Occasionally I – like other authors – get notes from people who have read one of my novels. They sometimes write, “I really enjoyed your book.” Occasionally I – also like other authors – happen to meet someone face to face who has read one of my novels. They sometimes say, “I really enjoyed your book.” These words are nice, and certainly the people writing or speaking them intend to say something that the author wants to read or hear. But many of us who write novels don’t wri

Near the end of my second adult-level novel – the second in the Rebecca Series – we read this passage: The gunman, kicking wildly at her face and chest, tried to wrest the barrel from her hands so that he could open fire again toward the dais. Just as he seemed about to succeed… all eight combatants were swarmed under by an avalanche comprising military policemen, Secret Service agents, and, by the dozens, members of the graduating class of the United States Naval Academy. In

In previous posts, I’ve suggested that, in action/mystery novels, a background romance can add suspense to the mystery and depth to the action. That first phrase, adding suspense to the mystery, means to me that, if the author has led me to care about any of the major characters, and if one of those characters begins to have romantic feelings toward another character, then I start to be both intrigued and concerned. What is this new person really like? Is this person going to

At the end of the highly successful film The Bourne Identity, the actor Matt Damon somehow finds the actress Franka Potente on what appears to be a Mediterranean island, a final scene that is as joyous as it is unexpected. We did expect Damon to be victorious in his violent struggles against those trying to destroy him; we did not expect him to be able to find the woman who had become his comrade in arms, and perhaps more than that, in mid story. Until the final scene, we wer

My stories – adult and young adult – often feature boats or ships at some point. What’s the difference? Well, the easiest way to think about the difference is to realize that a boat can be hoisted onto a ship. The aircraft carrier on which I served as a young naval officer carried eight motor whaleboats. Each of those boats could carry about 60 sailors to and from shore, whenever the carrier was anchored in a city’s harbor: Hong Kong, Valparaiso, Acapulco, for example. In A F

A Fearful Thing, the fifth novel in my Rebecca Series, opens with a car chase through the streets of London. On page two of the book, we read the following. (Bear in mind that this is London, the cars are right-hand drive, and everyone drives on the left-hand side of the roadways there.) As she turned her right hand drive Volvo onto the main thoroughfare… her liquid gray eyes focused on the black Mercedes sedan trailing five car lengths behind, one lane nearer the curb… She s

My new novel, A Fearful Thing, is the fifth novel in the Rebecca Series. It is set in the year 1985, four (fictional) years after the fourth novel, Choose You This Day. That means that most of the main characters, including Rebecca, are now in their early or mid-30s. That also means that the United States and England – the two national settings in most of my stories – are just starting their sprint toward the age of the worldwide web, of handheld electronic devices, and of ne

Over the years, when I have found myself speaking to students in their classrooms, or to adults at book-signing events, I have often been asked why my Rebecca Series features a woman as the lead character, given the fact that I am a man. My answer has always been that I have found women easier to know than men. Women and girls that I’ve known are more willing than men and boys to want to talk about serious subjects. (As a former college athlete and, later, high-school coach,

I have noted before, in other posts, how fast and hard I tend to get rolling when an action scene approaches. Since I am fast on the keyboard, I tend to write fast and furiously in approaching and describing action. I love action scenes, and relish the chance to present them to my readers. But I know that, unless an author is willing to “write shallow” – that is, to move from one action scene to the next without allowing the characters to reflect on the meaning of the action

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 length played out just the way he had imagined it would. He writes that, too often before that, he would find himself at the 50,000 word mark, only to realize that the end of the story appeared to be right around the corner. He humorously notes that, when he would reach that point, he would realize, too, that he could go ahead and finish the no

Authors, readers, and book reviewers often agree that in many novels, the “evil” character is the one who is the most carefully developed and most believable individual in the entire story. I’ve never been quite sure what that means, but I do have several observations on the topic. First, C. S. Lewis commented repeatedly that writing The Screwtape Letters was the most unpleasant experience of his story-writing career. Every day, he said, he had to get himself into the mind of

During book readings and other kinds of presentations related to my novels, I have often been asked that kind of question. The most common form of the question has been either, “What do you mean by ‘Christian novel’?” or “What makes a novel ‘Christian’?” Those are two different questions. It’s been easier to answer the first question than the second. When I’ve been asked, “What do you mean by ‘Christian novel’?” I have answered by saying that, first, my protagonists – that’s

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. S. Lewis’s Ransom trilogy, there is just one narrative thread, and Mr. Lewis continues that single thread throughout both of those books. I noted, too, that, in the third book in the Ransom trilogy, he changes. He gives us multiple sets of characters and scenes, completely separate from each other, in the early parts of the story, and then

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 shelves in the classroom – something like To Kill a Mockingbird or Tale of Two Cities – and read the first page aloud. The students and I then talk for a few minutes about whether or not that was a “good” opening, and why or why not. And whether or not the author might have made it even better. I then read the first page of the third chapter of Th

What do authors think about when choosing names for the characters in their novels? This is a question I get often at book signings or in classrooms. People are curious. I have three major objectives when choosing names. First, I want the names not to be easily confused with each other. I’m not going to have a Sue, a Susie, a Suzanne, and a Sue Ellen in the same book. In fact, I may not even have two people whose names start with the same letter. Second, since my stories are

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 copy editor. A definition for “copy editing” reads like this: copy editing is the process of reviewing and correcting written material to improve accuracy, readability, and fitness for its purpose, and to ensure that it is free from error, omission, inconsistency, and repetition. While this particular copy editor was superb at discovering a

Near the end of my second adult-level novel – the second in the Rebecca Series – we read this passage: The gunman, kicking wildly at her face and chest, tried to wrest the barrel from her hands so that he could open fire again toward the dais. Just as he seemed about to succeed… all eight combatants were swarmed under by an avalanche comprising military policemen, Secret Service agents, and, by the dozens, members of the graduating class of the United

I mentioned in an earlier entry that I am always appreciative if an author chooses to work a background romance into a mystery or action story. I wrote that a background romance adds suspense to the mystery and depth to the action. “Adding suspense to the mystery” means to me that, if the author has led me to care about the main character, and if that character begins to have romantic feelings toward another character, then I start to be concerned. Is this person really worth

If a novel doesn’t end in a way I like, I probably won’t read another story by that same author. I’ve already noted, in my comments about Good Beginnings, that, for me to read very far in a novel, I have to like the main character. She or he has to be somebody I can pull for, can hope for, can be nervous on behalf of. If an author gives me that person, but then allows that person to die at the end under “wrong” circumstances – that is, not death from old age in the arms of lo

Most of us don’t read very far in a novel, whether it’s a young-adult novel or an adult novel, unless we like the opening. We want to find the opening pages written well. We want to find them intriguing. We want to find them filled with potential. As for my own efforts, here are opening sentences from two of my novels. The first sample is from my first adult novel; the second sample, from my first young-adult novel. The day that changes our lives forever does not introduce it