Category Archives: Musings

How Dorothy Dunnett Taught Me to Write

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If you’re reading this blog, you probably know that my novel Painted Black is a suspense novel recently published by New Libri Press.

If you’re familiar with Dorothy Dunnett, you know that she is most famous for her two historical novel series, the Lymond Chronicles and House of Niccolo.  So you might wonder how an historical novelist had anything to teach to a suspense novelist.

World building is the key to the success of Dunnett’s novels.  This means so much more than just getting all the geographical and historical details correct. Language, characters, place, plot, theme and tone need to be layered and blended together in the same way I imagine an artist constructs an oil painting.

The characters are kind of like the paint colors.  From joyful Yellow Ochre to flamboyant Vermillion and Cadmium Orange to the darker tones of Burnt Sienna and Ivory Black.  Each color/character butts up against and is muddied by those surrounding it.

The language and tone with which you write is like the brush strokes, bold broad strokes here or subtle washes there.  Place is the details the artist chooses to call attention to or leave in the background.  The theme is the subject the painter chooses to portray and how to frame it: abstract, realism or romanticism. Plot is all of it put together: the layering of paint, the placement of the subject matter, the combination of colors chosen.

Dunnett paints her words in so many layers that I have read her books multiple times, but each reading find some new delightful something that I missed before or didn’t fully understand.  She builds a world I want to live in and do live in during the hours I spend reading her work.

Someday I hope to write a novel good enough to be read many times, each time as if you were seeing it for the first.  Until then, I hope people enjoy the world I did build, and look forward to my next Street Story with Jo Sullivan.

Here’s someone reading from one of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicle books, Pawn in Frankincense.  It may give you an idea of why I like her so much.

Fighting Fire Without Fire

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Every year when Mother’s Day rolls around, I face it with mixed feelings.  It brings back memories of a little boy cupping my cheek in his hand lovingly, and another little boy crying in my arms when the children at school laughed at him.  But it also brings back memories of loss, and makes me question choices that I made which impacted those two wonderful children and the men they would become.

At the risk of embarrassing my sons who I lost and then found again, I’ve decided to post a link to an essay I wrote about our history together.  I hope they’ll forgive me and maybe even be able to understand me a little better after reading it.

Click here to read the whole story.

“I’ve decided the boys would be better off with me.” I heard my ex-husband’s words, but could not quite comprehend. “I’m not bringing them back.”

That’s all I remember of the phone conversation with my now ex-husband, that and the animal-like sound that rose from a dark hole inside me when I finally hung up. The pain laid me out prostrate on the floor. I wanted to die.

This wailing remained constant in my ears from August of 1986 until January 1988, audible to no one but myself and my God. Even now I sometimes hear it in my dreams. A wild woman raged inside me, a gut-level, primitive instinct that wanted to tear its way through the jungle: a maniacal mother armed with an AK47 blazing bullets as she destroyed everything in her path.

But I did not want my children to come to me over the torn and bloody remnants of my rage.

via Fighting Fire Without Fire.