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| C. Kevin Thompson |
This iconic phrase comes from a movie wherein three people in
a Jeep are about to be eaten alive. Can you picture the scene? Can you see the
dinosaur’s head in the side mirror, with the little message on the bottom:
OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR”?
Do you ever feel like that sometimes as a writer? If you don’t
go faster, the world of writing and consumerism will eat you alive? While
you’re writing your second or third book for the year, another author just
published his or her eighth?
In a world with things like binge watching, fast passes, and
freaky-fast food deliveries, it seems everything has to happen yesterday.
Procrastinate a day, and you’re a week behind. So, we combat those assaults
with personal and group-oriented binge-writing events. Pay good money for
formulas on how to write a novel in thirty days. Some authors even go so far as
to have someone else write the novel for them (with their input, of course).
That’s how some famous authors can publish 13-14 novels a year.
But I have a question? If you could write a great novel or a
good novel, which one would you choose? Do you like wearing mass-produced
shoes, or hand-crafted ones? Would you rather eat frozen, store-bought pizza or
freshly hand-made pizza from a local pizzeria? Do you like adorning your house
with hand-made wooden furniture, or the kind made out of particle board with
the plastic veneer? I think you see where I’m going with this.
Little in this life worth having and cherishing was made
quickly. That’s not to say a good novel cannot be written in a mere few weeks. A Christmas Carol was written in about
six weeks. And that’s not to say good writing cannot come from the computer of
a person who types 40,000 words in a cloistered weekend. But those works are
the exception, not the rule.
In most cases, however, good writing comes from careful word
choices. Meticulous research. Edit upon edit. But it also comes from a story
not quite told that way before. A tale that is a little different from the rest
in its telling. Not a formula wherein the names and places are interchangeable,
and the story is just like the previous one. Not a cookie-cutter pattern of
rising action, climax, and happily ever-after. Good writing stretches the mind
of a reader. It pokes them when they expect a slap. It needles them when they
thought you were about to unload whodunit. It screams at them when they
puckered up for a kiss.
If you can do all of that and more and still accomplish 40,000
words in a weekend, then you have my applause. But for most people, it’s not
about the number of words thrown at the pages, it’s about the words placed on
the pages themselves. It’s about how they are arranged. How they emote. How
they live.
In a world drowning in books, it’s usually the dead ones that
rise to the top. Those that have weight and merit and depth and life are the
ones that withstand the tides of time, surviving even the harshest of droughts,
to become the water upon which thirsty souls may find respite. If you don’t
believe me, get a group of people together and see if they can name ten New
York Times Bestsellers from 1990-2000 that are still recommended reading today
and will probably be on recommendation lists for decades to come…like the works
of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, or Earnest Hemingway are recommended. (Good
luck.)
Do you see my point? “Faster” isn’t always better. Neither is
“Popular.” For faster and popular often look like a flare in the night sky.
Easily seen and easily forgotten.
So, write well, my friend, so that your writing may become a
well readers will want to come back to time and time again.
The
Blake Meyer Thriller Series, Book 3
A
Perverse Tale. A Precarious Truth. A Personal Tribulation.
Supervisory
Special Agent Blake Meyer is at an impasse. Bound and beaten in a dilapidated
warehouse halfway around the world, Blake finds himself listening to an
unbelievable story. Right and wrong warp into a despicable clash of ideologies.
Life quickly becomes neither black nor white. Nor is it red, white, and blue
any longer.
Every
second brings the contagion's release closer, promising to drag the United
States into the Dark Ages. Tens of millions could be dead within months.
Every
moment adds miles and hours to the expanding gulf between him and his family.
What is he to believe? Who is he to trust?
C. KEVIN
THOMPSON is a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a kid at heart.
Often referred to as “crazy” by his grandchildren, it’s only because he is.
He’s a writer. Need he say more?
The first three books of his Blake Meyer Thriller series are
out! Book 1, 30 Days Hath Revenge, Book
2, Triple Time, and Book 3, The Tide of Times, are now available! Book
4, When the Clock Strikes Fourteen,
is coming soon! Also, the second edition
of his award-winning debut novel, The Serpent’s
Grasp, is now available!
Kevin is a huge fan of the TV series 24, The Blacklist, Blue Bloods, and Criminal Minds, loves anything to do with Star Trek, and is a Sherlock Holmes fanatic, too. It’s quite
elementary, actually.
