Grrrist for the Mill

I haven’t been slacking off, not really, though some might think so.

I’ve been cutting and pasting and deleting and re-writing vast tracts of novel. But in the evenings, I’ve been reading.

Recently, I finished Marjorie M. Liu’s Soul Song - very entertaining - Lynn Viehl’s Night Lost - an excellent read – and Nora Robert’s High Noon - another well-crafted novel from La Nora.

All three are distinct in style. Soul Song follows an expected plot line that I’ve seen in other novels, yet Ms Liu brings her own talents to a story filled with mythology. Night Lost is more of the excellent Darkyn, but what makes this story terrific is the twist I didn’t see coming, and I should have. High Noon also follows an expected plot line, but what makes this different is the slow, inexorable rise in tension ending in the ‘will he’ or ‘won’t he’ questions and you know the villain has no reason not to. (Nope, no spoilers here, sorry.)

Of them all, it’s Night Lost that will stay with me, purely because of the clues I missed and the clever way those clues were hidden. I like books that lay down subtle clues.

Holly Lisle’s Midnight Rain is the same, though I knew the who, but not, quite, the how.

Good books are a pleasure to read; great books deserve re-reading. For writers, that re-reading involves a subconscious learning of how the author did it. I have found that I enjoy hiding those clues when I write, too.

But it’s not just the twists at the end. It can be the emotional punch, the OMG moment, the oh, no-oo scene. You want examples? Okay…

JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - when you read it, you’ll understand, but there is a suddenness of death that shocks.

David Weber’s Field of Dishonor - the emotional punch is from being told, not shown as we’re all instructed.

Elizabeth Moon’s The Deeds of Paksenarrion - there is tragedy in this that is exhausting in its stoicism.

Dean Koontz’s Intensity - left me breathless with its, yes, intensity. Tension from go to whoa.

Lisa Gardner’s The Perfect Husband - oh, the cruelty of a character’s demise, simply because the perp could.

S. L. Viehl’s Endurance - being traded into torture can only provoke intense feelings in the reader; it did for me. D, you bastard! I don’t care why you did it, you should have… yes, well. To continue:

J. T. Edson’s The Cow Thieves - begins with a murder as foul as it was historic.

Anne McCaffrey’s Dragon Flight - reading this as a kid opened my eyes to the wonders of the imagination; like Athena from the head of Zeus, new worlds, new creatures, new ideas erupted from my own imagination.

So, if you write - I believe Nora Roberts once remarked: reading is research – and no book is worthless. Even those you hate. At the very least, you learn how not to do something.

But the best are those books you love, for within those covers lies the genesis of your own great works.