Sweet mystery of life. Or rather, sweet mystery. Not the whodunnit type, mind you. The kind where you, the reader, actually have to participate in the story experience.

13. Not every conversation has to be clear to the reader. Some speeches and conversation toward the end of the Cormac McCarthy book* reminded me of this. Just about every page of a Dunnett book has conversations that the author understands but the reader doesn’t.

I’ve done a little too much of making sure every main character knows what’s going on with the other and that by characters telling you their own issues.

Chalk it up to inexperience. What I describe above are some of the issues, er, problems, I had with the manuscript for  A Summer Longer. Too often, it was as if I was trying to keep everybody up-to-speed with everyone else—characters and readers alike. That’s not authentic. Apparently, I was under the mistaken notion that I was a tour guide. “And we’re walking and we’re moving…”

When I read a good mystery (and it applies to other stories and life as well) I imagine I’m spinning plates. When I come to a place in a book where a question remains unanswered, I have to keep the possibilities spinning in my head like plates on a stick. That means I, as the reader, am engaging in the story. And that’s a good thing.

*No Country for Old Men