Go West, Young Man from James W. Ziskin

What advice would you give to your younger writing self?

My favorite piece of advice in life and in writing is “Know what you don’t know.” I don’t remember where or when I came across this gem, but I believe it was during my corporate days. A little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, so it’s best to challenge yourself and question what you think is true and correct. At every turn, verify. Make sure. Don’t trust your faulty memory or your inadequate education.

Now, what else might I tell my younger self? How about “Buy $1,000 worth of Apple stock in 1980.” It listed for $22 at its IPO, but, adjusted for splits, that was the equivalent of ten cents per share. Which, in turn, means a 2,200% appreciation. So $1,000 invested then would be worth $2.2 million today. 

On second thought, perhaps I’d tell my younger self to buy $10,000 of Apple stock.

Another tip I’d offer myself would be to write a thriller about a murder that leads to the discovery of Jesus’s hitherto unknown bloodline and living descendants. Oh, and be sure to write that book before 2003.

Finally, I’d tell myself to get rid of that mustache I tried to grow in college.

But, as they say, hindsight is 20/20. Instead of looking for profit and a better look, I’ll say this:

• Experience the world, but don’t waste time putting off your writing. 
• Never stop yearning, dreaming. 
• Never abandon hope. 
• Don’t have regrets. 
• Don’t chase fame or fortune. Your place just might be more modest than that. But that’s okay. You may not always be the tallest person in the room, but that doesn’t mean you’re not the grandest in the room.

Do I follow that advice now that I’m older and wiser? I try and fail. But that’s okay. 

*********************

THE PRANK…enigmatic and unnerving. The pace never flags for a second. This is some masterly plotting. I loved it.”

—Liz Nugent, author of Strange Sally Diamond

 

“The Holdovers meets The Bad Seed,”

THE PRANK. A picture clipped from Playboy magazine, a missing Swiss Army Knife, and a prank gone terribly wrong conspire to make Christmas 1968 a deadly holiday to remember.

From two-time Edgar Award finalist, Anthony, Barry, and Macavity award-winner James W. Ziskin, THE PRANK releases July 2026.

Psst, Hey Kid!

Advice to my younger writing self.

By Dietrich

Look at you, sitting there waiting for the lightning to strike. Let me break it to you gently, kid: inspiration isn't coming, and if you only write when you feel like it, you’ll just be a guy with a clean desk and a tragic amount of blank paper.

Grab a pen, get your hands on a decent typewriter, and get to work. Then all you have to do is show up, put words down, and keep doing it until it starts to sound like something worth reading. And for the love of God, don’t try to sound like Salinger or Steinbeck. I know they’re your favorites. 

Right now, you’re insecure. You’re sweating it, trying to show off your chops. I know exactly what you’re thinking: you’re going to write three straight pages about the pattern on the wallpaper, the shade of the drapes, and the architectural history of the molding. Let me save you the ink. Nobody wants to read about the wallpaper. The reader wants to know who just walked through the door, what they're after, and what they’re packing under their coat.

You’ll want to show off your research, too. Spend weeks digging up facts just to dump them on the page. Don’t do it. Sift the pile. Pick out the best bits—the smell of coal smoke, a dented fender, the exact shade of a neon sign. That’s your picture. Leave out the rest. If it doesn't move the story, it’s just noise. Don't take the reader out of the scene just to prove you did your homework.

Do yourself a favor. Go open a thick book, find a massive, unbroken wall of scenery description, and watch how fast your eyes skip right past it looking for the quotation marks. Why dialogue? Because that’s where the life is.

Get out of your room. Go sit at a lunch counter, stand on a street corner, sneak into a dive bar where the lighting’s bad. Listen to how people actually talk. Real people don't speak in flawless sentences. They don't use semicolons—and if you use them when characters are speaking, we’re going to have words. People speak in fragments. They interrupt each other. They talk over the good parts, mishear the bad parts, and say everything by saying absolutely nothing. That’s how you show who a character is.

And stop looking for a roadmap. Throw out the checklists and the genre formulas. Don't toss in a bedroom scene or rack up a body count just because you think it’ll sells books. What do you know about that anyway—you’re just a kid. Don’t be cheap, it looks desperate.

The whole game is simple: put two interesting people in a room, give them a history and a reason to disagree, and see what happens when they start bumping heads. Let the plot do what it wants, and make the collision sound like it belongs to them, not to your ego.

Finally, don’t sit there thinking about the great novel you’re going to write "someday." Quit dreaming and get to work. Now, not next year.

Advice to Myself

 

Terry here with our question of the week: What advice would you give to your younger writing self? Is there anything you'd do differently? 

 This will not be a long post, because the advice I would have for my younger writing self is simple: Take yourself seriously. 

 By that, I mean, pay attention to what you are writing and think about these things: 

 1) What do you hope your book will be in the end? The reason I would say this is that for several years I just wrote whatever struck me. I churned out novels without having the slightest idea what I wanted to say. I wrote okay stories, but they didn’t resonate. A nice story is not enough. The story needs to have a heart, a mind, and a philosophy behind it. That doesn’t mean it has to be deep into literary territory, but it has to have some thought behind it. 

 2) Have you chosen the right vehicle to tell the story? Don’t try to shovel a cozy into a thriller; or a psychological thriller into a police procedural. Make sure you know your genre. 

3) Are you writing what you mean to say? On every page? It’s interesting when you hear authors say “my character took over.” But that isn’t serious. It’s your world. Don’t let anyone hijack it. 

4) Are your characters who you want them to be? Are they fully fleshed out? Would you recognize them if you ran into them in the world? 

5) Have you done the proper research to get the details righ? 

6) Are you describing the action and the setting properly? Sometimes I write a scene and when I go back I think, “Where are they in this scene? Are they standing in the air?” And make sure the setting comes alive. Make sure the book couldn't be set anywhere but where you've written it.

 7) Finally, and most importantly, is this a book that comes from you? A book “only you can write?” Or is it a rehash of stories you’ve read. It may take some hard work, but you need to find your voice. Think about what makes it unique. Not sort of unique. Unique. One of the first short stories I wrote was critiqued by the great Max Apple at a conference. Very gently he said, “This is well-written. But we already have Eudora Welty.” He was right. She was my idol and I wanted to write like her. But…I had to find my own voice. 

 So if I could go back, I would tell myself: think. You don’t have to outline. You don’t have to know every detail. But you do have to know what makes you think this book is something people need to read.

When I first starting writing I would tell myself that I don’t need to address these things, that the “editor” would take care of the details. No. It’s up to you. I eventually learned that I didn’t have to address every single one of those things in the first draft, but that I needed to know my intentions. By that I don’t mean know exactly how the story would end. But what I hoped people will walk away with. 

 I read an enormous amount. And it’s fascinating to me that many authors I read write a perfectly good whodunnit. But it lacks heart. The book lacks a sense that the author has something urgent to convey. Or the book seems like I’ve read it before. 

And one more thing, I would say that taking yourself seriously means sitting down every day and writing as if it is your job, instead of waiting for “inspiration” to strike. Make the time to do it. If you value having a career as a writer, make it happen sooner rather than later. This last part is one that still eats at me because I think how much more I could have accomplished if I had taken myself seriously when I was younger. But…as my old friend Marilyn Wallace used to say, “You are the product of everything that has gone before, all the living you’ve done. That’s what goes into your work now.” Still, I wish I had known that earlier.

Out of the Shadows - Matthew Greene

What advice would you give to your younger writing self? Is there anything you'd do differently?

When I was coming up in theater, I was taught that a playwright belongs in the dark.

That may sound harsh or punishing, but I found the concept comforting. While the actors stood in the spotlight, the designers built beautiful things, and directors pontificated and made their presence known, I was allowed the luxury of letting my work speak for itself. I dreaded talkbacks for exactly that reason—I didn't want to be the face of the work. I was much more comfortable sitting (or, more accurately, pacing) in the back of the auditorium. In the darkness, where I belonged.

Fast forward to a few years ago, when I made my first foray into the wonderful world of fiction. Writing prose, I reasoned, was an even more solitary act. If I could stay mostly out of sight in my theatre work, I'd be able to outright disappear as a novelist.

Boy, was I wrong.

So, my words of wisdom to that younger me would come down to three emphatic words: show your face.

The cynical version of this advice came to mind during various book events when I was asked what I'd tell aspiring writers. I'd sometimes smirk and say, "Get a lot of social media followers," followed quickly by caveats and apologies.

But the frustrating truth is...online followers matter more than we want to admit. When I was prepping for my debut novel's release, my publisher's marketing department encouraged me to share pre-sale links with my "followers." And then panic set in.

Followers? What followers? You mean the few hundred friends and family members who had likely already ordered the book? Was I supposed to be amassing my own audience? 

The answer to that was a full-throated "DUH!"

In today's attention economy, it's harder than ever to get eyeballs on our work. Publishers' marketing budgets (especially for debuts, especially for cozies, and so on...) are not enough to break through the noise and attract a base of loyal readers. When I realized this (too late) I started furiously making content, attending conventions, and stepping out of the darkness I thought was my realm as a writer. 

As it turns out, people want to know who they're reading. Who they're supporting. They have to see us to believe us.

I think this will only get more important with the rise of AI. The more we can put a human face on our work, the more we can stem the tide of synthetic prose. We want people to read us, connect with us, and invest in us as storytellers.

And to do that, we may just have to come out of the shadows. 

Jane Austen and Stephen King both said so, by Catriona

What are some of the best tips you've taken on board from other writers whose work you love? Name the writers and their book that inspired you, and how it did so.

Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird? SS Van Dine's Twenty Principles? Ronald Knox's Ten Commandments? Elmore Leonard's Rules for Good Writing? Strunk and White?

Yeah, naw.

I've seen everything that all these renowned style and composition gurus have to say, and who am I to pooh-pooh the wisdom of the ages, but there's only one writing manual that I've re-read and would recommend and that's Stephen King's On Writing. I adore his novels so it's no surprise that I would drink in all the hot tips about how he makes them.One bit in particular that I valued from the first time I saw it, is something I was learning organically from Jane Austen anyway, but King drove it home. In the back of On Writing, King reproduces a draft of a short story with his handwritten notes and edits. One of his changes is taking out the character name Ostermeyer and making it Olin instead. With his typical lack of pomposity, he says it was annoying to type, would be more annoying to read and absolutely unbearable to say in the audiobook.

Jane Austen knew this too. Her books are filled with Annes, Janes, Lizzies, Edwards, Johns, Williams, and Fannys (Stop it! You're better than that.) In fact, her very early Marianne and Elinor is as fancy as she ever gets.

I'm always trying to make sure my names are just - but only just - noticeable enough to be remembered but otherwise exactly the kind of names people of that age in that place would have. Who was it who said: so many Tiffanys, so few Ednas? They were right. Edna in one of my books would need to be accounted for. Mind you, so would Tiffany.  
 
Another thing, I've learned - this time from Joy Fielding and Dorothy L Sayers working as a tag team - is the importance of good dialogue. Fielding's dialogue in Kiss Mommy Goodbye is a masterclass in how to make realistic speech reveal plot and character. It gets so that every time the loathsome Victor clears his throat, you are as ready for flight or flight as poor Donna in the novel. And every time Donna fluffs and stumbles her way through an attempt to deal with what's happening, you get that cold feeling that you wouldn't cope any better and thank God you don't have to.

But Dorothy L Sayers? And realism? Absolutely not. In - for instance - Clouds of Witness (but it could be any of them) Peter Wimsey talks with an effortless articulateness, an affability and unexamined noblesse oblige and he goes on for pages! Likewise, the dowager duchess witters on up tangents and down rabbitholes without any through line. And it doesn't matter. Their speech is so full of aphorisms and allusions, so stuffed with tantalising titbits and so regularly subject to hairpin bends of topic that you're hard-pressed not to say "Wheeeee!"
 
What have I learned then? That dialogue is the writer's to do with what she will. There are no rules worth sticking to.

Finally, I want to talk about a differernt pair, Stewart Arnott and Simon Wood. Stewart is a retired West End stage manager who has written a memoir of his decades on Miss Saigon and Phantom of the Opera. Simon is a crimewriter who's written . . . well, tons, but I want to talk about his Aidy Westlake mysteries about a professional racing car driver. 

Now, I'm not a musical theatre fan. I don't know much about it and I've never felt the lack of that knowedge. I've been to see musicals, mind you. So when I say I'm not a motor-racing fan, I need to find a different way to say it. Never been, never watched it on the telly, never not left the room if someone else was. Don't get it. 
 
However, what these books taught me is that if you write well about something you know and love, you can take the reader with you regardless. National parks? Night markets? Cadaver dog training school? I've been happily ensconsed in all these worlds for the length of a novel and it's helped me stop worrying about my books finding an audience beyond the pretty grim bit of Scotland where I'm drawn to set them. 

Cx

Still learning by Eric Beetner

 What are some of the best tips you've taken on board from other writers whose work you love? Name the writers and their book that inspired you, and how it did so. 

I can’t say I’ve ever taken notes on pearls of wisdom about writing, even from writers I admire. I do think I take many lessons from how they compose a story, how they conduct themselves as a public figure, how they create an authorial persona.

Writers like Ken Bruen and Barry Gifford come to mind when I think about how important a unique voice is. These are two writers who I greatly admire and who you could remove their names from a book and I’d still know it was them two chapters in. The downside is I constantly self-censor myself for sounding “Too Bruen” or “too Gifford-esque” Such distinct voices risk mimicry. 

I remember killing more than few songs back in my band days for sounding too much like other artists who had influenced me. My bandmates would protest and say it was still a good song, but I knew I’d never be able to play it and not think of the musicians I was ripping off. I'd hate to have someone reading something of mine and think, "Well, this guy is surely a Ken Bruen fan." 

Similarly, a writer like Joe R. Lansdale taught me to be proud of sounding like yourself. Joe is unabashedly East Texas on the page and he never shies away from that or tries to sound like anyone or anywhere else, despite what the flavor-of-the-month in publishing might be. Be true to yourself and the readers will find you.

I could say the same about Christa Faust, a fiercely singular writer who does not care if she’s not your cup of tea. As a result, she writes some of the most entertaining books I know.

I’ve long cited A Simple Plan by Scott Smith as the book that made me solidly a thriller reader. I’d been an eclectic reader until then, following suggestions and borrowing books. I read Horror and Sci-Fi, tried books that were the source of movies I liked. I even read The Bridges Of Madison County because someone said I should. I grew to know what I didn’t like. Then I read A Simple Plan. It scratched every itch and I knew all I wanted was to find more books like it that gave me that same feeling. It also solidified my love of crime stories with ordinary guys in them. Even if I like then, my top novels have never been PIs or police procedurals. I like stories of normal folks living normal lives until fate comes in and sticks out a foot to trip them up and knock them to the ground. Most of my books have followed suit. I can trace that inspiration back to a single book.

 Brian Panowich taught me how to fight for your story even if it threatens to derail your publishing career in its infancy, but not compromising is more important than a few extra book sales.

John Rector taught me the value of knowing when to walk away.

Countless authors with long careers taught me the value of sticking with it. 

Bill Crider taught me that being kind and helping other authors didn't have to be a chore.

I learn a little something with every book I read. Sometimes I learn what not to do – or what I certainly don’t want to do. Sometimes I learn to trust myself and follow the story off the beaten path. I learn that a little sentiment is not a bad thing. That humor and darkness can mix well and each elevate the other. Now and then I learn that if this pile of crap can get published then maybe I still have a shot. 

And once in a while, I can look back at my own work and learn that yeah, I really can do this. Time to go do it again.

What I Learned by Not Taking Writing Advice

  

What are some of the best tips you've taken on board from other writers whose work you love? Name the writers and their book that inspired you, and how it did so. 

 

There is an old classical warning: be afraid of what you ask, because you might not like the answer.

 

When asked what tips I’ve taken on board from other writers, my first answer is: none.

 

That sounds more contrary than I mean it to be. I have learned an enormous amount from other writers. I’ve simply never thought of what I learned from them as “tips.”

 

I suspect the expected answer might include some of the usual—and deservedly popular—books on craft: Stephen King’s On Writing, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, or Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. But I was never particularly interested in “How To” books about writing. Perhaps I’m suspicious of the premise. “How to” can suggest that there is a method to be followed, or that we should aspire to reproduce someone else’s success. I don’t want to be another writer, or even to write like one. I want to sound like myself.

 

There is also something peculiarly modern—and perhaps peculiarly American—about our appetite for optimization. Everything becomes advice, a hack, a set of habits, ten things successful people do before breakfast. Writers are not exempt. Apparently, somewhere out there is the secret that will put us in the top one percent of people sitting alone in rooms making things up.

 

I’d rather read.

 

When I first started reading, the stories that captured my imagination were Greek and Roman myths. They seemed to contain greater truths, universal and sometimes esoteric. I read to pierce the veil, to find the reality behind the obvious. Reading was a quest.

 

Perhaps that is why my first literary love was poetry.

 

Poetry taught me compression: how an image can carry more than its apparent weight, how the concrete can express the abstract. T. S. Eliot called this the objective correlative. Mallarmé and Valéry could create an image and distill an experience into something simultaneously precise and almost untranslatable. They taught me more about writing than being told what a writer ought to do.

 

Latin was also part of my education. It taught me grammatical structures, rhetoric, and the architecture hidden beneath language. English was not my first language, and I had my struggles with it, compounded by profound hearing loss. I developed compensatory mechanisms. I watched people. I paid attention to gestures, expressions, silences, and all the little things people communicate without realizing they are communicating.

 

Writers are often advised to eavesdrop on conversations. I did that too, although not always accurately. The mishaps probably account for some of my humor and perhaps my reserved demeanor.

 

I remind people that knowing English is an achievement that shouldn’t be taken for granted. It is a damn hard language.

 

What poetry taught me about compression eventually found its way into my dialogue. Elmore Leonard and others are routinely held up as exemplars of dialogue, but I want to study comedians because they are masters of timing. A comedian understands that changing one word—or putting a fraction of a second in the wrong place—can kill a line. Cinema taught me something related: visual compression. A glance, an object, a cut can accomplish what several paragraphs might otherwise explain.

 

And then there are writers who taught me things without ever offering advice.

 

Philip K. Dick could write some terrible dialogue, but his ideas were extraordinary. What mattered was the question underneath the story: Is the world what we think it is? Is the person we think we are who we really are? He, too, was trying to pierce the veil. From him I learned that the idea animating a story can matter more than technical perfection.

 

Eduardo Galeano showed me that history could be rendered as poetic prose without becoming didactic. He could compress politics, memory, violence, irony, and human experience into brief passages that retained the force of history without sounding like a lecture. His work showed me that political writing need not announce itself as political writing.

 

Umberto Eco taught me something else: erudition need not preclude wit. Ideas, history, semiotics, theology, politics, and social criticism could coexist with playfulness. Intelligence did not require solemnity.

 

Those lessons matter to me because I write crime fiction. I didn’t choose crime because I couldn’t write Literature with a capital L. I chose it because crime fiction has enormous potential for examining power and corruption: who possesses power, who abuses it, who suffers because of it, and who gets to decide what constitutes a crime in the first place.

 

Genre has never seemed like a limitation to me. All literature works within conventions of one kind or another, and every book must ultimately encounter an individual reader. Reading is Rashomon: put the same book into the hands of ten readers, and you may get ten different reactions back.

 

The few writing resources I have deliberately consulted have therefore been practical rather than inspirational. Because I couldn’t afford a professional editor when I started—and because I’ve encountered published books that made me wonder whether anyone could either—I had to teach myself how to edit.

 

For that, Renni Browne and Dave King’s Self-Editing for Fiction Writers was genuinely useful. What I appreciated was its method: state a principle, then demonstrate it on the page, often by examining or revising recognizable prose. It gave me something practical to interrogate rather than a commandment to obey. I suppose it is the closest I come to a writing tip.

 

Learn the technique. Understand why it works.

 

Ezra Pound famously said, “Make it new.” I would revise it to: Make it yours.

 

Whatever I’ve learned as a storyteller, I’ve learned primarily by reading, watching, listening, failing, and figuring things out for myself. What you teach yourself tends to stay with you because it has been tested against your own instincts. It becomes knowledge rather than imitation.

 

So perhaps my original answer was wrong. I have taken plenty from other writers.

 

I just never thought of any of it as advice.

 

When I Grow Up...

What are some of the best tips you’ve taken on board from other writers whose work you love? Name the writers and their book that inspired you, and how did it do so? 

I’m so thrilled to answer this question. I used to read People Magazine a lot, had a subscription and everything. There was a book section there, where they reviewed books. Being written up in that section has been way up there on my bucket list, or maybe wildest dream list, right alongside being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, since the first word I ever put on paper. When it happens, there will be a party and this question will be answered, because I think about it often. 

If you had asked me this question ten years ago, you’d have gotten a completely different answer than today. Ten years ago, I would have told you, proudly and without reservation, that Stephen King was my biggest inspiration. I am one of the SK faithful. I have every book, including the good—The Stand, It, Insomnia. And the bad—The Dome (still mad about that one). But the reason Stephen King continues to keep me firmly locked in a chokehold is his ability to build the best characters.

I don’t mean to imply that his characters are good people, a lot are literal monsters, but good or evil, they are fully formed and as real as you or me.  So much so that when you close that book, they don’t go away, ever. I can still find myself missing those kids from the Barrens and wonder what they’re up to—spoiler alert, nothing. They don’t exist, but they do in my mind as well as many other’s I would guess. Forty years later and we’re still revisiting that story and finding ways to expand on it as evidenced by the success of Welcome to Derry. As a writer, it’s hard not to be inspired by that. 

But as much as I love to read Stephen King, I’ve realized as I’ve started my own writing journey, Stephen King didn’t inspire me to write. He inspired my love of reading. I was learning, though I didn’t know it, how to build a world, how to build a character, how a story should feel, with every word I read. But I never even considered the idea that I could become a writer, until I read a book called Mama by Terri McMillan. 

It was the first novel I had ever read that was written by a black woman. And she was writing about people that looked like me. People who came from circumstances like mine. I understood the language. Loved the open exploration of black family drama that we didn’t talk about in front of company. That one book led me to find other black authors that I didn’t even know existed, like Bebe Moore Campbell, Eric Jerome Dickey and Walter Mosley, to name a few. Reading those authors opened up a world of possibility for me. 

It was while reading the words of these authors that I had the very first inkling that I might be able to write a book. So, when Eric Jerome Dickey came to my local bookstore, I went to my first book signing. Soon after, I put my very own words down on paper. The result, my first three novels, Fat Chance, Chasing Navah, and Maria’s Song. 

Regardless of where my writing career takes me, I’ll always love those three books most of all, because they are a direct representation of the inspiration that led me to the thing I love. Writing.

The time is now, and tomorrow is not promised by Faye Snowden

I’m back after not being able to post last time because I was traveling for work. This week’s question is a good one, but I’m in too somber of a mood to provide a coherent answer. 

Recent events remind me, once again, that life is fragile. Two teenage girls struck and killed at a crosswalk in my hometown. An aunt dies of cancer.  Good men, relatively young, fall asleep and don’t wake up. And I’ve been thinking that even with this evidence all around us, we hang on to tomorrow as if someone has written us a check for it.

Case in point. As a writer I hear from people all the time who want to write a book but can't start. This phenomenon, of having a story inside us that we never tell, has been studied, researched and discussed in many forms. An article by Madeleine Aggeler in The Guardian speculates why so many people want to write a book (October 2026). In The Guardian archives, articles about why women don’t write, how to write your novel this year, and how to get rid of writer’s block abound. A Medium article by C J Ahmed goes further by explaining the scientific reason of why we don’t write. (The Science Behind Why So Many People Don’t Write, June 2026). 

I didn’t read deeply any of these articles because it’s always been quite clear to me that we are compelled to write because storytelling is innately human, and the biggest reason we may never lift a pen is fear. I have no further advice to offer, no wise words of wisdom to send fear packing beyond what has already been written. What I do have for those struggling writers is a wish. 

My wish for you is that you think about how we were as children, how invincible we felt. We were so confident in our own abilities that we believed we could be football players, astronauts, firefighters, jet pilots, movie stars, doctors, and yes, writers. When we grew up to be teenagers, all the wild chances we took. We dove headfirst off a rock into a swollen river, smoked weed after dark on school grounds, and the exhilaration of running from and escaping the cops made us say, ‘hell, yes, we’d do it again’.  We scorned tomorrows, laughed at the promise of one day. We ripped that check into a million pieces. 

But something happened. We grew up. We learned to fear our dreams, especially if others told us they were impossible.

All of it reminds me of something Carol Burnett said on the IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson podcast. When Obama asked Burnett if she were scared to show up in New York with only a few dollars and a cardboard suitcase, Burnett replied, “No, I was too stupid”, going on to explain that she had been schooled by the Micky Rooney and Judy Garland movies where they would suddenly decide to ‘put on a show’. Next thing you know, Mickey and Judy are singing and dancing on an ornate stage in elaborate costumes that inexplicably appear out of cloud dust. Those movies made Burnett think she could do anything. She believed with the confidence of a child, and acted with the recklessness of a teenager. When she decided that she wanted to land a part in a Broadway play, she up and did it. 

I’m not encouraging us to embrace stupidity or recklessness, but I hope that in the face of mortality we find ways to unlearn the fear that holds us back. We need to remember, as I heard my cousin say once, that the time is now, and tomorrow is not promised. And as Mary Oliver asks in the poem, The Summer Day, Tell me, what is it that you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life? The emphasis on ‘one’ is mine. 

Mark Pryor, May His Memory Be a Blessing — from James W. Ziskin

I was supposed to write about something else this week, but a terrible tragedy occurred. My great friend and writer Mark Pryor passed away unexpectedly last week at the age of fifty-nine.

I met Mark in 2013, shortly before my first book came out. It was at Bouchercon in Albany, New York. We had lunch with our editor, Dan Mayer, and two other Seventh Street Books authors, Terry Shames and Lynne Raimondo. 

Mark was one of those people who drew others to him. It seemed everyone loved him, wanted to talk to him, and ask him for advice, which he always gave generously. It’s no exaggeration to say that he had a magnetic personality. His native English accent didn’t hurt. Made him mysterious and, as Lee Child always says, added twenty unearned points to his IQ, at least in America.

2013 In Albany with Mark, Terry Shames,
and our dear departed friend Lynne Raimondo

Mark worked incredibly hard and was a prolific writer. Despite holding down jobs first as a public prosecutor in Austin, then later as a defense attorney, he managed to write seventeen books—the terrific Hugo Marston series, a few thrillers, and even a non-fiction book. He also raised three great children with his amazing wife, Sarah. I can only dream of being so efficient with my time.

A few years ago, I stayed with Mark and Sarah and their kids—and dogs—when I was in Austin. They were welcoming and generous, despite my practice of razzing Mark. In fairness, he gave better than he received. 

He once asked me for advice on selling the foreign rights of one of his books to a publisher in Russia. He worried that, given current world events, his reputation might suffer by association. I assured him not to worry; people couldn’t possibly think any less of him. He struck back:

Another time, he asked if I’d be willing to read something new and different that he’d written. I said of course, and that reading his work always made me feel better about my own.

Mark often offered to plug fellow Seventh Street authors’ books in his Hugo Marston novels. He’d slip a mention into the story. He’d already done it for my first book and he couldn’t resist scoring off me:

Yet another time, he asked what I thought about his idea to cut some text from one of his manuscripts. I told him to go ahead and delete, since everyone who’d ever read his books agreed that whatever he could do to make them shorter would be an improvement. He chuckled, then reminded that me my books had more award nominations than actual copies sold. (Not far off…)  

Each time we engaged in these wars of words, I was left wishing I could manage a clever comeback to get the better of him, but, alas, no. Mark wielded his wit effortlessly and to devastating effect. He was brilliant and hilarious.

But it wasn’t all fun and games. Mark and I shared a deep interest in writing—obviously—and mysteries, and France. He filled his Hugo Marston books with tremendous detail that he’d acquired from years of research and experience in France. He knew his way around, from Paris to the Pyrenees and made a serious study of the minutiae necessary to give his books that ring of authenticity. He asked me to draw him a map for one his books, and a family tree of his characters for another. I was very proud of those.

From The French Widow

From The Book Artist

 

What can I say? Mark Pryor was a gem of guy. I loved chatting with him, enjoying a drink, or insulting him publicly. And I know he enjoyed doing the same to me. Ever since I got the horrible news that he’d died, I can’t stop thinking about him and his lovely family. It just isn’t fair. My heart goes out to them, and I’m so very sorry. I’m going to miss him.

My friend, Mark Pryor, 1967-2026. May his memory be a blessing. 

What Would Mother Think?

Would you prefer to write a sex scene or a murder scene?

By Dietrich

Ask a writer if they’d rather script a bedroom scene or a killing, and they’ll take the murder any day of the week. It’s funny because most of us know our way around a bed but haven’t ever seen a corpse.

But writing sex leaves you exposed. You’re putting your own business out there on the page. A killing is smooth—all logistics, mechanics, and moving pieces around on a board. You just throw in some gunplay and hide behind the action beats. And nobody finishes a shootout and worries if their mother is going to read it. 

Turns out we’re terrified of folks judging how we love, but we don’t mind applause for how we kill.

Sex is different. It’s messy. You have to deal with actual heat, people being awkward, and making reckless choices. The second you try to manage it too tightly, it stops feeling like two people in a room and starts sounding like you’re checking off anatomical boxes. 

Throwing in a sex scene just to sweat up the page is cheap, and killing a guy just to run up the body count is a stunt. Readers aren't dumb. They might not know why a scene feels hollow, but they know the difference between a writer pulling a fast one and something that happens because of who the characters are and the mess they got themselves into.

The genre is already crowded with inherited furniture—the lone wolf, the body in the alley, the femme fatale. Shoving in obligatory sex or violence just piles more junk into the room. You don't follow a checklist; you write what the plot demands. The scenes that stick with readers are the ones that sound fresh and like they could have happened, whether that realism arrives between the sheets or at gunpoint.

Sex and Murder

 

Terry here with our question of the week: 

Would you prefer to write a sex or a murder scene? Is it important to include both in a crime novel? The short answer is, I don’t have a preference. If the story calls for it, I’ll write it. And I hope to write it well. But in books I read, too often those high-stakes scenes don’t work. 

 One of my favorite panels at conferences is about sex scenes, where authors are given the text of a ridiculous sex scene and are supposed to read it with a straight face. Smirks, eyerolls, and squirming ensue…and that’s just the readers. The audience is usually laughing out loud. I’d much prefer having the author close the door and let me imagine the hot sex than having them write something that sounds preposterous. Or disgusting. Or isn’t particularly sexy. For a sex scene to be satisfying, I think you usually have to have some sense that the characters engaged in the act are actually attracted to each other. 

I’m thinking particularly of reading thrillers written by men in which the 48-year-old hunk of a man is like a god to the 23-year-old redhead with green eyes and the perfect body. (Yeah, they always have red hair and green eyes, a combination that actually exists in maybe .000002 per cent of the population.) She submits readily to his caveman technique. And then he goes away and kills bad guys—until she gets kidnapped and he has to save her. I don’t care how adeptly the author slots part A into part B, I don’t care how perfect their bodies are, if I don’t have some sense of emotional connection, it leaves me cold. 

 Which brings me to writing sex scenes. For me, it’s often more tantalizing to suggest the sex. Here’s my favorite sex scene I ever wrote in a Samuel Craddock novel, the beginning of An Unsettling Crime for Samuel Craddock (which by the way got a starred review—because of the sex scene? Probably not). 

     “When I walk into the kitchen, Jeanne is standing with her back to me stirring oatmeal on the stove. She’s still in her nightgown, and the outline of her body is visible through the sheer fabric. My breath catches. I walk up behind her, put my arms around her, and nuzzle her neck, where she says it always makes her feel weak. She shivers and nestles back into me. She smells like lemon and soap. I slip my hands up to her breasts and she whispers. “Samuel, the oatmeal . . .” 

 I reach over and switch off the burner. She turns around and her mouth comes up to meet mine. We’ve been married for six years and I still can’t get enough of her, ever. She steps onto my feet to bring herself up closer to my height, and also because she knows it arouses me. I move my hands over her and she begins humming that low sound she makes in her throat. 

 The phone begins to ring and she stiffens. “Leave it,” I say. My voice sounds strange to me, hoarse and urgent. She clamps her arms around my neck and I pick her up so she can wrap her legs around my waist. I carry her to the bedroom like that and slam the door to muffle the sound of the telephone. I hear the sound of the volunteer fire department whistle starting up. Thank goodness that’s not for me.” 

 There isn’t much sex in the Craddock novels, and it’s always offstage. But in the Jessie Madison thriller series, I feel less constraint. One, she’s a woman, and I can imagine things more from her point of view. Also, she’s young. And she likes sex. In the latest, In Too Deep, which I just turned in to my editor, there are a few sex scenes, and flirtation scenes as well. In each of the sex scenes, I set it up so that you know the characters engaged in sex are not just attracted physically, but they also like each other. And the sex is on the page. Works for me. Readers? 

 In a way, it’s just as hard to write a murder scene. I want details, but I don’t like sadism or too much gore (that said, I read a vampire novel that was full of gore—and funny as hell—The Southern Ladies Guide to Vampire Hunting). I just started reading a novel by an author I admire, but couldn’t continue past a horrendous scene of sadistic cruelty. I can’t even imagine what the author could have done to make it more palatable. I’m sure there are readers who were able to digest it and move on, but it was too much for me. 

Confession: I haven’t actually ever written a murder scene. The body is always discovered after the fact. In a thriller I wrote that never got completed I wrote a gunfire scene. It was hard to write because there were guns involved. It has to be the right guns for the characters and the setting, the right ammo, the right way the guns are brandished and fired (does the gun have a safety? Is it heavy? Etc). Not to mention whether the gun is going to be concealed, whether the shooter is well-trained, whether the gun belongs to him or her, whether he has a right to the gun. All that has to be set up for it to be a reasonable scene. Same is true with any kind of murder method. If you are going to write the scene, you better know how the fire is set and how it proceeds, how the knife is wielded and where the victim is knifed. It’s easier to just find the body! 

As for the last question, no I don’t think either scene is obligatory. As I said in the beginning, if the scene calls for it, write it! Otherwise, let it happen behind closed doors.

Carnage and Carnal Delights - by Matthew Greene

Would you prefer to write a sex or a murder scene? Is it important to include both in a crime novel?

They say you should write what you know. And I only have first-hand experience with one of these. (Please don’t guess; it might hurt my feelings.)

I’ll add that one of the joys of writing cozy mysteries is not having to delve into the details of graphic violence or explicit sex. They’re remarkably hard to get right, to describe with much novelty. I admire the hell out of the people who can bring their own fresh take to carnage and carnal delights, of course. But when I sit down to write either one, during my less-than-cozy pursuits, I find myself oddly blocked.

If it’s a sex scene, I worry I might be sensationalizing the spicy bits, using titillation as a cheat code to cover up cliché. I wonder if there’s any element of wish fulfillment at play, and even if there’s not, I wonder if other people will wonder the same. 

If it’s a murder scene, I fret over the details, well aware from my EMT training how ludicrous a lot of fictional deaths can be. In a world so saturated with violence—both real and imagined—I have real moral qualms about anything gratuitous. But should I really be afraid to delve into the real, visceral consequences of the story conventions that underpin the crime genre generally? Am I overthinking? Probably.

(Not to mention the fear that someone may be looking over my shoulder while I I’m typing either of these types of scenes, strangers assuming I’m a pervert or a murderer or both…)

All that being said, I would so much rather write a murder scene.

I think a lot of mystery writers try their hand at romance at least once. It’s too big a market not to be tempted by, after all. But my forays into the realm of longing looks, heaving bosoms, and (REDACTED TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT) have been less than stellar. I can’t manage to construct a narrative around something as trivial as…love.

No, for me, it’s not really a story until somebody dies.

A lot of the books I read and write keep the violence off the page. (And the sex purely speculative.) But the threat of death is the beating heart (or lack thereof) of the genre I love so much.

Maybe I’m not much of a romantic. But at least the stakes stay high.