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Controlling the Flow of Information   by Simon Brett As a writer, you have one enormous advantage over your readers or audience. You know the whole story, and they don’t. Except in very rare circumstances, you don’t start off knowing the whole story. You begin with an idea, which hopefully leads on to other ideas, which…

You Don’t Say?  by Brad Harper Dialogue is an ancient Greek stage direction, meaning “action through words.” One of the first critiques I got from an agent, looking at my neatly printed manuscript was “There’s not enough white space,” meaning there was too much narrative description, and not enough dialogue. Dialogue opens up the tight-knit…

What is a Story Without Adverbs?  by Lynn Truss The question a lot of people have been asking me is, “So, Lynne, what’s the difference between writing these stories for radio and writing them as a novel?” This is because my new book A Shot in the Dark  (first in a series of comic crime…

What is a Cozy Mystery, Really?  by Vicki Delaney What, exactly, is a cozy mystery? On one hand, that seems to be an easy question to answer. A cozy mystery is often described as a book containing no overt violence or sex on the page. It’s a character-and-community based mystery featuring an amateur sleuth. But…

Hungry for Murder with Jude Dillane  by Cathi Stoler There’s no getting around the fact that my protagonist in BAR NONE: A MURDER ON THE ROCKS MYSTERY, Jude Dillane, loves to eat. At five foot nine, it seems that everything she consumes goes to height, rather than her waistline, so she can slip into those…