placement of dramatic unanswered questions) creates suspense
• clues are pieces of information which, if correctly interpreted by the reader, lead him to solve the case in advance of or along with the detective
• red herrings are items planted in the story to deceive the reader
• readers should have no way of telling whether they are seeing a clue or a red herring
• the detective cannot ignore what the reader sees as real clues. This puts the reader ahead of the story, knowing more than the detective knows, and destroys the suspense

 ******

Silence in Hanover Close by Anne Perry

• Charlotte asks if Pitt has “any interesting cases.” The expectation is that Pitt will discuss his new case, as it is implied he has done in the past. But instead, he says, “No. An old case that will go nowhere.” Charlotte persists, “Nothing?” Pitt responds, “Nothing.”
• This is surprising. Why does Pitt pass up the opportunity to discuss his case? Perhaps it suggests that this case is different from the others. We sense that his surprising response will have consequences. And it does. Charlotte eventually drags it out of him, and then she sets off, without telling him, to do her own investigation into his case. Would she have kept this from Pitt if he had not been withholding with her? 
• It is a huge surprise when Pitt is arrested for the murder of the prostitute. It is even more surprising that Ballarat won’t lift a finger to help him. And it is the most surprising that, while Pitt languishes in prison, Charlotte and Emily solve the case without him.

What Makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulberg

• Were there any significant surprises? No.
• It was clear in Chapter 1 that Sammy would steal other people’s work and promote himself. That’s what he did until the end of the book.
• Did Sammy Glick ever do anything out of character? No.
• The details of what he did, and who he did it to, were of course unknown at the end of Chapter 1, but the path he was to follow was predictable, and there were no deviations from that path.

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte

• two surprises at the same time … “He’s dead,” and that it is the green-eyed girl who tells Corso.
• However, why this happens as it does is never made clear.

Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

• many outstanding descriptions of places.
• One of the best, of the villa M. Kercadious’ brother’s villa on the heights of Meudon, is combined with a political statement regarding the excesses of the nobility
  • “Andre-Louis crossed the threshold of that great room, softly carpeted to the foot, dazzling to the eye … immensely lofty … festooned ceiling … overwhelmingly gilded … what was customary in the dwellings of people of birth and wealth … Never, indeed, was there a time in which so much gold was employed decoratively as in this age when coined gold was almost unprocurable, and paper money had been put into circulation to supply the lack … if these people could only have been induced to put the paper on their walls and the gold into their pockets, the finances of the kingdom might soon have been in better case.”

Silence in Hanover Close by Anne Perry

• “the curtains seemed to be without the usual faded marks which the sun so quickly made in blues, which meant they were not above a season old.”
• this tells us about the place, the financial circumstances of the owner, and the perception of the viewer, all in one sentence.

Write Away by Elizabeth George

• research and know each of the separate locations
• use settings to create atmosphere, trigger mood
• Show a character in his setting; the individual setting for each character
• Setting can be a contrast to the events that occur within it
• choose your settings so that each is a place that you want to know about
• Writing about a place should involve all the sensory impressions
• Rendering a setting requires details to bring it to life
• Descriptions of place and character should be part of the narrative, accomplished without interrupting the flow
• consider the concept of landscape, by which I mean the broad vista; not only the setting but also the emotions evoked by the setting
• Invite the reader to own the landscape
• Go to the place: see the land, the sky, climate, weather, sounds, scents, wildlife
• the objective is to stimulate the reader’s senses and imagination

Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

• Some of the most interesting scenes in Scaramouche are the ones that aren’t there … Sabatini often skips the scene you expect to see.
  • None of the duels, except that with the Marquis, are portrayed. Thus Sabatini avoids what would be repetition and holds the reader’s anticipation of a dueling scene until the last and most important.
  • Andre-Louis’s entrance into Paris in the midst of chaotic street fighting is also not shown. How did he get past the guards? Did anyone question him?
  • Likewise, the leaving of Paris, first by the Marquis, then by Andre-Louis with Aline and Mme. de Plougastel, become past events, never shown “live.” … Why?
  • One also looks in vain for a real love scene between Andre-Louis and Aline where either’s emotions are shown rather than merely stated or even hinted at.

Les Miserable by Victor Hugo

• Robertson Davies … there can be a 90 page digression about something which happens to interest Hugo.
• When is he ever going to get on with the story?
• But the story is so good, and Hugo writes so fascinatingly about his odds and ends that you can’t stop.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

• pages and pages of narrative scenes. Charming in 1924 when written, perhaps not so much now.
• Very well written but no immediacy.

The Instrument by John O’Hara

• Ch 3 begins with a long transitional narrative (over 2 pages) telling what has happened in the few months since Ch 2 ended.
• This is lazy. It would have been more effective to work whatever was essential into the ensuing action.
• O’Hara’s abrupt transitions to new immediate action work much better.
  • “They were in Boston.”
  • “The New York opening was an ordeal and a delight.”
  • “The house was at the edge of the village of East Hammond …”

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte

• exposition … long, detailed descriptions and lists of old books, which the reader can’t possibly read and absorb. what is the purpose?
• transitions … the reader is suddenly transported from Fargas’ home in Portugal to Paris, with no transition. The details of this change of scene are presented later (187-88). Does this work?
• It’s a technique similar to what Tolstoy does repeatedly in Anna Karenina.

Write Away by Elizabeth George

• Every scene MUST advance the plot, advance a subplot, develop character, or address theme. If not, toss it!
• Every scene MUST contain some degree of conflict
• Dramatic narration – omniscient narrator gives us the facts of what occurred. No dialogue.
• Summary narration – quick, economical, not fully explored
• Fully rendered scene – allow the reader to be a witness to the activities of the characters or an eavesdropper on their conversations
• in PD James, A Taste for Death, two characters appear for only one scene, passing on valuable information. This adds verisimilitude, as opposed to simply reporting the information.
• partial scene interrupting dramatic narration
• Every scene must have conflict.  Begin at the low point, let thetension rise to a climax, then provide a resolution which propels the entire novel forward.
• not every scene must be formed identically.
• Alternative scene formulation: motion picture, sound vs sight, present-past-present, plunging in
• motion picture: set the scene, move to a narration of action, hit the dialogue
• sound vs sight: begin with dialogue (not explained first), back off to set the scene, then return to dialogue
• present-past-present: start the scene in real time, stop the scene and go back to previous action to bring the reader up to date (summarizing that action instead of a fully rendered scene), then return to real time
• plunging in. start with a character in thought or action and go with it.

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett

• omniscient narrator, able to show the inner feelings of all the characters
• at least once the narrator speaks in his own voice … (beginning of Ch 3) … “Faber … Godliman … two-thirds of a triangle that one day would be crucially completed by … David and Lucy”
• the narrator thus provides a foreshadowing, setting the stage and piquing the reader’s interest.

Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

• an omniscient narrator, who sometimes interjects into the story … “nor can I discover …”

Silence in Hanover Close by Anne Perry

• Perry gets us into the heads of all three of her major characters – Pitt, Charlotte and Emily – and the omniscient narrator POV allows this easily and smoothly.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

• the narrator is omniscient, knowing things that were not known at the time
• this narrator, who is never introduced to us, gains our trust when he says that what the people of Lima have come to believe about Dona Maria is not true, and “all real knowledge”
• also when he corrects Dona Maria’s impressions of the Perichole … “It was … untrue …”
• in the conversation (p 24) between Dona Maria and the Perichole, the narrator reveals the inner thoughts of both.
• the Abbess has “fallen in love with an idea several centuries before its appointed appearance in the history of civilization.” The idea is the modern role of women, and the way it is disclosed reveals the perspective of the narrator, and places him in the 20th century.

The Instrument by John O’Hara

• O’Hara uses an omniscient narrator.
• Had he used 1st person (Yank) he would have been forced to write a far more interesting story.

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte

• inconsistent narrator.
• How can Boris Balkan, the knowledgeable narrator of the Dumas part of the story, continue to function as narrator after the April 1 meeting of the Club Dumas, when the story now switches totally to the other narrative, in which he is not involved and knows nothing?
• the narractor seems to be a minor character who interacts with Corso, so he is really telling the story from what Corso has told him. Why not have Corso narrate in 1st person? I wonder if Perez-Reverte thought of doing it that way.

Write Away by Elizabeth George

• must be clear about point of view in each scene
• Objective viewpoint ·  writing is journalistic, like a reporter; provides facts, but not thoughts and feelings of characters – tough to carry off well
• objective narrative can create an aura of intrigue about a character or a situation – precisely because the reader does not know inner thoughts or feelings, but it also minimizes the reader’s intimacy
• Omniscient viewpoint. · Must be adept to remain truly omniscient and not just slip in and out of different characters points of view
• the omniscient narrator knows, sees, hears all  ·  the narrator enters into the mind of every character
• the viewpoint of the narrator is not necessarily that of the author
• the omniscient narrator is a story teller; the reader sinks into the story; the narrator is not confined to the time or place of the individual scene (like a reporter would be) but can provide history about the characters as well as what’s in their hearts and minds
• Character viewpoints … Reveal only what the chosen character would see, know, think, feel in each scene in which the character is participating
• First person … Stay with one narrator throughout the novel … be in that character’s head and none other. Terrific intimacy, authenticity. BUT this one character must be in every scene, which is a challenge to plotting
• Shifting first person. Multiple first character viewpoints. Each section or alternating chapters told by a different first person narrator. Challenge: each “I” must be utterly distinct
• Shifting third person. NOTE: no viewpoint shift within a scene
• can combine first person with shifting third person (that’s what I did in A Good Conviction)
• too many narrators slows down the pace of a novel
• the narrator can be reliable or a devilishly clever liar, likable or not

What Makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulberg

• The entire story is about Sammy Glick, but everything is told through the eyes of Al Manheim. When something occurs that Schulberg wants the reader to know, but Manheim wasn’t there, he has the person who was there (usually Glick) tell Manheim what happened. These sections are in italic.

Write Away by Elizabeth George (voice)

• voice is the tone that comes through the narrative when the point-of-view character is on stage
• voice comes from the character analysis you’ve created; if you’ve designed characters who come to life, highlighting the salient aspects of their personalities allows their voices to emerge
• a character’s voice comes from his background, education, position in society, personal and family history, prejudices and biases, inclinations and desires, belief system, what he wants for his life, his agenda in an individual scene, his arching purpose, his core need
• voice: use of language, vocabulary, attitude
• we’re inside his head, living the scene through him
• attitude reveals character
• reader can recognize connections to a character or can recognize that the character is very different (curiosity piqued?)

The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer

• in the 1st person, you gain immediacy but lose insight, because you can’t move into other people’s heads.
• in the 3rd person, you are God, ready to see into everyone’s mind, enter into every character’s consciousness.
• 1st person cannot be as free as the separation between author and protagonist offered by the 3rd person.

Executive Power by Vince Flynn

• Flynn has a number of plots boiling simultaneously, with uncertain outcomes in each. He switches among these actions, leaving every scene with a hook.
• This is standard fare for a thriller; how will it work for my Heretic sequel?
• What makes it a more complicated approach in a historical novel is the number of names and other information (beyond plot), which without great care can confuse and discourage the reader.

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett

• Follett’s purposeful ping-pong structure alternating between the characters forced him to slow down to show (in his words) “how the protagonists were reacting to each other’s moves,” and to include more enriched attention to “character, landscape and emotion.”
• It surely worked.

Silence in Hanover Close by Anne Perry

• Pitt asks one very short question after another, each one 2-5 words. This not only shows his investigative style, it moves the background process swiftly along.
• Perry frequently alternates family scenes with investigative scenes, breaking the tension, showing more of what Pitt cares about

The Writer’s Chapbook edited by George Plimpton

• Ernest Hemingway … I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader. Anything you know, you can eliminate. But … if you omit something because you don’t know it, there’s a hole in your story.
• James Baldwin … the goal is to write a sentence as “clean as a bone”
• Georges Simenon … I cut adjectives, adverbs and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You have a beautiful sentence – cut it.
• Elie Wiesel … I reduce 900 pages to 160 … writing is more like sculpture where you remove … you eliminate in order to make the work visible … there is a difference between a book which is 200 pages from the beginning and a book of 200 pages which began as 800 pages … the pages you remove are really there – only you don’t see them

Old Man by William Faulkner

• the central action of the story introduced by an innocuous question … “can you fellows paddle a boat?”

Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

• Scaramouche is more driven by plot than by character. It is an exciting adventure story, tracing a vow of revenge from one improbable escapade to another.
• The pace, usually rapid, is slowed from time to time by philosophical and political ruminations on the changes occurring in France at the time of the 1789 Revolution and its immediate aftermath.
• This transforms the story, raising its level of importance, since what the characters do impacts these epic historical events.

Silence in Hanover Close by Anne Perry

• having both sisters (Charlotte and Emily) take on different hidden personas was not credible for me.
• In a “Society” where everybody knows everybody, it seems unlikely that either could get away with it, let alone both.
• But Perry is such a good story-teller that I allowed a “suspension of belief” and did not allow my incredulity to interfere with the tension that these subterfuges produced.
  • Perry has Charlotte, in her persona as Elizabeth Baranaby, sit quietly listening to conversation and asking herself a series of questions.
• This listing helps the reader keep straight what is known and yet unknown about a complicated plot.
  • Similar to what I did when Detective Watson complied a list of unanswered questions in A Good Conviction.

The Writer’s Chapbook edited by George Plimpton

• E.L. Doctorow … as the book goes on it becomes inevitable … choices narrow … the thing picks up speed
• Truman Capote … what I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter’s evening
• Isak Dinesen … I start with a kind of feeling of the story I will write … then come the characters and they take over, they make the story
• John Irving … how can you plot a novel if you don’t know the ending first? how can you introduce a character if you don’t know how he ends up?
• Norman Mailer …generally, I don’t even have a plot … my characters engage in action, and out of that action little bits of plot sometimes adhere to the narrative (I don’t believe him, he’s just shooting off his mouth)
• John Mortimer … the plot and discipline of the crime novel save it from terrible traps of being sensitive and stream-of-consciousness and all that stuff … life is composed of plots
• James Thurber … we’ve got all these people (in our story), now what’s going to happen … I don’t know until I start to write and find out … I don’t believe the writer should know too much of where he’s going
• William Kennedy … if I knew at the beginning how the book was going to end, I would probably never finish … I knew Legs Diamond was going to die at the end of the book, so I killed him on page one

 The Instrument by John O’Hara

• we never get to know what’s actually in either of Yank’s plays. O’Hara provides scant detail, probably because he never thought it through himself.
• Yank uses the people in his life to feed the characters in his plays, which could have been very interesting, if we had been allowed to see it happening.
• BIO NOTE: John O’Hara received high critical acclaim for his short stories, more than 200 of which appeared in The New Yorker. But it was mainly his novels, though mostly of dubious literary merit, that won him the attention of Hollywood. Their focus on ambition, class conflict, money, troubled marriages, and promiscuity was the stuff of film melodrama in mid-20th century America.
• These plots seem trite and barren today, all surface and no depth.

Write Away by Elizabeth George

• plots should not insult reader’s intelligence, no holes, characters who are real
• create subplots that illustrate the same theme through different situations
• every scene advances either the plot or one of the subplots (or it doesn’t belong)
• using a piece of information from the character analysis, twist the story one more time
• keep aware of what the reader knows or doesn’t know at each point in the story
• work with your characters to design the plot
• Plot is what characters do to deal with the situation they are in
• the primary event – that which gets the ball roiling in the novel
• Events must be organized with an emphasis on causality
• The first event (scene) triggers the event that will immediately follow it
• High drama results from: direct conflict between characters, discovery, revelation, personal epiphany
• Plot must have climax, and climax itself must have a climax
• Post climax comes resolution – tie up loose ends, illustrate the nature of the change that has occurred in the characters
• Open up the story by asking dramatic questions (but do not answer)
• I always know the end in advance
• subplots arise out of a novel’s theme, mirror the theme
• you need to end every story you begin
• theme – the basic truth about which you are writing. ·   you may not know the theme in advance, but it will emerge (???)
• the writer’s object is to keep the reader reading
• if a plot is essentially believable, it can sustain a suspension of belief
• every story needs plot points, critical moments when events change (the plot and send it in a new direction)

The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer

• a novel is most alive when one can trace the disasters which follow victory or the subtle turns that sometimes come from a defeat.
• to know what you want to say is not the best condition for writing a novel.
• novels go happiest when you discover something you didn’t know: an insight into one of your more opaque characters, a metaphor that startles you even as you are setting it down, a truth that used to elude you.
• our love of plot comes from our need to find the chain of cause and effect that so often is missing in our own existence
• I look to find my book as I go along. Plot comes last.
• I no longer make up a master plan before I begin a novel. some of my best ideas come because I haven’t fixed my novel’s future in concrete.
• I want to keep the feeling that I didn’t know how it was going to turn out.
• I prefer a story that develops out of the writing.
• Characters (who are alive) need to fulfill their own perverse and surprising capabilities.
• I don’t do my research too far ahead of where I am in the novel.
• if you get a good novel going, you have a small universe functioning, living in relation to its own scheme of cause and effect.
• Planning too carefully makes it almost impossible for one of your characters to go through a dramatic shift of heart.
• the artist seeks to create a spell … a feeling that he knows something deeper than his normal comprehension … a sense of oneness
• both artists and scientists are trying to penetrate into the substance of things
• coincidences occur … exciting us with a livid sense that there’s a superstructure about us, and in this superstructure there are the agents of a presence larger than our imagination.
• stories bring order to the absurdity of reality.
• In analyzing novels, consider each major character, and describe where he was at the beginning of the story, where he ended up, and how he got there.
• Jorge Borges has a magical ability to put plots through metamorphoses, thus posing the difficulty of comprehending reality.
• writing a novel is creating a world, God-like, presumptuous, intoxicating, never comfortable.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

• even though it’s a short novel (117 pages), the story seems to drag, as long narrative scenes regarding Esteban and Uncle Pio are added.
• What does this all have to do with the collapse of the bridge, and with Brother Juniper, who has totally disappeared from the story?

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

• the way Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina communicates immediately that this is not a novel about pace, but will proceed in a leisurely manner to wend its way through the lives and relationships of the many characters.
• Anna Karenina is widely regarded as the best novel ever written. So I’ve read over 400 pages, with another 400 to go, and I’ve had enough.
• The story is slow, boring even, with very little happening, and characters that are not gripping.
• Actually, it’s one long slow soap opera.
• Tolstoy’s descriptions of places are remarkable. His interior monologues are often revealing, although too frequent and too long for my taste.
• Bored, I have put Anna Karenina aside to be picked up later NOTE: it’s been four years and I haven’t

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett

• Follett starts with a one page historical preface about the D-Day deception. He ends the preface … “That much is history. What follows is fiction. Still and all, one suspects something like this must have happened.”
• the high stakes of blowing the deception plan are emphasized several times … Godliman: “If one decent Abwehr agent in Britain gets to know about Fortitude … we could lose the fucking war.”
• But of course we know that D Day was successful and we didn’t lose the war. Follett creates tension about an event where we know the actual outcome, ie that Faber cannot succeed.
• this is much like Forsythe in Day of the Jackal (published in the early 1970s, before Eye of the Needle), where we know that De Gaulle was not murdered by a sniper but are carried into great tension anyway.
• Perhaps the tension is maintained because we don’t know if Faber will fail, or if he will succeed but Hitler doesn’t act on his knowledge.
• However, we are told repeatedly, by Hitler himself, that he will be guided by Faber’s report.

Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

• The occasional insertion of the narrator’s voice into the story, and the reference to supposed actual documents (Andre-Louis’s Confession, playbills, newspaper articles) add historical credibility to the fictional adventure.

Silence in Hanover Close by Anne Perry

• Perry provides the timing of the story by giving the date of the burglary to be re-investigated – “about three years ago – October seventeenth, 1884, to be precise.”
• “star-glazing” is explained … a burglar’s technique … what this does is add verisimilitude, and give the reader confidence that the author knows the period she is describing.
• this technique can be overdone, if it appears that the author is just showing off her knowledge.   ·
• Perry has Emily read real novels published in the time frame of the story. A good way to reinforce that time frame.
• Perry explains terms that a modern reader could not be expected to know.

The Writer’s Chapbook edited by George Plimpton

• John Irving … I begin by telling the truth, by remembering real people … but the people aren’t quite interesting enough … I exaggerate … soon I’m on my way to a lie
• Graham Greene … one never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels … one must imagine what one does not know, but what is imagined should be consistent enough with what is known so that it is believable to a knowledgeable reader

The Scarlet City & In A Dark Wood Wandering by Hella Haasse

• This frustrating historical novel, first published in Holland in 1952, opaquely treats the early 16th century: the machinations of papal and imperial forces have divided all of Italy into scheming factions, and mercenary soldiers gather to sack Rome.
• Haasse ( In a Dark Wood Wandering ) chooses a nonlinear approach: various historical figures alternately narrate a series of complicated events. This structure bleeds the narrative of its intrinsic drama.
• critical episodes invariably take place offstage, characters enter and exit abruptly, and the single-minded concerns of the individual protagonists overshadow the central action.
• Those who don’t know much about this thorny patch of history will be thoroughly adrift; on the other hand, anyone familiar with even a snippet of the works of the figures incarnated here will chafe at Haasse’s shallow and simplistic interpretations.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

• the specific date (Friday noon, July the 20th, 1714) and number of people who die (5) in the first sentence adds versimmilitude. (Stein)
• Wilder chooses to have a 20th century narrator for a story set in 1714. Why? What does this accomplish? Does it makes the story seem true?

comments on “historical fiction” by author David Liss, who writes historical fiction

• Like pretty much everything else in the universe, historical fiction can be divided into two categories.
  • On the one hand are books that use real historical events and people as a springboard for the author’s imagined events and people.
  • On the other hand are novels that limit their scope to characters and events from the archives.
• I strongly favor books of the first kind and shy away from the second.
• History — fortunately — tends to make for great history. Reality, however, does not necessarily make for great fiction.

The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer

• Ancient Evenings, a book about ancient Egypt, took 11years to write
• if a novelist can take actual people who are legendary figures and invent episodes for them that are believable, he has done something fine.
• the trick in doing a historical novel is to digest your research (before writing your fiction based on it)
• in researching ancient Egypt, I felt I knew things that the average (historian) didn’t – not more about the details, but more about the underlying reasons for what was done
• both the historian and the novelist are engaged in writing fiction, making an attack on the possible nature of reality
• there is an inevitable slipperiness to most available facts … when we think we are approaching reality, we are only writing a scenario to comprehend it, a hypothesis that seems correct until new evidence subverts it.
• Trust the evidence of your senses until they are revealed as inadequate, tricked or betrayed – then refine them
• history in Mailer’s view seems quite like the process of scientific discovery; I think he’s right.

******

Silence in Hanover Close by Anne Perry

• the ending, which I will not reveal, is, in my view, too quickly rendered, not quite believeable, and has nothing to do with the main theme of the book
• However … it was also a total surprise which tied together all of the unexplained threads that have puzzled the reader, and in Perry’s sure hand it actually worked quite well.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

• the Abbess “had felt not only the breath of old age against her cheek, but also a graver warning” (the lack of a successor) … foreboding establishes tension … will she accomplish her life’s work?
• This question was never again addressed until the final pages of the story, when it is beautifully resolved.
• Soon we shall all die, we are told, and memory of us “will have left the earth.”
• But the “love will have been enough,” and all “impulses of love return to the love that made them,” ie to God.
• beautiful last sentence … “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

The Instrument by John O’Hara

• Yank has not grown at all, remaining the same totally self-absorbed (but honest) person he was when the story started. There was never any reason to feel any emotion towards him.
• Yank has used other people and when he had gotten what he could from them, he moved on.
• So we are left with Yank Lucas, writer of plays, incapable of feeling emotion except in the characters his talent (his “instrument” ?) creates for the stage. Hollow.

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte

• at the end of the book, there are major unresolved issues, which are not even acknowledged by Perez-Reverte.
  • Who is the green-eyed girl?
  • Why does she follow Corso and help him?
  • What happens to Varo Borja, who has committed murders but is not (yet) sought by the police?
• Is this effective? I find it frustrating. Did I miss something?
• what seems like two unrelated stories are intertwined and become a single story, then end up to be two separate stories. Perez-Reverte is playing with the reader, which angers me.
• I came to the end of the book with great anticipation that the threads would be tied up and then felt great disappointment when they were not.
• At the end of the book, there is an implication that the Ceniza brothers did in fact forge a page, at Corso’s request, thus preventing Varo Borja from achieving his contact with the devil. This page was never shown or mentioned before, or if it was, I missed it. There must have been a better (more clear) way to present this, so perhaps the author wanted it to be unclear, maybe to be thought of long after finishing the book.
• But he leaves unexplained why Corso would have thought to have the page forged, and for what purpose, at the point in the story when this would have been done?  Another frustrating aspect of the ending to this book.

The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer

• I look to find my book as I go along.  Plot comes last.
• I want my conception of my characters to be deep enough that they will get me to places (which I did not plan) and where I have to live by my wits.
• If the characters stay alive, and keep developing, the plot will take care of itself.
• Is there a problem if the reader senses that the author doesn’t know how the plot turns out?

Write Away by Elizabeth George

• I always know the end in advance
• after the climax comes resolution – tie up loose ends, illustrate the nature of the change that has occurred in the characters
• you need to end every story (ie, every sub-plot as well) you begin

What Makes Sammy Run by Budd Schulberg

• I expected more. I’m not sure what, but more.
• It’s hard to imagine Sammy upset with his runaround wife for very long.
• Upset at younger men nipping at his heels, for sure, but for poking his wife, I don’t think so.
• He didn’t love her, and he would get over the embarrassment, probably find a way to turn it to advantage.
• He’s not happy. He’s never going to be happy. But ‘happy’ wasn’t ever his goal. Money and power were his goals.
• Sammy was never portrayed as introspective enough to understand and be upset at what his life had become, and since he did not ‘grow’ over the course of the book, we never got a sense that his original goals might have changed or even be questioned.
• We sense the incompleteness of his life, but does he?
• Perhaps Schulberg was too close to the film industry and some of its major players to go any further than he did in dramatizing the essential emptiness of the success driven life.
• I never cried for Sammy Glick.

The Art of Fiction by John Gardner

• the “dream” the writer creates for the reader must be continuous; avoid interruptions and distractions which force the reader to stop thinking about the story and start thinking about something else

Les Miserable by Victor Hugo

• Hugo gives in to the temptation, common in writers of historical fiction (including myself), of “showing off” his research. I studied it, I think it’s interesting, so I’m going to tell you everything I know.
• This is a serious mistake, certainly for me, but even for Victor Hugo. (see ‘The Year 1817’ p. 119)

Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte

• the reader is suddenly transported from Fargas’ home in Portugal to Paris, with no transition.
• The details of this change of scene are presented later (187-88).
• Does this work?  I don’t think so.
• It’s a technique similar to what Tolstoy does repeatedly in Anna Karenina.
• Ah, crticizing Tolstoy – heresy!
  • NOTE: since making these comments four years ago, I have become less critical of suddent transitions, perhaps because I think I have learned to use them
• long, detailed descriptions and lists of old books, which the reader can’t possibly absorb and likely will not read. What is the purpose?

Stein on Writing by Sol Stein

• avoid anything that distracts from the reader’s experience even momentarily
• don’t over-characterize a minor character, making the reader think he is more important than he is; select one memorable characteristic that distinguishes this character from the rest of humanity and let it go at that
• don’t present characters who are either all good or all bad. It’s not believable.

Write Away by Elizabeth George

• avoid preaching
• avoid dealing with too many ideas at once

The Spooky Art by Norman Mailer

• The moment you moralize in your novel, your book is no longer moral.  It has become pious, and piety corrodes morality.
• Don’t go into your protagonist’s thoughts until you have something to say about his inner life that is more interesting than the reader’s suppositions

******

Silence in Hanover Close by Anne Perry

• Constable Lowther speaks in a heavy dialect, which is difficult to understand. The only reason this works is that he is a minor character, so you can struggle through.
• If Pitt spoke that way, it would be a good reason to put the novel down.

Write Away by Elizabeth George

• A character’s dialogue illustrates opinions, personality, education, economic background, attitudes, beliefs, superstitions, pathology
• Wield dialogue as a way of banishing doubt from the reader’s mind
• Dialogue can foreshadow events that will not take place until well into the story
• relationships take on life through dialogue
• natural speech isn’t fluid. Writing like that would be virtually unreadable
• Dialogue needs to seem natural even when it can’t be
• syntax reveals character: pedantic speech, casual speech, uneducated speech
• a character may have a signature word (or expression)
• each character has a distinctive way of using language
• dialogue needs to be concise
• dialogue should never be obviously expository
• dialogue is not supposed to be the way people talk all the time
• dialogue can reveal subtext – what the characters are really talking about beneath what they appear to be talking about
• to offset the direct nature of dialogue with minimal (or no) subtext (St. James and Deborah often speak directly, trusting each other), which would become repetitive and tedious, you need to have other scenes in which the dialogue is rich with subtext (Lynley and Helen rarely speak directly and often speak at cross purposes)
• a lot is going on, and much of it is not expressed
• subtext colors the scene. People don’t always say what they really mean. They don’t always state their thoughts and feelings directly. Sometimes they talk around a topic
• fancy tag lines such as snarl, moan, whine, growl (instead of said, asked, answered, replied) call attention to themselves. EG discourages using them at all. The reader will know if someone is snarling without obvious words to say so
• Adverbs can add a degree of precision, but draw reader’s attention to how the line is said rather than what is said
• Junk words. Use them only if they illustrate character. Otherwise delete.
• Suggest dialect rather than using full dialect. The reader will get it.
• In a long speech, maintain attention by showing other characters’ reactions, gestures.
• Interrupt the speech with a moment of thematically related action – sound of voices, wind against the windowpane, song on the radio in car which passes by.
• Intersperse some physical thing into the stream of dialogue (may reveal character, contain important information, be a metaphor)
• Indirect dialogue is a summarized form of dialogue, told in narrative style, which alters the pacing of the scene, compresses the dialogue while still allowing the reader to know that it was lengthy.
• after writing dialogue, evaluate it. Does it add tension? Demonstrate conflict between characters? Reveal some aspect of the character speaking or listening?
• Would some of the dialogue be more effective as indirect rather than direct?
• If the dialogue isn’t essential, get rid of it!

******

Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

• The entire story is a series of obstacles for Andre-Louis to overcome.
• Every other character exists mainly to create such obstacles.

Silence in Hanover Close by Anne Perry

• “Ballarat disliked Pitt and resented his manner, which he considered insolent.”
• we know early on (p3) that Pitt’s boss doesn’t like him, and we sense why. This enmity between the two turns out to be of real significance as the story unfolds.
• Charlotte explains to Radley how she will investigate Pitt’s case. “But will Pitt approve?” … “Thomas won’t have to know.” This is conflict coming big time.
• However, when Pitt finds out what Charlotte has been doing, he is so appreciative of what she has learned  that he expresses no anger. I found this to be unrealistic.

 The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

• between Dona Maria and her daughter Dona Clara, who “barely glanced at the letters.”
• between the twin brothers Manuel and Esteban over Manuel’s love for the Perichole.
• between the Perichole and Uncle Pio, as she grows too much a lady to be seen with the man who had everything to do with her success.

Write Away by Elizabeth George

• plots must have conflict
• Events occur as the conflict unfolds
• Conflict is a form of collision
• Conflict can be created by resistance against a character’s desires. Resistance can come from within the character himself, from nature
• Conflict adds tension to the novel
• The story’s conflicts are reflections of the theme
• Put your characters into conflict
• Look for subplots (which provide opportunities for conflict) based on character’s strengths and weaknesses
• Characters are interesting in their conflict, misery, unhappiness, confusion; not their joy and security
• what does the character do when under stress?
• conflict is what brings characters to life and makes them real for the reader
• Put the character to the test by putting him into conflict; he then springs to life, forced to make a decision, to act on that decision
• create a situation where the characters are bonded together and are unable to escape being in conflict with each other; then “heat” the situation
• conflict is a character’s will in collision with something else
• a character’s inner conflict will show that he is real
• conflict works best when it is rising conflict, builds over time, reveals more facets of character as incidents occur
• Every scene must have conflict.  Begin at the low point, let the tension rise to a climax, then provide a resolution which propels the entire novel forward.
• foreshadow future conflict with the present dialogue
• after writing dialogue, evaluate it. does it add tension? does it demonstrate conflict between characters?

Old Man by William Faulkner

• Faulkner takes 4-5 pages to introduce two convicts who are never named; only then does the story begin …
• “It was this second convict who, toward the end of April, began to read aloud to the others from the daily newspapers”

Executive Power by Vince Flynn

• Here’s how Flynn did it, scene by scene:
• SCENE 1. special op craft filled with Navy SEALS approaches an island in the Philippines, heavily armed, mission unstated; foreboding hook at end of scene: the mission has been fatally compromised by someone from their own country.
• SCENE 2. Mitch Rapp is enjoying the last day of his honeymoon; he is high-up CIA, they were married in the White House; he leads teams of commandos on secret and dangerous missions; he has scars; no hook at end.
• SCENE 3. back to the SEALS;  mission explained: recue hostage US family; many details as they leave the support boat, rubber launch to the island, deploy; then they are attacked with major force; call in backup and evacuate; lose two men.
• SCENE 4. another boat in Monte Carlo; the assassin named David gos to meet his Arab sponsor, five hours early; insists that the man be awakened.
• SCENE 5. CIA HQ; Dr. Irene Kennedy, Director of CIA and Rabb’s direct boss, is furious that leaks have compromised the mission and caused two deaths; she knows who leaked, and is planning to make this information public; hook: Rabb is the only man in DC who can do the job.
• It works for a thriller; can it work for a historical novel?

Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth

• the prologue is set in 1832, whereas Chapter One is set in 1752-53.
• In the prologue an old plantation slave from Carolina (which is where we later learn slaves captured in the settlement were to be taken) talks of a Liverpool ship and his white father (later we know this is Paris) who was a doctor on the ship. I totally forgot about this prologue until I reached the epilogue. So … was it necessary? helpful? distracting?
• there is, in effect, a second beginning: Book Two on page 397, begins in 1765, a gap of 12 years. This creates a need for extensive flashbacks, which are inserted at different places in the second story. This works very effectively to create suspense and a desire to know what happened in the intervening years.

Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett

• Follett starts with a one page historical preface about the D-Day deception. He ends the preface … “That much is history. What follows is fiction. Still and all, one suspects something like this must have happened.”
• the first chapter begins with Faber. The first clue to his identity as a spy is … “Faber watched such things – he was considerably more observant than the average railway clerk.”
• in the first chapter, Faber kills his landlady, packs his transmitter, and moves on. We now know he is a German spy.

Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini

• first lines … “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony. His very paternity was obscure …”
• a great opening, characterizing Andre-Louis and raising a question not answered until the very end of the book.

Silence in Hanover Close by Anne Perry

• first line … “Police station, sir!” takes you right into the story.
• the first hook (p2) is the opening of a 3 year old burglary case. why? why now?
• the old case involves “the delicate question of a woman’s reputation, a distinguished victim from a powerful family, and treason”
• this case was first introduced as a burglary; soon we find out (p3) that it’s a murder as well … the reader’s interest is heightened.

The Writer’s Chapbook edited by George Plimpton

• Joan Didion … What’s so hard about the first sentence is that you’re stuck with it.
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez … One of the most difficult things is the first paragraph. I have spent many months on a first paragraph. In the first paragraph, you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone.
• Philip Roth … I often have to write a hundred pages or so before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. That then becomes the first paragraph of the book. Underline all the sentences, phrases, words that are alive. write them on one piece of paper. There’s your first page. the “aliveness” sets the tone.

The Day Of The Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

• opening sentence … It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad.”
• the precise time convinces the reader of the reality of what’s taking place.
• By not naming him, the reader wants to know who is being executed. And, since the reason is not given, why
• … from Stein on Writing

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

• first sentence … “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below” … specificity provides verisimilitude.
• the fact that the “finest bridge” collapsed suggests something out of the ordinary, some unseen hand. (Stein)

The Instrument by John O’Hara

• O’Hara’s first two chapters (50 pages) are a nice setup … Interesting characters are introduced, the primary event takes place (the production of Yank Lucas’ play), and a whole range of expectations of interesting story line are established.
• There has been no mention of what the “instrument” is.
• first paragraph … “Yank Lucas fell asleep late one night and left the gas burning on the kitchen range. … when the water boiled over … extinguished the flame … the odor of gas … Jiggs knocked on the door.”

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte

• opening scene. man hanging … is it suicide or murder?
• the connection to Dumas Three Musketeers is very well done.
• opening line. “The flash projected the outline of the hanged man onto the wall.” … a powerful visual image

Write Away by Elizabeth George

• Open up the story by asking dramatic questions (but do not answer)
• primary event – that which gets the ball roiling in the novel
• you can begin at the beginning, before the beginning, or after the beginning (permits non-linear narrative … back stories)
• In A Great Deliverance, the novel starts with a priest on a train, going to London, reacting to some important (but not revealed) event that we will later learn was the primary event of the story
• Opening scene either possesses or promises excitement, intrigue, conflict, foreshadows problems; establishes atmosphere, place, some characters (not necessarily the main characters)
• must hook the reader (first task is to keep the reader reading)
• Follett – Key to Rebecca – opening scene introduces but does not identify character, shows aspects of the character’s behavior that are intriguing, mysterious
• can use the opening to establish place by specific memorable details – atmosphere, mood, tone
• the opening can be used to illuminate theme or plot or place
• or to illustrate the agendas of characters

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

• opening sentence … “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
• From which we know that this is going to be a story about unhappy families (more than one).
• opening scene … Tolstoy starts (p.1) with the Oblonskys, Prince Stepan (Stiva) and Princess Darya (Dolly), who are not the main characters.
• Q: Are there successful examples in more modern novels of this use of secondary characters to begin the story?

What Makes Sammy Run – Budd Schulberg

• first paragraph. “The first time I saw him, he couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old, a little ferret of a kid, sharp and quick.  Sammy Glick. Used to run copy for me. Always ran. Always looked thirsty.”
• Brilliant. Tells a lot about Glick and also about Manheim.
• first chapter. 28 pages. Sets the stage beautifully. Gets right into the story. Conflicts established. Sets reader’s desire to know more. Great beginning.

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