Two novels. Both are set during the Second World War and yet neither is a war story. Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, won the Pulitizer Prize for fiction this year. Read it to gain an appreciation for what editors mean when they say “character-driven plot.” This is much more than a story about WWII. Marie-Louise is a blind 14-year-old girl who lives with her father in Paris before the Nazi occupation. Her father works as the master locksmith for the Museum of Natural History and takes with him the museum’s greatest treasure when he and Marie-Louise escape to the coastal city of Saint-Malo. Werner is a gadget-obsessed German orphan whose skills land him a place in Hitler Youth and he is sent to Saint-Malo to investigate resistance activities. The life stories of the two child protagonists are interleaved in short chapters with alternating POV. This provides good pacing and builds momentum over 531 pages. David Treuer, Prudence, is a novel which begins one August afternoon in 1942 when Frankie Washburn returns from Princeton University to his family’s Minnesota summer resort before he leaves to join the war as a bombardier. Awaiting Frankie’s arrival are his hovering mother, a distant father, Felix, the Indian caretaker who serves as a masculine role model, and Billy, his Ojibwe childhood friend who has become something much more intimate. A German soldier escapes the POW camp across the river from the resort and Frankie and his friends go hunting and…
Journalistic nonfiction makes an unspoken promise to readers: it doesn’t just tell a tremendous story, it forces readers to question and examine current cultural practices and societal values. A strong journalist knows how to write articles that do more than just expose the facts. Many call it an ethical code, but I call it a mark of skill, developed over the years by knowledge of… [Read More]
Filed Under: Broadmoor, Hare Checklist, Jon Ronson, journalistic nonfiction, journey through the madness industry, labels, psycopathy, sociopathy, the psychopath test, unspoken promise, Wall Street
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Whether you check the news on your smartphone first thing in the morning or you’d rather read the phone book than attend to anything on such a tiny screen, there’s one thing you’ve got to keep in mind – potential readers are looking at your site on mobile even if you’re not. In the same way that your website needs to be accessible to many… [Read More]
Martin Sweeney from Homer, NY, has written a captivating account of three native sons who played pivotal roles in Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and the United States’ history. [Martin Sweeney, Lincoln’s Gift from Homer, New York: A Painter, an Editor and a Detective, McFarland & Company, Inc., 2011.] The painter, Francis Carpenter, brushed “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation before the Cabinet”—the iconic image of… [Read More]
If you are an author who seeks an agent or publisher, you know that it is important to have an audience platform. What’s an audience platform? Historically we think of the soapbox a speaker stood upon at a busy intersection of streets hawking one’s ideas or wares. Print advertisers have long based their rates on the size of their circulation, or the “reach” of the… [Read More]
How does one combine memoir, ethnography, self-discovery, and history, while contributing to two important bodies of literature—Holocaust and psychotherapy—in an eminently readable book? Do what Leila Levinson has done in Gated Grief: The Daughter of a GI Concentration Camp Liberator Discovers a Legacy of Trauma (Cable Publishing, 2011). The breadth of her project is evident even in the awards it has won—one for women’s memoir… [Read More]