I have never thought much about the kind of book I write. Maybe I should.

It seems that so many of the legendary writers we read and revere studied, examined, and analyzed their novels, tore them apart scene by scene and often character by character, carefully putting them back together again in order to maintain a book that reflected their style and their identity.

I always thought I wrote mysteries.

And occasionally I wrote a thriller.

At least that was my intent.

I don’t think I studies, examined, or analyzed my craft or my novels nearly enough.

I was comfortable with the top layer.

I didn’t peel back enough bottom layers.

I didn’t dig deeply enough.

I had never thought much about it until I recently read a quote by Franz Kafka. His thoughts were tucked away in a letter he wrote to a school friend in 1904. He said: I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.

That’s pretty strong stuff.

But he’s right. It’s not necessary to write novels as dark as those penned by Kafka, but writers do need to write stories that deeply affect people, whether it’s with humor, love, mystery, the unknown, or grief.

It’s well known that Ernest Hemingway was a master of writing spare prose.  He believed you should start with the simplest things, boil them down, know what to leave out, and write on the tip of the iceberg. Leave the rest under water.

As Hemingway once told the Paris Review: I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of how they made their living, were born, educated, bore children, et cetera. That is done excellently and well by other writers. In writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened. This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard.

Hemingway knew what he was doing before he began. He said you should look at words as if you are seeing them for the first time, learn to write a simple declarative sentence, be able to tell a story in six words, write poetry into prose, distrust adjectives, write the truest sentence you know, and ditch the dictionary.

He knew who he was and the kind of novel he was destined to write each time he put a piece of paper into his typewrite.

So I began thinking: what kind of book do I write? Sherwood Anderson taught Hemingway that it was all right to write about common, ordinary people. I think my goal in a book is to take common, ordinary people and throw them in uncommon, unordinary circumstances, stir the pot and see who wins or loses.

For me, it’s all about the backstory. What is happening at the moment revolves strictly around the secrets that have shrouded my character’s past: the pain, the grief, the mistakes, the faults, his loves, his loves lost, his loves thrown away, his compulsions, his obsessions, and his memories, both good and bad. They all dictate what he does next: when he runs, when he fights, and why he tries to love and finds it so hard to love and winds up alone again. He hates being alone, but it is an old familiar feeling he well understands.

I would like to write more humor. I have always said that writing humor is exactly the same as writing horror. The build up is identical. You simply change the punch line.

I’ve tried. My punch line is always dark.

I would like to write about romance. But I can’t. Don’t understand it. Never have. I’ve been in love with the same woman for fifty years. I understand us. I haven’t figured out how to toss a little romance into my character’s miserable life. He meets girls. He wines and dines girls. He protects girls. He feels responsible for girls.  He will even kill for them. But when the novel ends, she’s not with him anymore. I hope that someday – when I have written down the final sentence – she has refused to leave. I would like that a lot.

So that’s the kind of novel I write.

What kind of novels come out of your creative mind?

Please click the book cover and read more about my books on Amazon. Maybe you could help me better understand the kind of book I write and what I should do to improve it.