5/29/2023 0 Comments Come tumbling down book![]() My own method, it seems, is all about keeping myself off-kilter during the plotting process. If they know what’s coming, there’s a good chance they’ll put down your book and move on to something else. The best bit of that advice, and one I would take to heart as a novelist, is the idea of keeping your readers off kilter whenever possible. Sometimes I slap my forehead with the ruler, just so the lesson would sink in. Whenever I needed a reminder, I’d take out the ruler and read this sentence again. ![]() I liked this advice so much that I printed it out and taped it to the back of a wooden ruler that I kept in my desk drawer. ![]() Make it funny, make it dark, keep the body count in the low double digits, liberally coat with lotsa Philly ambiance, keep the surprises coming (never let the reader get too comfortable, keep ‘em off kilter whenever possible) and you might just have a winner on your hands. Did Gary have any advice? (He’d edited hundreds of them over the years.) He wrote back: During one e-mail exchange I admitted that I was working on a crime novel. Before I’d published my first novel, I wrote two nonfiction books for an editor named Gary Goldstein. ![]()
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