Welcome to my website. Writing novels is an odd business. It starts with the question, "what would happen if ..?” And then the narrative tapestry emerges.

My stories are typically action thrillers, but not always. Pale Tides is quite different from the others. To find out more, please click on the cover images.

BLOG  October 2007 - Where is the world?

Still in Spain in a small village away from the internet hunkered down in front of my laptop. The story is progressing.

BLOG  September 2007 - What's your story?

I'm still in Spain and the weather continues to be magnificent. The daily sunrise over the Mediterranean is inspirational. My new novel is advancing and I'm excited about the story. I'll hang out here until the draft is done.

Last month I talked about 'what makes a story'? Let me push that thought a bit further by asking something that writers continually think about as they go through their daily lives. It is the question, 'Is there a story here?' Or when we meet a person for the first time and then get to know them, we are in fact asking the question, 'What is your story?'

Last month I gave my definition of a story as follows: It is a cause and effect drama where something happens to a character that drives him or her forward on a significant quest, where the tension constantly increases, where the character faces challenges and an enemy, where the character in some way overcomes and then makes an important realization about his or her life.

What is a story? As I said, I often ask this question when I meet people and what I am looking for are some basic story elements in their lives. For instance, what is their current situation and is there something that is making them step out of it and pursue a significant quest? What is that quest? What are the challenges they are facing? Who or what is the enemy? Do they know? What are they doing to overcome the enemy? Do they rebound from the defeats and get back into the battle when things go bad, or do they just give up? Are they coming to a new realization about themselves and life around them? In other words, what are the story elements.

In meeting people it is often quite difficult to find ‘the story’ in their lives, or at least to find a compelling story. Maybe I’m being a bit hard here, but it seems that most people are just living lives of reasonable routine. And from a writer’s perspective that doesn't constitute a story because it doesn't contain the right components. A story involves facing challenges while pursuing a significant quest. The true hero is someone who has responded to a challenge (internal or external) in their lives and then steps out to pursue a goal. With many people the story is not really compelling, but sometimes I find some real gems.

And I must admit that while my stories are definitely fiction, most often they originate from real people I've met. Pale Tides is a good example of someone I met who was caught between a legalistic church-school system and a secular world gone crazy.

Granted, not all the real people on which my stories are based are facing dilemmas that impact the fate of the world, but the story elements are there only to be expanded just a bit. For instance, the current novel I’m working on is another Doby story, this time with even more at stake than found in Social Code and Virtual Eyes, the previous two books where Doby was the protagonist. I don't have a title for this new book yet, but in this story Doby's quest is significant. And to be honest, I actually met someone who had a similar experience as Doby in this book, at least in terms of the inciting incident.

So, could we find a fiction idea based on your story? Did you ever think about it? What is your story?

Wish you could enjoy the Spanish sunrise.  . . . blog archives