Bryan Gilmer

Very excited to be the guest today of the Paperback Dolls, a group of readers and bloggers who love genre fiction. We’re talking about using audiobooks to add more reading time to your busy week and reminiscing about having bedtime stories read to us when we were kids. There are FIVE ways to win a free copy of the Felonious Jazz audiobook — so head on over

I couldn’t have planned this, but it’s the perfect follow-up to my post, My Kind of Villain. Today over on Murderati, fellow North Carolina thriller author J.D. Rhoades, the master of a subgenre he affectionately calls “redneck noir,” talks about how he doesn’t like his heroes perfectly capable or perfectly good:

Problem is, far too many thrillers–some of them extremely popular–feature heroes I can never quite accept as human. Instead of realistic people who feel fear, doubt, tension, you get Bolt Studly, the mavericky, two-fisted, fearless ex-Navy Seal/CIA Agent whose only flaw is that he rushes headlong into the action. I much prefer my action heroes with some vulnerabilties: Charlie Fox, Jonathan Quinn, John Rain, to name just a few. Even Jack Reacher got a lot more interesting when he began to face the possibility he could lose.

Readers of crime novels need great heroes. Writers of crime novels need great villains.

The villain’s crime brings the story into being. Villains provide the tension and suspense and surprise. They challenge society’s rules. They bring the fear. But I am not interested in writing about “alien” villains, some personification of Death. I want to write about villains that will feel familiar to us: Those who have let the forces of death in this world begin to rot their souls.

This Easter, with the theme of resurrection vivid in my mind from church, I’d like to share with everyone an essay I published in the St. Petersburg Times after visting Ground Zero — and more signifcantly, a nearby Irish pub — in New York on Easter weekend, 2002.

I have been to New York City four times. Each of the first three, I lay on the plaza between the World Trade Center towers and stared at the point in the sky where extensions of their strong vertical lines would converge on an artist’s canvas.

At a summer program I did in high school, one of my writing instructors, whose name I forget, told us that as writers we should “learn to savor melancholy.”

He was right. Being a writer makes most situations fascinating and useful, even ones that most would call unpleasant or annoying or forgettable. The a-hole at the convenience store, the peculiar physical sensations of an illness, a fear in the middle of the night — all of them become fascinating, rich experiences that can be worked into the next story. Being a writer makes you experience life. It makes you wonder about people and how they became themselves. There’s something fascinating about every person; just behind the canned smalltalk at the party is a cast of fascinating characters.

Great fiction shows us these details of our world, makes us

Here’s the transcript of an interview I did a while back with Bryan Gruley, author of the excellent mystery books STARVATION LAKE and THE HANGING TREE (and the forthcoming THE SKELETON BOX). Bryan’s a Bouchercon buddy of mine and the Chicago bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. I’m hoping the similarity of our names causes people to buy my books when they’re really looking for his. If you post your own questions and comments in the thread, I’ll try to get him to stop by.

Q: You’ve made your career in journalism. Starvation Lake features a small-town newspaper editor as the protagonist. How did working as a reporter and editor prepare you to write a novel, and how did that influence you to write this novel?

One of the most important principles of both journalism and corporate communication is to consider your audience and frame your message in a way that meets their needs. As a reporter, it was my best way to come up with stories. Put myself in the shoes of a typical reader and ask myself, what do they want to know more about? How can I package the information in a convenient and engaging way that they can act on? It’s also the way I think about how a client’s website content should be organized and what should included. How do we make people feel welcome and appreciated? What can we give them? How can we build a relationship with them and persuade them to do the things we want? How can we be of service?

I wish more advertisers did that. Instead, particularly online, many advertisers behave like a four-year-old who’s half an hour past hungry.

Like this: I begin to read an interesting article. Your company covers up what I was reading with a floating ad that maybe even flashes. I’m just as annoyed at you and your product as I would be if you stuck your hand between me and what I was reading on an airplane.

As I’ve relaunched this website, I realize it has two distinct goals: to share information about my fiction and to present my skills and experience as a consultant writing web and marketing copy for institutions and companies. Should this really be two websites, I wondered? Maybe three, since I also feature some of my journalism?

No, I decided. It’s all writing. I’ve devoted my career to writing, and the site is about all my writing. Though the intended audience, organizational logic, and voice differ wildly as I write in these different arenas, the fundamentals stay the same.

So here’s my main secret: Great writing stands on apt nouns and verbs. Subject –> verb –> object. That’s it. Choosing which noun or verb is the writer’s primary art.

Adverbs modify verbs, and using one usually means you could choose a better verb. Adjectives modify nouns and usually mean you could’ve chosen a better noun. You do use adjectives and adverbs — but only after you’ve first tried to pick a noun or verb that can stand alone.

When you discipline yourself to seek nouns and verbs, you begin to write elegant, concise, direct sentences. And pulling a noun or verb from one aspect of life into a sentence about another enriches your writing with connotations from the source of the word. You introduce literary devices into your sentences.

From a crime short story I just entered in a contest. You may or may not agree they’re good, but you can see how I worked to find the noun or verb for the job:

You’re busy. The only time you have to yourself is when you’re in the car or on the treadmill. You wish you had more time to read. You have an iPhone, an iPod or some other mp3 player. I want you to be a buyer of my fiction, so I’ve recorded an audiobook version of Felonious Jazz. Yep, I called on my old college radio experience and narrated the book myself, even doing different accents for each of the characters.

It’s now available on Audible.com, where I highly recommend their one-audiobook-a-month subscription plan.