Vision and Betrayal by Ginger Bolton Like almost everyone else, I started my first novel with “What if?” There were really two what ifs. One: What if that real-life woman didn’t return my call because she had mysteriously disappeared? Two: What if I started writing, you know, just to see what happened, both […]
Imagine Me As A Little Old Lady by Parnell Hall Dropped. Desperate. Never going to write again. Been there. Done that. The scariest thing for a writer is to be dropped by your publisher. There you are, on top of the world, one of the chosen few, and suddenly it’s snatched out from under you, […]
When Mystery is Out of This World by Claire Gem Even in a world where people are suffocating under stress, many consciously and deliberately seek even more. Fans of mystery, thriller, and suspense novels not only want their reads to bring more tension into their lives, they demand it. Unless these books raise their blood […]
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 […]
The Antibiotic Crisis Scares Me So Much I Wrote A Novel About It by Rachael Sparks When I decided to write a novel, I believed the adage that you should write what you know. For me, that topic was clear: the fact that we are running out of antibiotics faster than we can develop new […]
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 […]
Think INTO The Box by CJ Lyons Want to know a secret about writing great thrillers? It’s not “think out of the box” but rather “think inside the box.” Many thrillers are big, bold, anything-can-happen rushes of adrenaline. The key words being: anything can happen. That’s an open system. There are no boundaries. Anything can happen. Once […]