THOUGHTS ABOUT WRITING A SERIES, FROM SOMEONE WHO NEVER INTENDED TO WRITE ONE
I always swore I’d only write standalones. I wanted to craft wholly original stories that would end, dammit, and after I finished that story I’d do something entirely different. To my mind, a series, or continually employing the same characters, was something of a cheat. Which is a short way of saying that the second novel […]
THOUGHTS ABOUT FICTION, LITERARY AND OTHERWISE
If you believe any number of critics, readers, pundits and scribes, the people who practice the craft in which I am now engaged (crime and mystery fiction) toil in a literary ghetto. I am, well, mystified as to why some folks feel this way. I’ve always believed that all fiction should at least aspire to […]
THOUGHTS ABOUT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JOURNALISM AND FICTION
Now that I’ve retired from The New York Times, I can reveal that one of my favorite lines about the nature of journalism was uttered by Ben Bradlee, the longtime executive editor of The Washington Post and an archnemesis of my former employer. “We’re not in the truth business,” Bradlee said. “We’re in the facts […]