I’m passing 55,000 words on the fifth novel in my Rebecca Series. That means I am getting close to the point at which I will ask my wife ...

In a personal letter dated June 26, 1956, and published in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Mr. Lewis responded to a Ms. Joan Lancas...

There is a passage In C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity where he writes the following: I have often thought to myself how it would have bee...

In the introduction to his novel tilted Winter Prey, John Sandford observes that this story was one of his first in which the novel’s len...

Authors, readers, and book reviewers often agree that in many novels, the “evil” character is the one who is the most carefully developed...

During book readings and other kinds of presentations related to my novels, I have often been asked that kind of question. The most commo...

Television dramas like NCIS often feature ensemble casts. That is, a half dozen or so individuals “star” in the series, rather than just ...

I am about one-third of the way through the fifth novel in my Rebecca Series. How do I know? Two ways. One, of course, the word count on ...

Books, movies, television… the creators of suspenseful stories take widely differing approaches to letting us, the readers and viewers, k...

I know that question sounds ridiculous. But hear me out. I’m reading a new book titled Becoming C. S. Lewis, by Dr. Harry Lee Poe (Crossw...

By most people in the world, C. S. Lewis is best known for his Narnia stories for children. But he wrote many kinds of books. His Ransom ...

Time gets “juggled” in two ways in my novels. First, the action usually takes place on more than one continent, separated by the Atlantic...

Almost every major character, good or bad, gets wounded or, in a few cases, actually killed, at some point in my stories, both in the adu...

A lot of things – good and bad – can happen below the surface of the ground or of the water. In the novel I’m working on now, a labyrinth...

Three breeds of highly intelligent dogs appear in my fourth novel for adults, which is titled Choose You This Day. Since many readers are...

“Th’ bg! Th’ bg! Dt’r Stf’d’s bg! H’r sh’s w’r unt’d! Th’ w’r unt’d!” What? What dialect is that? What language is that? Well, it’s Engli...

In Part One of this two-part post, I wrote about how novels are often pieced together. And I mentioned that, in the first two novels in C...

Whenever I am a guest teacher for an hour or so in a high-school or middle-school English class, I usually pull a novel off of the shelve...

When my first novel was completed – when it was still just a manuscript – it moved from the managing editor’s desk to the desk of a young...

I have already mentioned in an earlier post that the characters in my novels – adult novels and young-adult novels alike – are not based ...