It can be impossible to ever know the full truth about a crime. Eyewitnesses don’t have perfect recall, and fingerprints and DNA evidence aren’t the magical solutions that shows like CSI would have you believe.
But how far would you go, and how much would you risk, to seek out justice and prevent future victims from being murdered—without locking up the wrong person?
That tension is at the heart of the new novel by Hilary Davidson, ONE SMALL SACRIFICE, told from alternating points of view: the detective and the suspect.
Hilary got started as a journalist and eventually published 18 travel books.
She’s won a pile of fiction awards–the Derringer, Spinetingler, Crimespree and two Anthony’s–and this was one of the easiest and most interesting interviews I’ve done with an author.
If you have the Series of Tubes (which you do because you’re reading this), and you enjoy these things I like to call “books,” go check out Linda Rodriguez.
As a huge geek for storytelling structure, I love the fact that she wrote PLOTTING THE CHARACTER-DRIVEN NOVEL after teaching courses all about the topic.
This book is a public service, since novelists are typically thrown into the deep end of the literary pool, filled with tiger sharks and clones of Nicholas Sparks, and told to figure it out. Which happens about as often as you think.
Her first novel, EVERY LAST SECRET, was a mystery that won the Malice Domestic Competition and was published by St. Martin’s Press, but she’s also published award-winning books on poetry and is now working on something with a historical twist.
Once you’ve read his books, and fully appreciate his literary genius, you can watch this low-definition video with horrible audio that still rocks because it has KURT FREAKING VONNEGUT.
I would have paid monies to have him as my professor. Now that I think about it, I did pay monies to have professors. Hmm. Though my journalism profs were top-notch. Props to you all.
Now, it’s not so complicated, is it?
Hero in a hole.
Boy meets girl.
Girl with a problem.
Albert Einstein — and thousands of other people far, far smarter than you or I put together, even on our good days when our fingers spark magic and the coffee we drink would do better on an IQ test than Michele Bachmann — spent many years trying to come up with a unified theory of everything.
See, the whole E=MC2 was only part of the answer. That’s the equation for energy. He wanted to do an equation that also explained gravity and whatnot. IT IS COMPLICATED. We will not get into it.
Albert Einstein was a muffin of stud with epic hair. I salute him. Image via Wikipedia
Oh, people get all mystical and complicated, and come up with their own jargon and rules. Yet these self-appointed writing gurus all disagree, and they specialize so much that they know more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing.
You’ve got screenwriters and reporters, poets and novelists, playwrights (who spell their name wrong) and songwriters (spelling it right, good job), copywriters and non-fiction authors — all with their own rules and jargon, their own writing conferences and groups that hand out awards.
You’ve got endless shelves of books about the craft of writing, each expert giving their own special equations to maybe solve a piece of of the puzzle.
Hear me now and believe me later in the week: We could unify this sucker, and we could do it without a lick of calculus or a single imaginary number. (Having -1 bottles of rieslings does nothing for me.)
So let’s do it. I have evil ideas, and have scribbled on the blackboard while cackling with glee.
But I’d like to hear what my brilliant writer friends say. How would you smash the walls that separate the different houses of writers?
The Red Pen of Doom 