writing | Debra R. Borys

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.

The article below specifically refers to reading and how people claim the internet and television has caused an illiterate society which no longer reads. I think the subject goes far beyond that.

I’m as guilty as the next person of waxing nostalgic about “the good old days.” I still think the love children of my youth were headed in the right direction with their Make Love, Not War signs. I love reading historical novels and often wish there were time machines so I could visit other times and places.

But when I really stop to think about it, there were no good old days. Do we really want to go back to the fifties, often held up as idyllic, forgetting the McCarthyism and nuclear paranoia? The twenties may have had happy flappers but it also had prohibition, and no equal rights for women or blacks. Any decade you point to, you can find both good and bad things we left behind.

Even when we humans have the right idea (wouldn’t the world really be a better place if we had all evolved into flower children?) tons of wrong ideas happen at the same time. Can you name a time in the past when everything was better off than we are today? If you can, does everyone else feel the same way about it?

Remember the good old days when everyone read really good books, like, maybe in the post-war years when everyone appreciated a good use of the semi-colon? Everyone’s favorite book was by Faulkner or Woolf or Roth. We were a civilized civilization. This was before the Internet and cable television, and so people had these, like, wholly different desires and attention spans. They just craved, craved, craved the erudition and cultivation of our literary kings and queens…..read more

via The Next Time Someone Says the Internet Killed Reading Books, Show Them This Chart – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic.