Writer's Harbor

The Maltese Falcon is a great hard-boiled detective novel. Many only know this story from the movie where Humphrey Bogart portrays the tough, but flawed Sam Spade. Like the movie, the book is dated, timeless and a true masterpiece of fiction.

Dashiell Hammett describes all of the characters extremely well making it easy to believe they are real. Each scene doesn’t exactly explode with wall to wall action, but the use of late night tension definitely fits the bill.

There are shady detectives, femme fatales, gangsters, and a treasure thrown in for good measure.

Hammett provides Spade with only a minimum of conscience just above the people he’s working against. Spade works alone. When outnumbered in difficult situations, he always remains in complete control. He relies upon his sharp tongue and quick wit, and uses physical force only when necessary.

Women are instinctively drawn to the strong and protective side of Spade. He usually accepts their attentions without a hint of kindness or concern. His partner’s wife, his secretary and even the mysterious Brigid O’Shaughnessy are drawn to Spade. Yet, Spade refuses to let romance cloud his judgment or deter him from his goal. What goal is that? Why money of course.

The style and narrative is a world away from the writers of today, but then it would be. It is a highly enjoyable, extremely suspenseful, and delivers a complicated plot that moves along with the use of great character development and superior novelization skills.

The Maltese Falcon is the pinnacle of the true hard-boiled detective mysteries. It represents a genre that can be compared to The Three Stooges. You either love it or hate it, and most definitely can be classified as a guy thing.

What’s not to like about a good swashbuckling story set in the Caribbean filled with pirates, treasure, ship battles, blood and guts, looting and pillaging, lusty wenches, hurricanes and a sea monster?

Michael Crichton has created a fun little story far from his usual work. Pirate Latitudes was found on his computer after his death, and although there are clear indications it is not, the publisher reports it to be a finished manuscript. We can speculate this claim, but finished or not – this is all we are going to get.  Well, at least until Steven Spielberg makes it into a movie.

The story revolves around the main character, Captain Charles Hunter and his idea that gold in Spanish hands is gold for the taking. With that in mind, he and his privateers set out from Port Royal to conquer a Spanish fort as well as the galleon El Trinidadas with its fortune in Spanish gold. Obstacles will be conquered and lives will be lost, but the big question to be answered is will they make it?

What a quick-paced and fascinating ride you get to take until you find out!

You can learn more about Michael Crichton at his web site.

What is it about Dan Brown that makes you either love him or hate him?

The impression you get after delving into his latest book, The Lost Symbol is that you have been cheated and should get your money back.

Much of the problem stems from the main character, Robert Langdon. For some reason he can’t take a step without delivering a lecture or flash back to a lecture he’s given or heard.

The glacial pacing across Washington, D.C. is hardly worth the trip since the book suffers from having decidedly low stakes.

I mean really, why bother when the book’s greatest mystery can be solved with a simple Google search?

It’s impossible to miss that the story borrows or at least nods at the National Treasure franchise. Not a good idea on the face of it unless you can find a way to improve it, which clearly didn’t happen.

To be fair there are a few interesting parts that can salvage the story for die hard Dan Brown fans, but very few.

On the most part, the pace is slow and the story is all over the place. If you decide that you must read, The Lost Symbol save a little money and wait for the paperback. Otherwise, avoid it like the plague.

You can learn more about Dan Brown at his web site.

Grafton’s latest novel revolves around an unsolved kidnapping of a young girl some twenty years previously and the story of a young man who believes he saw the body being buried in the woods when he was 6 years old.

*It’s April 1988, a month before Kinsey Millhone’s thirty-eighth birthday and she’s alone in her office catching up on paperwork when a young man arrives unannounced. He has a preppy air about him and looks as if he’d be carded if he tried to buy a beer, but Michael Sutton is twenty-seven, an unemployed college dropout.

More than two decades ago, a four year old girl disappeared, and a recent newspaper story about her kidnapping has triggered a flood of memories. Sutton now believes he stumbled on her lonely burial and could identify the killers if he saw them again. He wants Kinsey’s help in locating the grave and finding the men. It’s way more than a long shot, but he’s persistent and willing to pay cash up front. Reluctantly, Kinsey agrees to give him one day of her time.

But it isn’t long before she discovers Sutton has an uneasy relationship with the truth. In essence, he’s the boy who cried wolf. Is his story true, or simply one more in a long line of fabrications?

Moving effortlessly between the 1980s and the 1960s, and changing points of view as Kinsey pursues witnesses whose accounts often clash, Grafton builds multiple subplots and creates memorable characters. Gradually, we come to see how everything connects in this twisting, complex, surprised-filled thriller. And as always, at the beating heart of her fiction is Kinsey Millhone, a sharp-tongued, observant loner who never forgets that under the thin veneer of civility is a roiling dark side of the soul.

*Publishers Description

If you enjoy Grafton’s murder-mystery series then you will enjoy her latest offering. What is unique about this one is the trips back in time to tell the story. It adds a different twist and element to the story that you don’t see in her previous mysteries.

You can learn more about Sue Grafton at her web site.

Except for Jesus Christ, Charles Dickens has probably had more influence on the way we celebrate Christmas than any single individual in human history.

In the time of Dickens, the celebration of Christmas was in decline. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing allowing workers little time for the celebration of Christmas, but that was about to change.

A romantic revival of sorts began when Prince Albert brought the German custom of decorating the Christmas tree to England. Christmas carols had all but disappeared at the start of the Victorian period, suddenly began to thrive.

The first Christmas card appeared in the 1840s, and then there was Charles Dickens.

The Christmas stories by Dickens and especially his 1843 masterpiece titled, A Christmas Carol literally lifted Christmas to a height not enjoyed for some time. Through his stories, Dickens is responsible for rekindling the joy of Christmas in Britain and America.

The general theme of A Christmas Carol is one of redemption, a life redeemed from an inward focus to an outward focus. The priorities of Scrooge’s life change in one night from one of greed and accumulation of material wealth, to one of benevolence and generosity.

After 166 years, A Christmas Carol is still relevant because it continues to send a message that slices through the materialistic trappings of the season and gets to the heart and soul of Christmas.

Charles Dickens describes the holidays as “a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”

It’s hard to imagine Christmas without the story Dickens gave the world so many years ago. His reward is that his name is now synonymous with Christmas. Not in a way that diminishes the real meaning which is the birth of Christ, but more to enhance and remind us of the goodness people are capable of if we try.

A kind offering of  Christmas cheer reached  the troops after Stephen King and his wife decided to donate money so 150 soldiers from the Maine Army National Guard can come home for the Christmas holidays.

King and his wife, Tabitha, who live in Bangor, are paying $13,000 toward the cost of two bus trips so that members of the 3rd Battalion, 172nd Infantry Unit can travel from Camp Atterbury in Indiana to Maine for Christmas.

The soldiers left Maine last week for training at Camp Atterbury. They are scheduled to depart for Afghanistan in January.

Julie Eugley, one of King’s personal assistants, told the Bangor Daily News that the Kings were approached about giving $13,000. But Stephen King thought the number 13 was a bit unlucky, so the couple pitched in $12,999 instead. Eugley chipped in $1 to make for an even $13,000.

This is a very nice gesture, and one I’m sure these 150 soldier and their families appreciate and will never forget.

James Patterson leapt upon the writing scene in fine style when his first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number won the prestigious Edgar Award in 1976. Since that time, Patterson has created an impressive string of best sellers that eventually elevated him into the upper echelon of the mystery/thriller genre.

The secret of James Patterson’s creativity is relatively simple -

“I have a big folder of ideas and when it comes time for me to write a new book, I’ll pull it out and go over everything that’s in there.”

He takes five or six ideas from the folder, puts them on paper then narrows them down to one or two. Patterson then writes a page or two on each just to see if there’s a story he likes.

Once Patterson opens his file of ideas, finds his creativity and battles the threat of becoming formulaic, he writes and tells the story. The main objective is not to let sentences get in the way of crafting and telling a good story. There are a lot of stories where the authors are good stylists, but they prove to be very bad storytellers.

“I think sometimes we give people a lot of credit just because they’re writing nice sentences even if it isn’t adding up to much.”

When asked if he ever falls into a writing slump Patterson answers, “I do, but I’ve been writing for a while now. I have a pattern that works for me. If I don’t get it this time, I just go on to the next chapter with the notion that I’ll get it the second time around.

Patterson believes being a good storyteller is the key to his career and the driving force behind the kind of books he writes.

“What I’m doing and what I enjoy is writing books that a lot of people sit down, can’t put down, and at the end of the reading they’re glad that they picked it up in the first place.”

You can learn more about James Patterson at his web site.

Tom Clancy is pretty much the king of the techno-thriller. A term he hardily rejects claiming it was invented by critics who do not admire his politics. “I write novels, maybe thrillers, but all novels have an element of excitement to them. On the technical side, many crime novels or mysteries include much detail on police and forensic science. Must we accuse those writers of writing techno-mysteries?”

Even with his much earned success, Clancy faces the same struggles and challenges as all writers.

“Writing a book is an endurance contest, and a war fought against yourself. It is beastly hard work which one would just as soon not do. Writing is a job and if you want to get paid you must work. Life is cruel that way.”

Clancy considers the most important part to creating his stories is to have a solid plot element. “When you have that, it’s easier for the peripheral elements to spinoff affecting other areas directly. Sometimes when it doesn’t, you play them out anyway because they can materialize into something useful.”

Jack Ryan is Clancy’s main character and claim to fame. Ryan is his ordinary guy that is dropped into serious situations. Clancy said he learned that technique from Alfred Hitchcock movies. Hitchcock liked to use Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart as his ordinary guys. This is important because most people perceive themselves to be regular people and are more likely to identify with a normal person over Batman.

Creating suspense is a key component to thrillers. Suspense is achieved by information control. What you know. What the reader knows. What the characters know. You balance that properly and you can really get the reader wound up.

Advice to aspiring writers -

Keep at it! The one talent that’s indispensable to a writer is persistence. You must write the book, else there is no book. It will not finish itself. Don’t worry about creating art, just tell the story. The objective is to be read, so if it is entertaining people will read it. Just remember that fundamentally writing a novel is telling a story.

The Shining is a tough act to follow, but it appears Stephen King is going to give it a shot. King revealed that he had already begun work on a follow-up selecting Jack Torrance’s little boy Danny as the main character.

King admits that Danny was certain to have been left with “a lifetime’s worth of emotional scars” after his experiences at the Overlook, where his father was possessed by the hotel, tried to kill him and his mother eventually died.

In the sequel, the 40 year old clairvoyant Danny Torrance finds his way to upstate New York where he is now working in a hospice for the terminally ill. His job is an orderly, but his real work is to help make death a little easier for the dying patients with his psychic powers – while making a little money on the side by betting on the horses.

It’s difficult to imagine a sequel to The Shining without the real main character, the Overlook Hotel. I suppose we won’t know if King’s vision will live up to its predecessor until we see the final product, but the good news is if anyone can pull it off it would be Stephen King.

If “read a lot, write a lot” is the Great Commandment – and I assure you that it is – how much writing constitutes a lot? The simple answer is that it varies from writer to writer.

My Routine

My schedule is pretty clear cut. Mornings belong to my current composition. Afternoons are for naps and letters. Evenings are for reading, family, TV and any revisions that just can’t wait. Basically, mornings are my prime writing time.

Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind. They begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that’s the kiss of death. I like to write when it is inspired and fresh.

I write everyday, except for those periods of full stop. Those are the times I feel at a loose end and have trouble sleeping. For me, not working is the real work. When I’m writing, it’s like a playground, and the worst three hours I ever spent is still good.

I believe the first draft of a book should take no more than three months, the length of a season. Any longer the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel. I like to get 10 pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book. That’s something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

On some days those 10 pages come easily and I’m up doing errands by 11:30. As I grow older, I find myself eating lunch at my desk and finishing up around 1:30 in the afternoon. Sometimes, when the words come hard, I’m still fiddling around at teatime. Either way is fine with me, but only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words.

Working in a serene atmosphere is the biggest aid to regular production. It’s difficult for even the most naturally productive writer to work in an environment where alarms and excursions are the rule rather than the exception.

The Secret to My Success

If there is a secret to my success it would be that I stayed physically healthy (at least until the van knocked me down in 1999), and I stayed married. The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship has made the continuity of my work possible. And I believe the converse is also true: that my writing and the pleasure I take in it has contributed to the stability of my health and my home life.

* first published in Writer’s Digest

You can learn more about Stephen King at his web site.