Author Caroline Leavitt and link
Caroline Leavitt, author of nine novels and book reviewer for People Magazine and The Boston Globe, happens to have an incredible blog, CarolineLeavittville, where she reviews and writes about writing. She’s also a friend, so I wrote her suggesting that she write about structure—mainly because that’s what I was obsessing over on my novel-in-progress. Maybe I could steal some inspiration.
She wrote back saying that it’s a great topic, and could I write a guest blog on the subject? Ha! I had to answer my own questions, but I did so by interviewing her, author Janet Fitch (White Oleander) and mystery writer Lynn Hightower (Fortunes of the Dead).
The resulting article looks great and indeed, I’ve broken through my own wall and am restructuring well. Learn by doing. To read the article, click here.I’ve learned over the last year that only about 5% of the readers of any given article or blog actually click on a link, so that’s the challenge. Click on the above link.
I’ll upload the article here tomorrow, but it really does look great over at CarolineLeavittville.
'Love At Absolute Zero' is a gift--and one of the many that continue to emerge from the pen and mind and brilliant trait for finding the humor in life that makes him so genuinely fine a writer.”
—Critic Grady Harp, Top-Ten Amazon reviewer
About Christopher
Christopher Meeks writes short fiction and novels. His book of short stories, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea earned great reviews including the Los Angeles Times ("poignant and wise") and a blurb in Entertainment Weekly that said, "A...
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Click. Christopher,
Click. Christopher, Fantastic article, and it does look great. It also helps explain for me why there are some novels that seem to be going nowhere until about page one hundred and something.
You're patient
Rebbecca--
Thanks for your note. If you've read novels that took more than a hundred pages to get going, then it shows such books can get published and some people read them.
I happened to finish reading two wonderful, well-built books recently. "The Silence of the Lambs" by Thomas Harris is a great example of a book whose every scene is tight. There is no fat. If you happen to read it, see how it's created scene by scene.
The other one I just finished is "The Girl She Used to Be" by David Cristofano, which I wouldn't describe as taut because it's not that kind of book. It's about a young woman whose parents witnessed a murder, so they've all been in the Witness Protection Program for years, and the protagonist breaks out to stop the charade. It's funny and honest. While she puts herself in danger, you're not as tense as in Harris's book, yet it is still a great example of how to build scenes to a satisfying conclusion.
As much as I'm in awe of Lorrie Moore's short stories, I had to put down her new novel, "A Gate at the Stairs" because I couldn't sense it was going anywhere. It wasn't building scene by scene.