The Writer February 2014

FOR MOST OF US, February is the dead of winter. Yes, there’s Valentine’s Day – a hot spot in one of the chilliest months. (And we pay homage to that holiday in these pages.) But by and large, come February most of us are hunkering down in front of fireplaces or space heaters trying to keep our bodies warm and our imaginations fired up. Instead of focusing on the chill of winter, however, we decided to focus the pieces in this issue on the dead of winter. Of course, it was a short leap from there to expand our theme to thrillers, murder mysteries, suspense novels, crime stories and even eulogies. We don’t mean to be morbid or morose. In fact, we believe you’ll find the stories in this issue…

All of my research was done: the weeks upon weeks of reading, the staggered interviews. I’d finished my procrastinating, too, and the crazy carb loading that I’ve come to recognize as part of my windup process. The deadline had crept close enough to be un-ignorable. I tapped away at my keyboard, trying to tell the story. And failing. CLUNK, went the sentences, horribly. Clunk, clunk, clunk. I wrote some more. Clunk. Distantly, in a small and insistent part of my brain that I was determined to disregard, I understood the trouble with the piece, a profile of an artist ascendant. The story I’d found in talking with her could not have been clearer or more apt, and she’d been brilliant in conversation. But she’d been anxious, too, or so I…

Lori Roy’s crime novel Until She Comes Home is set in a Detroit during deep social rifts in 1958. The New York Times called the story a “quietly shocking account of the tiny tremors in the life of a city that warn of cataclysms to come.” How did Roy build suspense? How did she get the facts right? A condensed version of her answers follows. STRUCTURE The first 50 pages are critical to get your story off to a good start. Think in terms of a playwright or a screenwriter: the inciting event and the key incident. Those are the moments that tell us what the story’s going to be about. Draw the reader into the story and then that key event is the event that turns the status quo…

The Welsh call February y mis bach, which means “the little month,” and in Poland, the second month of the year is known as luty, or month of ice or hard frost. The theater critic Joseph Wood Krutch once said: “The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.” Despite its short length and miserable weather (at least at The Writer HQ in the very New England to which Krutch alludes), February has boasted some significant events for the literary world over the years. Here’s our timeline of notable February moments in history for writers and readers. 1792 George Washington signs the Postal Service Act, federalizing mail delivery and making letter writing a much more reliable form of communication. The act also made…

Alexandra Styron is the author of Reading My Father, a memoir about her life as the daughter of the renowned novelist William Styron, whose own novels include Sophie’s Choice and Lie Down in Darkness. Alexandra Styron is also the author of the novel All the Finest Girls, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. Her prose is controlled, precise and evocative. In her memoir, for example, she describes her father’s writing habits this way: “His prose, laid down in an elegant hand on yellow legal pads with Venus Velvet No. 2 pencils, came at a trickle. He labored over every word, editing as he went, to produce manuscripts that, when he placed the final…

I’m writing a novel about a family of seven. The novel is about the whole family, but I keep wondering if I should focus on one character as the main character. Can a novel have multiple characters as main characters? Main characters, also called protagonists, are the central focus of a story. Don’t gauge main character status based on how often a character appears in the novel. Some characters play prominent roles but still somehow inform another character’s experience. Main characters are the ones in the middle of the action and the conflict. Their choices have consequences; their actions bring about significant change. While many novels have only one main character, some have more than one. Joyce Carol Oates’ novel We Were the Mulvaneys tells the story of a family…