Outline Your Novel Before Writing It

I've always outlined my novels to avoid dead ends and blind alleys, to avert the horror of dumping hard-earned pages into the wastebasket. Also I want to know in advance if the story is worth telling, if it's going to stand up to lengthy treatment, and most of all: Can I bring it to a satisfying conclusion?

F. Paul Wilson in How I Got Published, edited by Ray White and Duane Lindsay, 2007 

Why Children Read

Children read to find out what happens next: Anxiety feeds suspense. The Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket books have proven this.

Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review, October 26, 2014 

The Myron May Police-Involved Shooting Case

     As a teenager, Myron May didn't get along with his parents. In 1999 he moved from Ohio to the Florida panhandle where he took up residence in a rural town with his grandmother. After graduating from high school, May enrolled at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He graduated from the university in 2005.

     In 2009, Myron May graduated from Texas Tech University with a degree in law. For the next three years he practiced law in that state.

     On January 18, 2014, May accepted a position as junior prosecutor in the district attorney's office in Las Cruces, New Mexico. According to District Attorney Mark D'Antonio, the 31-year-old did a good job and was well-liked by his colleagues. But on October 6, 2014, May abruptly resigned. It was about this time he began to exhibit the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

     May's former girlfriend, Danielle Nixon, called the police after he came to her house uninvited with news that government agents were bugging his dwelling and his car. In a journal he kept, May wrote about his fear of being a target of government surveillance. His Facebook page contained messages regarding government agents who were spying on him by reading his mind.

     In early November 2014, May moved back to Tallahassee where an old friend let him stay in a guest house.Troubled by financial issues and mental illness, May said he planned to take the Florida bar examine in February 2015.

     At twelve-thirty in the morning of Thursday November 20, 2014, Myron May showed up on the FSU campus armed with a .380-caliber pistol. He walked into the lobby of Stozier Library that was packed with students studying for their upcoming final exams.

     In the library lobby, May opened fire wounding two students and a university employee. Students in the library proper heard the gunshots and called 911. The scene was one of chaos with 450 students taking cover.

     After the shooting spree, May stepped out of the building to reload. It was there he encountered officers with the Florida State Police and members of the Tallahassee Police Department who ordered him to drop his weapon. May shot at the officers who returned fire, killing him on the spot.

Prison Culture

Inmates speak their own language, cultivate their own customs and rituals, and adhere to their own norms. They laugh at a joke that an external observer would find lame and react violently to an apparently friendly gesture. Their interpretation of behavior is clearly different from outside society. It is dictated by their own prison code, which categorizes behavior as hostile, offensive, neutral, or friendly in its own fashion.

Marek M. Kaminski, Games Prisoners Play, 2004

Negative Book Reviews

    The publishing industry, we hear, is in trouble. So why would a sensible writer tell people not to buy a book? If the novel, as we also hear, is moribund or dead, why drive another nail into its sad little coffin? And lately there seems to be a cultural moratorium on saying something "bad" about anyone or anything, unless you're a politician, in which case that's your job.

    There was a time when I wrote negative reviews….Sadly, it's easier to be witty when one is being unkind. Friends would say, "Oh, I just adored your hilarious essay on that celebrity's memoir about her fabulous million-dollar-face-lift." And what would they say when I praised a book? Nothing.

     Even so, I stopped. I began returning books I didn't like to editors. [You returned them?]….But in the last year or so, I've found myself again writing negative reviews--as if, after quitting for three decades, I'd suddenly resumed smoking, or something else I'd forsworn. Once more, it's a question of what gets under my skin, and of trying to understand why. I've begun to think, if something bothers me that much, life is too short not to say so….

Francine Prose, "Do We Really Need Negative Book Reviews?" The New York Times, February 11, 2014 

What is Plot?

     Plot is the nervous system of your story. In the same way nerves connect your brain and muscles so you can move and live, plot interconnects and moves the elements of your story.

     Of the journalist's six questions, plot answers as many as three: what, how and why. Plot is the key event of your story and the logic between the event and the supporting events, which serve to illuminate it. Plot establishes the causes and the consequences.

Josip Novakovich, Fiction Writer's Workshop, 1995  

Writers, Don't Quit Your Day Job

A few first novelists rush to quit their day jobs, especially if they manage to swing a large advance. It is accepted industry wisdom that getting big money up front means that one's publisher will be forced to work hard to earn it back. Sounds logical, but it isn't necessarily so. Even with massive support, a certain number of books are bound to fail. It also happens that publishers blow off high advances.

Donald Maass, The Career Novelist, 1986 

Learn the Business of Publishing

Publishing is a business, and aspiring writers who take the time and expend the effort to learn about that business and what it demands give themselves a leg up on success.

Donald Bain in How I Got Published edited by Ray White and Duane Lindsay, 2007  

The Day Of The Memoir

     Memoir as a genre has entered its heyday, with a massive surge in readership the past twenty years or so. But for centuries before now, it was an outsider's art--the province of weirdos and saints, prime ministers and film stars...

     Changes in the novel have helped to jack up memoir's audience. As fiction grew more fabulist or dystopic or hyper-intellectual...readers thirsty for reality began imbibing memoir.

Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir, 2015

The Real Experts On Prison Life

     Most books about prison are written by academic criminologists who know little about prisons because they have no firsthand experience and simply parrot outdated correctional theories and so-called empirical evidence they learned from other sheltered scholars. Most of these university "experts" have spent precious little time inside of penitentiaries or talking with convicts. If they were left unescorted in a penitentiary cellblock for ten minutes, they would probably have a heart attack.

     If you want to know how the criminal justice and penal machinery functions, then ask a convict.

Jeffrey Ian Ross and Stephen C. Richards, Behind Bars: Surviving Prison, 2002