An Uneasy Grace

 

 

Childhood trauma seems to inform a lot of literary novels. Do you pull from any fears, anxiety or trauma from your early life into your work? Seems like mining our own uncomfortable pasts is perfect for crime fiction

 

This week’s prompt makes me uneasy because I’m not inclined toward the autobiographical, or, more to the point, self-revelation in life or my fiction. The truth is, I’m uncomfortable discussing childhood and trauma. I understand the impulse. We want meaning from pain, but I’m wary of turning suffering into a performance.

 

We live in a culture that can turn every hardship into a badge of honor. When I was a kid, status among adults was being in therapy and having Quaaludes within reach. Today, influencers offer advice, progress notes, breakthroughs and setbacks as their brand.

 

I live in a country that fetishizes its military power, promotes aggression as morality and policy, and has a long cultural romance with the idea that the person willing to do the most damage is somehow the strongest.

 

The cowboy became the robber baron in the Gilded Age, the gangster during Prohibition, who became the corporate mafioso quoting Marcus Aurelius and The Art of War in meetings.

 

As a crime writer, I get it. Injustice is part of the landscape. It’s material. Violence is a tool, a threat, a consequence.

 

Newsflash, folks: life is trauma.

 

I haven’t met a woman who hasn’t had to deal with a predatory man. We live in a world where the media sometimes informs us, sometimes misleads us, and often lies outright. Violence is treated as morality while sex is taboo and censored. We are subjected to daily assaults on our cognition and emotions.

 

News update: real violence is not cinematic.

 

It is fast and almost always uglier. In my experience, people who know violence intimately understand this and don’t talk about it.

 

I’ve seen what violence does to people and families.

 

My father’s best friend killed his wife and then himself in front of their two children. Their son was institutionalized and never recovered.

 

I grew up with weapons within reach: a .357 in one nightstand, and a .45 in a desk across the room, a combat knife tucked beneath magazines. I can tell you what gunpowder from a shotgun smells like on a hot, humid summer day because it hits my brain with the same immediacy people describe where they were when Kennedy was shot, or the song on the radio when they experienced their first kiss.

 

And then there is my own experience.

 

I have no criminal record, but at sixteen I came close. A cop understood context and circumstance and cut me slack he technically shouldn’t have. We made a deal. I kept my end of it.

 

That is one reason I didn’t walk out of a state prison in my thirties.

 

If I seem deliberately vague, I am.

 

All I’ll say is that I very nearly committed the irrevocable. I’m not religious, but there was, in that moment of chaos, an uneasy grace: a strange calm and a clarity that I have never forgotten.

 

People use terms like PTSD and mention flashbacks and nightmares. It doesn’t work that way for me. If I’m awake at 3 a.m., it isn’t necessarily because I’m replaying some horrific montage of images.

 

I’m rehashing something I said or did wrong in a relationship forty years ago.

 

I’m quirky that way.

 

What may surprise people who have never experienced their dark side is that, under certain circumstances, you step outside yourself.

 

I did.

 

You become Other.

 

That, too, is grace. You do what you believe you must do, and you discover you are capable of things you never imagined. The textbook example we all know is the mother who lifts a car to free her trapped child.

 

The scene of violence that has haunted me longest, however, wasn’t human.

 

A friend’s dog stepped into the street and was hit by a car. I watched the dog die and my friend become inconsolable. Somehow, that stayed with me more than the things that should have been harder to forget.

 

I have a soft spot for animals.

 

All that is to say that I haven’t emerged unscathed.

 

I still look for entrances and exits when I enter a room. I notice whether people are left- or right-handed. I register what is closest to me that I could use as a weapon. I dislike having people behind me. I become edgy in conversations when I can’t see the other person’s face.

 

Most days I have a dim view of the species. I often think we are screaming apes in clothes.

 

People tell me I have a dry and dark sense of humor.

 

They’re probably right, but it’s a defense mechanism and I know it.

 

In the years since, I’ve learned that you can never truly know another human being, just as they can never completely know you. I’ve had enough experience not to trust easily, but you have to know and trust yourself.

 

That is what I bring from childhood and trauma into my fiction. Not specific events, necessarily, and certainly not autobiography. What I bring is an understanding that the line between ordinary and terrible is thinner than we like to believe.

 

That matters when I create characters.

 

I’m less interested in the question, What happened to this person? than in the more difficult question: How did it change the way they understand the world?

 

Trauma doesn’t have to produce a damaged person in the conventional sense. People survive. They adapt. They become functional. They become successful. They can be funny, intelligent, competent and perfectly capable of getting through an ordinary Tuesday.

 

But survival can come with a price.

 

It can alter what you trust. It can alter what you notice. It can alter what you think other people mean. It can make uncertainty intolerable. It can make a person extraordinarily good at reading danger while being remarkably bad at understanding safety.

 

That is where trauma becomes useful to a crime writer.

 

My current work in progress, HUNGRY GHOST, the sixth Company File novel, illustrates this.

 

One of its central characters is Tania, a Hungarian-Russian orphan. Stalin liquidated her family. She was severely traumatized and abused, and as a result she is poorly socialized. She is also highly intelligent, multilingual and manipulative when necessary. She has killed, including once in self-defense, and in an earlier novel she took the initiative and killed believing she was helping ‘uncle’ Sheldon, only to discover later that she had been manipulated into it by Allen W. Dulles.

 

Tania could have joined the Company. She could have gone to the Mossad. She turns both down. She goes solo.

 

That decision makes sense to her, and that’s crucial.

 

A character doesn’t have to make sense to us. The character has to make sense to herself.

 

Tania’s logic is often eccentric. She can rationalize violence. She is a functional adult, but she doesn’t trust permanence. She has survived too many incompatible truths.

 

The novel opens with her arriving in Budapest, with revolution and Soviet reprisal in the air. It is a bittersweet homecoming. She is in her early twenties and following a lead to find a man she met briefly as a child, a man she believes betrayed her father and ultimately led to the annihilation of her family.

 

Tania’s real wound isn’t simply what happened to her.

 

It is the destruction of certainty.

 

Her epistemology has been damaged.

 

She cannot tolerate unanswered questions.

 

That gives me something much more interesting than a conventional trauma backstory. Her history becomes a force acting on every decision she makes. Her need to understand the past affects whom she trusts, what risks she takes, how she interprets evidence and, ultimately, what she is willing to do to get an answer.

 

If I had to reduce Tania to one sentence, it would be this:

 

Tania is a highly intelligent survivor of political terror whose greatest strength is adaptation and whose greatest weakness is her need to believe that the past can still be explained.

 

The crime writer’s job, as I see it, is not to diagnose the character or explain her to the reader.

 

It is to put pressure on the wound and see what happens.

 

That is also why I’m cautious about using my own experiences too literally. Autobiography can tell you what happened. Fiction has to ask what happens next.

 

My most recent novel, FOUR ON THE FLOOR, also touches that territory. Shane recognizes something of himself in an assassin. I won’t say more. What lies behind that character’s actions is part of the novel.

 

But the connection between that book and HUNGRY GHOST are the questions:

 

What does prolonged exposure to violence and uncertainty do to a human being?

 

Does survival make you stronger, or merely better adapted to surviving?

 

Can you learn to trust again?

 

Can you distinguish danger from the memory of danger?

 

And perhaps most difficult of all: can you accept that sometimes there are questions to which there are no answers?

 

That last one is where Tania eventually has to go.

 

By the end of HUNGRY GHOST, she has to accept something her entire life has taught her to reject: sometimes you don’t get an answer.

 

That, I think, is the difference between mining your past for material and allowing your past to inform your fiction.

 

I don’t have to put my childhood on the page. What matters is what it taught me to notice.

 

Vigilance. Uncertainty. The knowledge that people can surprise you, for better or worse. The knowledge that someone can survive terrible things and still be funny, intelligent, competent and profoundly wrong about something that matters.

 

Those are things I can give to a fictional character. The character gets her own history, her own logic and her own choices.

 

That is probably as autobiographical as I’m willing to get.

 

And perhaps that is enough.

 

As for the inevitable darkness at 3 a.m., the best thing you can hope for is an uneasy grace.

 

Childhood trauma seems to inform a lot of literary novels. Do you pull from any fears, anxiety or trauma from your early life into your work?

I grew up in the inner city of Cleveland, Ohio, where traumatic experiences happen so often to children, that they don’t even recognize it as trauma, just a way of life. Gun violence, loss, fear and grief was often more prevalent than joy in my childhood. I lost my first friend to violence at the age of fourteen. My first phobia was born at the age of ten courtesy of a little movie called the Birds, the 1963 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and loosely based on a short story written by Daphne du Maurier. I don’t know what bird did what to her to inspire this truly horrific story, but if the author’s objective was to write a story that would establish a lifelong terror of birds in the reader, or watcher, depending on how you like to take your terror, mission accomplished.

In reality, I’ve not heard of a time when birds banded together with their beady little eyes, sharp talons, and deadly beaks, to attack humanity. But thanks to Alfred Hitchcock, I know every which way that they can. And that’s enough for me. Does this mean that Daphane du Maurier hates, or is terrified of those vicious little killing machines? I don’t know, but I do know the idea of taking something so ordinary in all of our lives and using it as a vehicle for terror was brilliant. And I believe we, each and every one of us writers, all do the exact same thing. It’s nice to be able to have that emotion to pull from. It is nice to know that trauma does give back, instead of just take.

When I was a little girl, I used to walk home from school alone. It wasn’t very far, maybe a quarter of a mile. There was this one house that I had to pass everyday that had dogs in the front yard. Not nice little puffs of fur that you could carry around in your pocket. This house had big, mean, scary dogs, that would bark, growl, and drool at me as they raced back and forth behind an old decrepit fence that I was sure couldn’t keep them inside, it they really wanted to get out. Turns out, I was right about that one.

One day, as I walked by, heart hammering against my chest, the dogs burst out of the gate and chased me down the street. I ended up climbing onto the hood of a neighbor’s van, screaming my head off until the lady of the house came out, and rescued me. I remember her holding my hand as she walked me the rest of the way home, me sobbing uncontrollably the whole way. Thus, ending any chance of me becoming a dog person. And making my first deposit into my trauma bank.

A trauma bank may sound sad, or maybe disturbing to some, but for us writers, those experiences don’t just add up to a new boat for your psychiatrist. They are a valuable unique source for us to draw from to make our work sing. There are plenty of people who have been chased by dogs in their lifetimes. Some even get caught, God bless them. But I’m guessing that if you asked a room full of people to describe their experience, it would read different for each individual. But we would all recognize the honest to goodness fear or trauma of the writer.

All these years later, I can still feel my heart pick up its pace at the sight of a loose dog. I like to think that that traumatic event and all the others that I’ve accumulated in these many years, are as useful as a thesaurus in its way. Because, no emotion for the writer, equals no emotion for the reader.  And that will never do.

 

Continue Trucking from James W. Ziskin

How do you avoid repeating yourself? Do you reinvent your approach to storytelling, or do you lean into what already worked and risk creative stagnation? 

Interesting question this week, especially the part about reinventing the approach to storytelling. I hadn’t thought of that side of repetition before, but it got me thinking about my first seven books, my last two, and my next one.

I prefer to write first-person narrators for my stories, and I doubt that will change any time soon. Does that mean I repeat myself or have fallen into a rut? Well, I don’t believe the risk of repeating oneself is inherently tied to the narrator, any more than it is to traditional timelines, dialogue, or descriptions. Or standardized spelling, for that matter. Storytellers have been inventing tales for millennia using first- and third-person narrators, and the well hasn’t run dry yet. I think it’s more in writers’ idiosyncrasies than in narrative point of view that repetition creeps in. Authors may lean on certain themes in their work, particularly in a series. Or they fall into the habit of re-writing similar situations. Maybe their protagonists fall into the antagonists’ traps over and over. And within specific genres, many tropes tend to come around again and again. The alcoholic PI, the rogue cop, the twisted villain, etc. So how do writers avoid repeating themselves and boring their readers?

I would guess that they do it with new characters and new settings. Detectives shouldn’t solve the same crime every time. They don’t bed the same dames, and they shouldn’t get beaten up by the bad guys either. (Unless they’re Jim Rockford. I love Jim Rockford.)

For my Ellie Stone books, I’ve tried to maintain verisimilitude and fresh perspectives by keeping Ellie on the move. I’ve written in this space before about Cabot Cove Syndrome—too many murders per capita in a small, fictional town—and I’ve avoided it by keeping Ellie on the road. New horizons and new crimes in every places as far flung as New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Saratoga Springs, the Adirondacks, and Florence, Italy.

Another way I keep things moving is Ellie herself. Over the course of seven books, she’s grown. She’s more discerning now, more mature, even as she remains a free-thinker, still playing by her own rules. But she’s smarter. More experienced. She no longer falls into romantic entanglements at every turn. She’s become pickier, I think.

My last two books are not part of a series, so at least there’s not the problem of recurring characters doing the same old tired things. But I still opted for first-person narrators. There’s no more effective way to show who your main character truly is than through first-person narration. (Provided your main character is your narrator.) Every word, every observation, every descriptive choice shows off your narrator’s personality and world view. That’s why I like telling stories that way.

In Bombay Monsoon, I created Danny Jacobs, a twenty-something narrator falling in love and into trouble in India during the 1975 Emergency. Danny’s narration is clearly different from Ellie’s, even if they’re both reporters. Danny is a naïf. Ellie, hardly. Danny is an idealist. Ellie is a wicked wit. But the two come from similar backgrounds. They could be cousins. Maybe I do repeat myself. 

And that brings me to my latest book, THE PRANK, which came out a week ago. For the first time in nine books, I wrote two narrators, a thirteen-year-old sociopath and his twenty-four-year-old English teacher. Jimmy Steuben and Patti Finch take turns, chapter by chapter, offering their own versions of events to the reader. This turned out to be exciting for me as a writer, but scary at the same time. Having never tried multiple narrators before, I was exploring plotting and characterization in a totally new way. New, not repeated, I hope.

My next project is a risky departure for me. I’m trying to tell a story that’s mysterious and magical as well. It’s set in New York City in the summer of 1977. There’s disco, Son of Sam, garbage strikes, and bank fraud. And a house—front and center in the story—that hates women. Tentatively titled Nights on Broadway, it’s definitely like nothing I’ve written before.

But, at its heart, innovative storytelling isn’t about structural tricks like narrators and location. It’s about making sense—or not quite—of the world through our own idiosyncratic vision. That vision shapes our stories, our characters, our wordiness, or economy of expression. You could ask a hundred writers to tell the same story, and it will be different in significant ways for each one. That’s not to say there won’t be similarities, of course. There are only so many dramatic situations, after all. But we all spin our tales to our own tune.

So what’s my advice for keeping your stories fresh? When I’m looking for a new angle or a bright new idea for a story—something to stimulate my interest as well as my creativity—I don’t look back. I don’t want to stay in the same place. I want to move forward. Do something new. Explore something a little different. The ideas don’t come easy. They’re hard to find, but they’re out there, somewhere down the road. Don’t ever give up looking. Keep going. Continue trucking. You’ll find them.

*******************************

THE PRANK…enigmatic and unnerving. The pace never flags for a second. This is some masterly plotting. I loved it.”

—Liz Nugent, author of Strange Sally Diamond

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Setting the bar

Not every book can be a stone cold classic. Do you seek out only the 5-star reads or is a book just as enjoyable if it is a 3-star read? Not an all-timer, but enjoyable nonetheless. Where's the line for recommending a book to someone else?

By Dietrich

Most of what gets published in any given year is just competent entertainment. A three-star novel can be perfectly fine on a plane or when you’re half-asleep on the couch. Clean plot, likable characters, satisfying ending. Job done.

But if you’re trying to get better as a writer, saturating yourself with that stuff doesn’t sharpen you. It flattens you.

Of course, taste is personal—one reader’s five-star mind-blowing read is another’s two-star shrug. That doesn’t erase the gap between work that stretches language and story and work that merely kills time. A writer’s ear still needs training. My concern is feeding it only the competent and the ear may start mistaking flat dialogue for normal, predictable structure for craft, and emotional shortcuts for depth. Mediocrity is contagious, and it lowers the bar until competence looks like artistry.

Reading only for pleasure makes you a consumer. Reading as a writer is different—you’re building instincts, learning what a sentence can carry, noticing the gap between a scene that happens and one that drags. A three-star book can entertain without teaching you a single thing and that’s okay. There’s a time and place for it. But seeking out the books that actually raise the bar exposes you to the upper range of the form so your own ambitions have somewhere real to aim.

That said, I spend plenty of days and evenings with three-star books and audiobooks. I just don’t file them under “influences.” They go under “passing the time.” There’s no shame in that.

It’s not good versus bad. It’s books that expand what you think is possible versus books that just confirm what you already know. Most of the so-called three-stars are professional, readable, and forgettable all at the same time. They leave no residue that changes how you write.

When it comes to recommending something, I try to be honest about why I’m pushing it. If I can’t say that it’ll raise the bar and give the reader something special, I’m likely to keep the title to myself. Handing people mediocrity is a way of lowering the bar, and we already have plenty of that.

Two I’ve recently read that do raise it:

The Lion by Nelson DeMille (John Corey #5). A lean, high-stakes thriller powered by John Corey’s razor-sharp sarcasm. Lethal tension and genuine craft coexist without apology.

Contrapposto by Dave Eggers. A clear-eyed, big-hearted novel about artistic integrity versus the noise of the art world. Eggers is at his most precise about what it costs—and rewards—to keep making real work.

And the next one on my reading stack which I’m sure won’t disappoint: The Hadacol Boogie (#25 in the Dave Robicheaux series) by James Lee Burke. Robicheaux investigates when a cloaked, disfigured man dumps the body of a young woman in a garbage bag on his property, drawing him, Clete Purcel, and new deputy Valerie Benoit into a dangerous web of bayou corruption, mobsters, and personal ghosts.

Read widely and hang onto the books that shaped you and changed how you hear sentences and build scenes. Go back to them. Steal from them. Let the three-star books exist without giving them authority over your standards.

Enjoy imperfect work. Enjoyment is allowed. Not every book has to be a classic. The writers who improved you were almost never the merely average. They were the ones who made the ordinary look insufficient. The ones that shape you should be closer to classic than to competent — anything less is a poor teacher.

I'm pleased to announce that Rust and Bone is a finalist in the fourth annual Sunshine Coast Writers and Editors Society's Book Awards contest, along with The Fourth Princess by Janie Chang, and The Tiger and the Cosmonaut by Eddy Boudel. 

Keep it Fresh

 

Terry here with our question of the week: How do you avoid repeating yourself? Do you reinvent your approach to storytelling, or do you lean into what already worked and risk creative stagnation? 

 I write a long-standing series (twelve to date) so it’s important to me to avoid repeating plot ideas, murder methods, and resolutions. Here’s how I do it: 

 1) My characters are always moving forward. Into new situations, with new relationships, new settings. They’ve learned from the past and looking to the future. My protagonist, Samuel Craddock, is an older chief of police in a small town. He could easily become a stock character. But I’ve given him different love interests, different relationships with friends, both men and women, and growth in the way he reads the world. For example, in Murder at the Jubilee Rally, I introduced his nephew’s feisty teenaged daughter. She gave Craddock some trouble, and he needed to figure out how to engage with her. It was both funny and enlightening. It was fun to write, and it opened up scenarios that wouldn’t occur in his everyday world. In one of the early books, a neighbor introduced him to fine wine. Never much of a drinker, he discovered the enjoyment of sipping a glass or two of good red wine. Which also got him in trouble in a later book with The Baptists. 

In one of the early books, I had Craddock courting a woman who shared his interest in art. Alas, she was also a vegetarian, and no matter how good vegetarian dishes were, he simply couldn’t keep up. To jazz things up, I had several people be huffy when he broke up with her. Then I introduced his “wild child” lover, Wendy. As his relationship with her unfolded, I discovered that I didn’t like her very much. But how was I to get rid of her? The easy way would have been to kill her. Booorrring. I think I came up with a delightful solution in The Curious Poisoning of Jewel Barnes, a solution that will spill over into the next book, The Redemption of Allie Pryor. 

 2) I have a revolving number of secondary characters, especially his deputies. It’s a small town, and deputies come and go as young ones go on to bigger jobs and older ones retire. There are two recurring secondary characters, Loretta Singletary, and Craddock’s deputy, Maria Trevino. The way these two characters, one young, and one older, interact with Craddock keeps things fresh. It was a surprise to me when the two women became good friends. In each book I reveal something new about the these characters. For example, in The Troubling Death of Maddy Benson, I revealed that Loretta is an avid reader of romance novels. It keeps characters fresh for me, as well as for readers. 

 But there are other characters who pop in from out of town, or as supporting character with an opinion. One of my characters is a “gun nut.” He believes if everyone carried a gun, we’d all be safer. He showed in a few books spouting his gun culture beliefs before I decided he was becoming a cartoon. I needed to give him another dimension. So I gave him a mentally disabled son, whom he adored and treated with great kindness and respect. 

 3) There are only so many ways to murder someone, but I vary it. For example, in A Reckoning in the Back Country, a man is murdered by being savaged by wild dogs. I’ve used knives a couple of times, guns, poison, and assault, among others. 

 4) I vary the way criminals try to cover up what they’ve done. This is my favorite variation. It means really having to be creative. It also means that a really creative murder makes it harder for Craddock (and me) to figure out. One of my favorites was the coverup of the murder in Guilt Strikes at Granger’s Store. I had set myself up for what seemed like an impossible cover-up. It took a lot of research. When I discovered the perfect cover-up, I was absolutely gleeful. 

 5) I try not to use too many tropes. I sometimes get impatient when I’m reading a book and there’s yet another “secret” uncovered that set the story in motion. Not to say that I don’t understand that secrets can be deadly, but reliance on them can also be deadly boring. 

 6) I vary the entry into the books. At some point, I realized I often began with Loretta coming to Samuel’s house in the early morning, bringing the baked goods that she gifts her friends with. I decided I needed to get into the next few books from a different angle. Again, refreshing for me as well as for my readers. 

 7) I always have some element of social justice in the books. It’s a way of expanding the horizons of the characters, bringing in real issues from the outside world that townspeople may not even realize impinge on their small town, but which often does. For example, in the latest book, The Curious Poisoning of Jewel Barnes, the poisoning of one character is echoed in the poisoning of communities through toxic dumping. 

 8) Each time I approach a new Samuel Craddock book, I look at the overall arc of the series to see who hasn’t had a role in a while, where Craddock is in his life, and what people in town are riled up about. There’s always something in a small town. For example, in one book the Baptists are determined to wrest control of The Goat Rodeo from the Catholics. In another, townspeople are up in arms about the Jubilee Motorcycle Rally, with its loud motorcycles roaring through town. The reader may laugh, but the people of town take it seriously. And it gives me a center for the book. 

 Every time I think I’ve run out of ideas for another Craddock book, I think about these points, and so far something new has always jumped out at me. The next book, which I’m working on now, is no exception.

Literature's Zone of Silence by Poppy Gee

What “great literary influence” do you secretly think is overrated—but are afraid to say publicly?

I am afraid to publish the following thoughts. So here goes...

We are currently living in an era when the veneer of Western civility is permanently rusted and corroded by the decision of Western governments to ignore or assist in the carnage being inflicted on innocent people who happen to live in a place we call the Middle East. 

How writers choose to write about the world's first livestreamed genocide is interesting. Many will avoid it altogether. In my opinion, there’s space for that. Readers need rom-coms and fun thrillers, heartfelt love poems and transportive historical novels; reading is what will keep us sane in these terrible times. However, it's interesting to look at how the events in Palestine and Israel are finding their way into the literary canon. 

Two books by award winning authors that I recently read that relate to this were The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout and Howl by Howard Jacobson. Both novels left me disappointed. 

In The Things We Never Say, history teacher Artie thinks the world has gone mad. It's Trump's America and 'good people' like Artie feel unanchored, confused about his relationships with the people in his life. It's a compelling read, I gave it four stars on Goodreads. However, this is a book about a man reacting to the atrocities in the world, from Ukraine to Palestine. And yet, in the entire book, the author does not use the word Palestine once. The people from Ukraine are never described as being from Kyiv; yet Palestinian people being ethnically cleansed are only ever referred to as being from Gaza. 

The deliberate choice of wording has the effect of dehumanising a group of people by denying them a nationality. It gives Zone of Interest vibes: Let's pretend Palestine doesn't exist, it's just a group of unruly people in an enclave called Gaza. The fact is, the people who reside in Gaza are mostly refugees, or descended from refugees who once lived in villages on Palestinian land now called Israel. Strout’s authorial decision left me wishing the author had more clarity and courage, especially, and ironically, in a book that aspires to delve into the mysteries of 'the things we never say'. 

Howl is written by an award-winning Jewish author. I'm reluctant to criticise a Jewish author - the world is a tough place for many Jewish people right now. However, Howl was a book that left me cold. Howl is about a primary school headmaster, Ferdinand, who is preoccupied with the idea that October 7, and the world's reaction to the carpet bombing that followed it, stems solely from antisemitism. The character is understandly upset and heartbroken about Israeli suffering but, quite confoundingly to me, has zero empathy for any of the Palestinian people murdered or displaced. Their suffering barely merits a mention. In this book, anyone in the pro-Palestine movement is ignorant, uninformed, a likely lunatic, and unquestionably antisemitic. The author has no intention at any stage of interrogating this ludicrous idea. 

The most potentially interesting character is Ferdinand's daughter Zoe. Zoe is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, and she attends pro-Palestine rallies. This is an interesting intersection for a character, especially as the daughter of a rigid man of limited empathy. And yet, Zoe barely gets any page time. We don't get to know her at all. Instead, the novel reads like a cold hearted rant. Howl is a good name for this book; but perhaps it would have been better to give it an empathetic rewrite and call it Sorrow. 

I recently read The Paradise Pact, an excellent, smart rom-com by Anita Heiss, in which the main character Abbey, a Wiradyuri woman, is searching for the man of her dreams. Notably, she's single because her relationship failed due to that particular man not caring about Palestine. This plot point is plausible, timely, honest and humane. Similarly, Hailstones Fell Without Rain by Natalia Figuero Barroso is about a Urguayan-Australian woman Rita who returns to her family's ancestral land. She's distressed about Palestine, and draws parallels between genocide in all three countries. Randa Abdel-Fattah wrote her novel Discipline about the consequences faced by an academic and a journalist for speaking up during Israel's bombardment of Gaza during Ramadam 2021. The Sunbird by Sara Haddad is about a Nakba survivor in her eighties, living in Sydney, reflecting on her childhood in Palestine before her family were expelled in 1948. These examples are recently published novels, that are not solely about Palestine, but portray a character who is explicitly aware of the profound moral failure that is happening in the the world right now. 

Why does it make me scared to write a blog about this topic? 

When a person speaks about this topic, there is a consequence. One small example of this, for me, has been 'unfollows' on social media from writer colleagues, family members, and even dear friends who attended my wedding. These are people who would, if they saw me in the street, cross the road and greet me with a hug... that was until I said, 'stop the genocide in Palestine'. 

When our current literature is studied in the future, readers will study absences and nuances. Just like how we ask: Why did Jane Austin only vaguely refer to the institution of slavery? How does antisemitism appear in The Great Gatsby? Why was Bertha hidden in the attic in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre? Most Australian university English Majors my age have read Patrick White's Fringe of Leaves, in which he has a white woman living with the Butchulla people who indulge in cannibalism, rape and enslavement - all horrendous things he made up, with no basis in fact. His work is now regarded as racist, colonial propaganda laundered with exquisitely beautiful prose. 

Back to the question, what great literary influence is overrated? I think it’s when award winning authors get attention for publishing books that are intellectually and emotionally lazy, or reckless, in how they address the issue. As educated readers and writers in 2026, we all know better. And when you know better, you have to do better.

 

11. Ignore Elmore Leonard, by Catriona

 What “great literary influence” do you secretly think is overrated—but are afraid to say publicly?

completely gratuitous pic of boxset
because I love it.

Right then.

I've got a problem with "overrated". It either means "too many people like this thing I don't like" or it means "the people who like this thing I kinda like like it more than me, which is too much". 

The second one is bonkers. The first is worse. If someone's going to mount a serious argument that fewer people should like something, I want a list of names. I want an alphabetical list of the people who should disdain the thing instead of holding it in esteem. And then I want an orderly explanation of how come the list maker is in charge of these strangers' preferences.

There's an exception, mind you. I don't think people should be rated at any level at all as Great Literary Influences, if they fall into this category. I'll explain. One - maybe the only - drawback to hanging out at lovely gossipy Harrogate last week was finding out which celebrities have put their names on crime novels despite not writing them. So annoying. I'm not listing them here but I will say that Richard Coles, Graham Norton and Sir Richard of Osman himself DO write their books.

There's one other Great Literary Influence I think is overrated, in that it does actual harm to people's creative life. I hinted at it in the title. If I can use "hinted" to mean, shone a klieglight on it and drew arrows. It's Elmore Leonard's 10 rules of writing. You know what I mean. "Don't start with the weather". "No adverbs". "No prologues". Pfft. Do what you want, I say. Learn to do it well. 

And I'm not alone. Nick Hornby has views on rules about writing. He speaks kindly but firmly about the fetishisation of cutting, to end up with lean prose, in particular. "That clinking noise you hear" he says, "is a class full of creative-writing students hitting bone". Then he slyly points out how improbable it would be if every story really was perfectly itself, peak and pinnacle wise, at 80K. He suggests that 80K being the sweet spot for a literary novel might - just might - be a factor. He doesn't say everyone should wind their necks in and/or get over themselves. That's me.

The truth, I reckon, is that brilliant books start with weather, adverbs have their place, prologues are absolutely fine (although I personally like short ones). And when it comes to "omitting needless words" as Strunk and White command . . . pfft again. For every Claire Keegan, there's a Donna Tartt.  

Cx

Let It Grow by Eric Beetner

 What “great literary influence” do you secretly think is overrated—but are afraid to say publicly?

It’s been a fascinating thing to watch my two daughters navigate through high school and see what the reading assignments were. I was dismayed to see that the standard curriculum hadn’t changed much since I was in high school in the mid-80s. 

I had to hear endlessly about how bad The Old Man And The Sea was. How The Great Gatsby was “meh”. How To Kill A Mockingbird wasn’t as good as the movie.

It becomes a slippery slope when discussing literature of any kind because I feel the need to acknowledge that books written in the 1800s simply don’t have the relevance to readers in the 21st century, while at the same time accepting the universality of certain story tropes and themes and basic human emotions in those same books. I think everyone should have a decent working knowledge of Shakespeare, if only because so many cultural reference still abound about his works. Do I think they have the same impact, as written, in 2026 as they did back then or even a hundred years ago? Not even close. They’re nearly impenetrable with a Gen Z reader.

Language evolves, and it should. More often than not those who lament over changing grammatical standards or newly invented slang creeping into common usage will also cling to the language of their youth, ignoring that their version of "correct" language is a product of change. If you tried to go around speaking in iambic pentameter because you felt that was the truest expression of the English language, then you would miss out on language’s primary goal: to be understood.

All that is to say, I think most of the “great” novels that are still studied and handed out to students in both the high school and collegiate level are overrated. You will still find young readers identifying with Holden Caulfield, but they would also love The Perks Of Being A Wallflower. Jane Austen fans would probably also love Wolf Hall. Frankenstein can be a slog, but if you want horror than it relevant than look at the work Stephen Graham Jones is doing these days, or recent Pulitzer winner Daniel Kraus. 

Any number of 21st century novels can claim just as much literary relevance as something 200 years old, and will likely speak more to a young reader’s experience and therefore make them more invested than, say, hunting for a white whale in 1840.

I find counterculture novels fall out of relevance quite quickly since they speak so much to the times in which they were written. Sorry, On The Road. Similarly, Hunter S. Thompson was fun to read when I was 20, but even then it was a relic of the past. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test seems like a cautionary tale these days and not a call to action. And Howl is just too damn long and someone should have said it back then.

And maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t put quite so much stock in writers who were being paid by the word. Dickens can get a little wordy, and there’s a reason. Or writers who had literally nothing else to do during a long Russian winter except muse about War and Peace for 1200 pages.

Just as writing evolves, language changes and reacts to a dynamic world and different times, so should our examples of “great” or “Important” writing. To exclude modern-day writers is to cheat readers out of that one book that will make them fall in love with words. Talk to any high schooler and they’ll tell you in florid language how much and how often assigned reading killed any love of reading. And when you kill it young, it often never grows back.

Literary Heresy, Cheerfully Committed

 

  

What “great literary influence” do you secretly think is overrated—but are afraid to say publicly?

 

Here’s my career-limiting confession.

 

I don’t think the most overrated literary influence is Shakespeare. Or Austen. Or Joyce.

 

I think it’s the idea of the canon itself.

 

Not because the canon is full of bad books. Far from it. But we treat it as though it descended from Sinai engraved on stone tablets rather than assembled, revised, argued over, marketed, anthologized, and taught by generations of critics, professors, publishers, and readers.

 

I came to that conclusion because of crime fiction.

 

People often lump Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler together because both wrote hard-boiled detective novels. That’s like saying Hemingway and Keats both wrote in English.

 

Hammett is to Hemingway as Chandler is to Keats.

 

Hammett strips language to the bone. Every sentence earns its keep. Chandler revels in metaphor, rhythm, and lyricism. One reports. The other performs.

 

Or, to borrow from journalism, Hammett is Jimmy Breslin while Chandler is Pete Hamill. Both wrote about the same world. One chased blunt force; the other chased music.

 

That, to me, is influence.

 

Hammett gave writers permission to be lean, unsentimental, and ruthlessly economical. Chandler gave them permission to be lyrical without sacrificing toughness. One proved detective fiction could achieve power through restraint. The other proved it could aspire to poetry. I mix both in my own writing.

 

Those influences matter to me far more than whether someone has a permanent reservation in an English department.

 

Which is why I admire plenty of canonical writers.

 

I just don’t worship them. Some leave me cold.

 

Moby-Dick? Half novel, half encyclopedia on whales.

 

Ulysses? I respect it more than I enjoy it.

 

Dostoevsky makes me want to open a vein.

 

If Tolstoy spends one more page describing a wheat field, I’m going to turn into that fellow inside the The Scream painting.

 

And yes, I once announced in a university classroom that Whitman was overrated—and something of a marketing genius. He self-published Leaves of Grass repeatedly, kept revising it, and famously “borrowed” Emerson’s private praise as promotional copy.

 

That’s not just poetry. That’s branding.

 

For the record, I do think Whitman is America’s great poet of death. Greatness and sainthood aren’t the same thing.

 

My professors were… less amused than I was.

 

That experience taught me something.

 

We often mistake fame for influence, influence for quality, and quality for whatever appears most often on a syllabus.

 

The bestseller lists of a century ago are mostly forgotten. Marketing fades. Fashion changes. Literary reputations rise and fall. Yet we’re remarkably confident that today’s canon represents objective truth rather than generations of critics, teachers, publishers, and institutions deciding what deserves to survive.

 

Education ought to teach us to argue with evidence. Too often it teaches us whom not to argue with because it is heretical to question indoctrination. Literature isn’t a religion.

 

It’s a conversation, and not a contest as to what deserves the capital L in literature.

 

Genre suffers in this false hierarchy. We still talk as though “literary” fiction occupies a higher plane than crime, mystery, fantasy, or science fiction.

 

I don’t buy it. Genre isn’t a lesser form. It’s simply a framework of rules. Violate them at your peril. The artistry lies in what the writer accomplishes within its rules.

 

Here’s another small heresy.

 

I genuinely enjoy Jane Austen, but I have ‘issues’ with Miss Austen. She largely erases the human cost of the Napoleonic Wars. Officers in Persuasion and Pride & Prejudice discuss prize money. Empire hums politely in the background without criticism. That’s a perfectly legitimate artistic choice, but it reminds us that every writer—even a canonical one—has blind spots.

 

Which brings me back to the question: What’s overrated?

 

The notion that the canon is beyond questioning.

 

The older I get, the less I am interested in inherited opinions and the more I am interested in discovering my own.

 

The book that changed your life at sixteen may disappoint you at fifty. The one you ignored for decades may suddenly become indispensable. Perhaps you weren’t ready to receive it. That’s not inconsistency or a flaw. That’s growth.

 

There are more books than any of us could read in ten lifetimes.

 

Read widely. Read recklessly. I say, read outside the syllabus or in the internet chatter.

 

The greatest instrument of literary rebellion has never been a banned book.

 

It’s a library card.

Over and Over Again

 

How do you avoid repeating yourself? Do you reinvent your approach to storytelling, or do you lean into what already worked and risk creative stagnation?

I’m working on what I hope will be my next novel, I have had to confront this issue quite a bit. What I found is I have a love affair with the weather in my writing. To be fair, it might actually be an obsession. Not the horrible Toxic Love Story kind of obsession. More like, I really love this character and want to write for them always, obsession. And that’s fine, I think, but I ask you, how many ways are there to describe the menace of a sudden winter storm racing down an icy mountain top to ravish an unsuspecting victim clinging desperately to a frozen branch to survive a wind that has suddenly grown sharp teeth? A lot, apparently. And it’s my job, as the writer, to explore every single one of them. If I want my writing to stay interesting. But how?

I find that when my writing feels a bit stale and moldy, like that loaf of bread that keeps dying on the top of my fridge, it’s time to switch it up. Time to get outside and let myself become refreshed by the conversations flowing around me. Sometimes plucking an interesting or funny turn of phrase from an overheard conversation, or song, or even the gentleman at the end of my street, who has been enjoying a one-on-one conversation with the air for as long as I can remember. Is that stealing? I don’t know, but public transportation has been a well of inspiration for many a character in need of a refresh.

And finally, I found inspiration in, no tomatoes please, television and movies. I am a visual person. When I write, I am writing what I see in my mind. When my mind is covered in fog, my writing follows. But, somehow, seeing the scenery in a show in a fantastic location, like Shetland or meeting a cool, interesting character like DCI Carl Morck from Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Dept Q, shoots a spark directly to the center of my creative spirit that pushes me back on course.

Reading, listening to music, yoga, breathing, a walk on the beach, there’s so many ways a writer can jumpstart that creative spark when it grows dim, but the one thing I find I cannot do is read in the genre I’m writing. Mainly to avoid any unintentionally thievery, if you will, but also not to psyche myself out by engaging in unhelpful and often false comparisons.

I wonder if I’m alone in this practice? Do other authors limit what they are reading while writing in the same genre? Or am I alone on Paranoia Island?

From what I’ve seen, writers have as many rituals as athletes when it comes to getting that book from t brain to paper. Some we’re aware of, some have become so ingrained we don’t even notice anymore. In the end, it all comes down to whatever works!

Happy Endings by Faye Snowden

Do you prefer endings that solve everything neatly, or ones that leave moral or emotional questions unresolved—and have you ever changed an ending because you were afraid of reader backlash?

In 1983, Margaret Atwood published a short story called Happy Endings, a meta tale about the craft of writing where readers are allowed to select the type of ending they want. Think of a choose-your-own adventure story. Happy Endings begins with these words. 

John and Mary meet.

What happens next?

If you want a Happy Ending, try A. 

Choice A is the shortest most boring of all with John and Mary both falling blissfully in love. They marry and buy a charming house and live happily together for a long, long time. Atwood ends Choice A with these words. “Eventually they die. This is the end of the story.”

John and Mary: Happy, but boring.

Choice A is one many readers, including me, would skip. Who would read 300+ pages about a happy life? Tell us about the time the roof caved in during a storm, or when Mary backed over the family dog while trying to escape the house after John confronted her about her habit of drinking three whisky sours before dinner, and red wine until she passed out after they ate whatever pabulum their hired cook sat on the table. We don’t read for happy endings. We read for drama and angst and bloody complications. In crime fiction its chaos and murder compelling us to turn the page. 

Now the other choices in Atwood’s story! That’s where the real fun begins. In Choice B John and Mary meet but it’s a one-sided love affair. Choice C tells the story of a May-December romance where Mary sleeps with John because she feels sorry for him. Her decision eventually leads to a twisty and brutal outcome. There are more choices in Happy Endings, but every single one refers the reader back to Choice A where John and Mary eventually die. As Atwood states, A is the “…only authentic choice…John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.”

So, it’s not the ending that matters in writing, but the plot which Atwood describes as the what, and what next, the how, and the why. In crime fiction, the ‘what’ or primary story consists of the crime (usually a murder) and the victim. There are clues and a villain to catch amid complications and reversals. The writer is obligated to ‘play fair’ so the reader has a chance to figure out the killer before the end of the book. When I write genre fiction I don’t leave loose ends in the ‘what’ because I want my reader to have a shot at winning the game.

It’s the ‘why’ part of the story that’s up for grabs. The ‘why,’ tightly entwined with the ‘what’ consists of my character’s internal struggle, their unmet desires, and vocal demons. This psychological darkness drives the plot, compels the ‘what next.’ The ‘why’ is where I place the most ambiguity. Will Raven, my detective protagonist, ever be able to live her own life without being tortured by the ghost of her serial killer father? Will she ever learn that she can’t run from herself? These questions aren’t neatly answered, but don’t worry. If you ever want to know the end of the story, refer back to Happy Endings. Run your finger down the page; stop when you reach Choice A.