use of surprise in fiction

Thank you, thank you to those readers whose comment included a life lesson I can draw from our experience with Cassie! I have contacted each of the seven winners to offer his/her choice of my available books, OR, also available, A Matter of Mercy, coming out on August 6, about which I will proceed to […]

Of course, it’s not only horses; it’s most animals that respond to human attention, nurture, and love on what is very much a two-way street. I wrote about my beautiful therapy Labrador retriever, Hannah, in Where The Trail Grows Faint, a memoir of her antics while she and I worked in a nursing home at […]

I love control. If everyone—including my dog—would only do what I tell them, it would put the fun back in dysfunctional and (my) life would go so much more smoothly. Let’s include objects too, so my computer would stop being a butthead. Ditto my iphone 5s, and Siri, who clearly has a learning problem. Oh, it […]

An unexpected ludicrous moment, a twist into tragedy, a flash of tenderness: surprise by a character is a crucial element of a riveting story. Speaking yesterday at the College of Mount Saint Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio, Marcus Zusak discussed this as well as describing how he wrote multiple drafts of The Book Thief, trying out different narrators as he worked to understand […]