When I started my latest draft of my novel, I decided to try some flashbacks and flashforwads to get the main cast in front of my readers and all the elements of my story out in front of my readers within the first fifty pages.

It re-energized me initially, but now I wonder if I’m robbing certain scenes of their dramatic power by doing so. After all, if the reader knows Zach is alive to be talking to the police, for example, they know he survived being held hostage by another suspect two days earlier, right?

Can knowing someone survives rob all the dramatic tension out of a scene? Or can a scene that you know the hero survives still keep you on the edge of your seat, if it’s well-told?

These are the things that keep me wondering about the best narrative approach. But at least I don’t need any Accutane to think it through!

Good ideas are as hard to come across as affordable Ferrari parts. But after I posted it, I realized I kind of stumbled across one.

That thing I wrote about a kid with seemingly incurable acne, but who finally finds something that starts to work, but with dark consequences? That’s pure gold, now that I think about it.

Sure, it’s more of a horror concept than mystery/suspense, but… there’s something there. Hopefully I can find some time to work on that, before someone rips it off and makes it their own.

Heh.

Quite often, writers meet eccentric characters in real life but then hesitate to make their own characters quite so quirky. And yet it is the quirkiness in characters that makes them memorable.

Nearly two decades have past since David Lynch’s Twin Peaks hit the airwaves, and I can still recall unique characters like the Log Lady and the Man From Another Place with greater clarity than who Jerry dated on a particular episode of Seinfeld.

Too much these days is made of issues like relatability and makes characters an “everyman/everywoman” type. But that’s just the opposite of what good writing does.

Tell me about the kid who keeps trying acne treatment that don’t work, but then finds one that does… but with dark consequences… and then you have me. Tell me about the guy who asks a gal to prom with no self-esteem problems because he’s the quarterback on his high school team, and you’re telling me about just about every character like that who’s ever appeared on page or screen.

So I say, let the quirkiness commence! It’s the key to making your characters unique.

In the past couple weeks, despite my main PC being down for half that time, I have accomplished a lot of writing. I have all of two commentaries done and a third one nearly complete; then I have a couple sermons to write.

It’s a lot of fun writing sermons, but I’m itching to get some fiction writing done, too; I just breezed through Terry Brooks’ wonderful A PRINCESS OF LANDOVER and was overjoyed to return to the world of Ben and Willow Holiday as well as their daughter Mistaya. I’d been afraid he’d given up on Landover years ago for the bigger payday that his Shannara series seems to bring in.

I’ve never cared much for Shannara, but the Magical Kingdom of Landover is a long-time favorite of mine. I’m glad to see the resolution suggested another book might be on the way. Perhaps this time, it won’t be another fifteen or so year wait between installments!

Of course, reading this wonderful novel helped inspire me, like all good writing does, even though I’m working on a mystery and not a fantasy novel. I’m hoping I can find some time soon for fiction writing again! Enough with all the distractions on my LCD TVs; I need to craft some fiction!

One of the worst things I think a writer can do is limit themselves to the scope of their own experience. Many people suggest, “Write what you know,” and yet this advice is often misunderstood and misinterpreted.

You see, some of the greater works of literature were about things that no one could ever reasonably know. I mean, do you think Bram Stoker hunted blood-suckers in graveyards in the dead of night? Nope. Did Jules Verne ever scuba-dive to an underwater paradise? Also no. Did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever smoke a hash pipe? Well.. who knows?

The point is, you can’t always write only what you know, but you can write what’s relate-able and what’s familiar. Which opens up whole new worlds of possibilities.

On the “what’s relate-able” front, sure, no one can know what it’s like to, say, turn into a wolf three or four times a month. But one can relate to the fear of hurting others, or the terror of allowing an inner rage to show through. Women writers especially ought to be able to relate to werewolves, since they have a “monthly cycle” as well. Outstanding allegorical potential there.

As to what’s familiar, I confess I’d be out of my league trying to describe, say, equestrian apparel. It’s something I don’t know a lot about, so I’d just be winging it. That means not much until you consider that some item like that might be the key to unlocking a murder mystery plot; if that’s the case, then you darned well better become familiar with equestrian apparel because no reader is less kind than the one who realizes you’re b.s.-ing and the details aren’t right.

While a writer can’t know everything, they do have an obligation to the reader to appear that they know everything as it relates to their story.

So such advice is not given to discourage writers, but to encourage them to do their research and get the details right. After all, one would hate to consider the ramifications if their entire plot rested on knowing the correct calibration of the boiler dispersal pipe and, as the writer, you get it wrong and everyone knows that it’s wrong.

Doe that mean avoid writing about it? No. It means work harder at being a good writer.

I was browsing dog supplies at PetSmart when inspiration arose within me; suddenly, out of the blue, I’d solved a motivation for one of my characters.

Sometimes it can happen like that. Most of the time, however, the only real way to solve a character problem is to put one’s nose to the grindstone and write it out. Try a scene different ways, or write a monologue between you and your ticked-off character, working out the issues that are blocking you from forward progress in the story.

It tends to work.

Reading good writing has always inspired me to get cracking on whatever writing project I’m working on at the moment. That’s been true lately. I just read the first chapter to Charlaine Harris’ upcoming Grave Secret, available on her Web site, and it made me want to fire up MS Word 2007 and work on my next chapter on my novel.

That’s exactly what I’ll do as soon as I get these blogs finished and get a good night’s sleep under me, in fact. I need the sleep, of course; don’t want to put myself in a position where I need the help of Seattle personal injury attorneys, after all…

Charlaine Harris is a great example of a writer who can make each of her characters sound different. That’s an essential skill when one indulges in first-person narration. The deal is not to concentrate so much on the Drew Estate, the murder weapon or the victim so much as to concentrate on the inner workings of your character’s mind.

Basically, you have to sink into their heads and see their world the way they see it. If you do that, it would be hard for all your characters to sound the same; you’d by nature be telling the tale in their unique voice. And that’s the goal.

I’m finally making progress again on my first Pizza Delivery Mystery novel, Thirty Minutes Or Less. Longtime readers will remember I lost over 100 surplus pages of manuscript during a hard drive crash in which I had no data backup. It’s been a long road toward working up the energy to tackle the novel afresh, but I finally have.

I’ve taken my wife’s advice and found a whole new approach to the plot, jumping ahead in the novel’s timeline after the prologue so that I can get my main character to the action, the novel’s main premise, and all of the important characters that much faster. I am envisioning about a third of the novel taking place in a sort of “frame/flashback” structure before the plot catches up to current action and unreels from there.

This new approach makes me feel more confident about the novel than I did the first time through; by getting to the important stuff earlier, the elements that I believe will hook readers are there early on. That is what will make this novel stand out.

Sometimes I like to think about an exchange I had with my uncle Kenny many years ago. A draftsman and engineer, he fell in love with the Commodore Amiga 128. The computer, had twice the RAM of the Commodore 64k, a whopping 128K. And he had just added on a new accessory, a 16MB external hard drive.

“This is all the memory you’ll ever need,” he told me proudly while sucking on his cherry-tobacco-stuffed pipe. “Do you know how much memory sixteen megabytes is? You could write a dozen novels and never fill it up.”

Over the years, of course, his wisdom has proven to have some holes in it. Since that conversation, Commodore has died out, Apple came and went and came back again, and MS-DOS has given way to various iterations of Windows. Megabytes have given way to gigabytes and terabytes and beyond and my standard portable memory cards are no longer 3.5-inch floppies with 1.4MB per disc, but a handy flash drive that holds 2 GB of information. (I own two of them.)

Of course, there are still plenty of people willing to sell the next “big thing” in memory storage. The latest is a sexy one terabyte hard drive I’m considering for my current PC. And of course, the sales pitch mirrors my uncle’s words from long ago: “It’s all the memory you’ll ever need.”

Of course, as a writer, I value memories like this far more than all the flash drives in the average Best Buy.

One of the best ways to cure writers block is to read extremely good writing.

Now, I’m not talking about reading someone else’s work at then sitting down and doing something just like what that did. No, what I mean is that sometimes you just need a fat burner for the mind.

And for me, nothing works better than reading the best writers I can think of; their skill with words, their creativity, their imagination all reminds me of why I want to write in the first place, what inspired me to want to be a writer when I was young. It was always the best writing that did that for me.

Of course, my standards for what makes up good writing doesn’t always match what they’ll teach you in some pompous creative writing group or college workshop. Perhaps I’ll share those soon.

Lately it’s been easier to write about diet pills that work than to make progress on my mystery novel, Thirty Minutes or Less. I’m in a delicate point in the novel where I need to lay the groundwork for the supernatural elements to come, while still grounding the series in a very realistic world.

Also, the scene I’m about to write is a very emotional one for me: it has Zack spending him with his parents, who due to reasons I won’t spoil here, are noncommunicative. Having just lost my own mother a couple months ago, this is not turning out to be an easy scene to write.