A conversation with two writers
I'm Kim Alexander and this is Fiction Nation.
Last week I sat down with four writers, and I intended to let them all talk and make one show out of it. But once we got started, I realized that the conversation, even though it started in the same place, branched off in four utterly different directions. Everyone I spoke with had a radically different take on what it meant to be a writer, how to do it, and what they wanted to talk about. Last week, Joni Cole talked a lot about the value of feedback and how to use it and make it work for you. Heather Cabot talked about how blogging kept her connected to the world and how it's giving voices to those who never thought they could write.
This week, I'm delighted to have some friends back to continue the conversation.
First I talked to N.M. Kelby, who I discovered through Whale Season, a south Florida crime novel, which means it has things like poker-playing Jesus, a barking bartender (who happens to be the mayor), and the Blind Brothers Blues Band, who are neither blind nor brothers. Through the mayhem — and there was a lot of mayhem — her characters sat up, looked around, and simply lived. They were there, whole and alive and breathing, not set up to be punchlines, and N.M. — Nicole's — grace and beauty as a storyteller made an oddly effective counterpoint to the tropical weirdness you're going to find, and probably even expect, in books set in Florida. I was only more impressed with Murder at the Bad Girl's Bar and Grill which we talked about recently. Nicole has been on a book tour for about 200 years now and has some really interesting things to say about the state of the independent book store, the architecture of the story, and how to write a dog. (That is to say, how to make a dog one of your characters instead of a prop, not how to write a book which is a dog.)
And not only does she write, she's got Bad Girl Barbeque sauce...spicy hot with a lingering hit of citrus underneath. Two sticky thumbs up!
J.T. Ellison is a big time crime and mystery novelist, and her series about detective Kendall Taylor is about to have its next installment — the title of which is "14" — published in a few months. Since her fiction is littered with corpses, we talked about writing about the dead. What is the obligation that a writer has to his or her victims? These people weren't real to begin with, and now they're not only fictional but deceased, twice removed from the real world. Are they important? If you're writing a murder mystery, you bet they are. J.T. has given them quite a lot of thought, and the care she takes with all her characters, even the ones that don't make it onto the page, make her bad guys particularly twisted and creepy, and her heroes and heroines an even more important moral center and force. Reading her work, you care about the victims because her detectives care about them, and we believe it because J.T. creates people, not just White Female Victim number 5. She goes all the way back so we want to keep reading forward.
Hear my interviews with JT Ellison and N.M. Kelby on Fiction Nation, on Take Five, XM 155 on Wednesday, August 6th at 7:00am, on Thursday, August 7th at midnight, on Friday August 8th at 11:00pm, on Saturday August 9th at 6pm, on Sunday August 10th at 10:00am and 8:00pm, and on Monday August 11th at 12:00 midnight. You can also hear Fiction Nation on Sonic Theater, XM 163 on Thursday August 7th at 3:00 pm in its half-hour format. All times EDT.
Buy N.M. Kelby's Whale Season from Amazon.com
Buy N.M. Kelby's Murder at the Bad Girl's Bar & Grill from Amazon.com
Buy J.T. Ellison's All the Pretty Girls from Amazon.com
Buy J.T. Ellison's 14 from Amazon.com
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