I’ve been asked to name an author who influenced me. This is such a hard question because I read so much and have so many “favorite” authors!

I have to say that Tony Hillerman would be one of them, though. I’ve read and loved all of his books, especially the Navajo Tribal Police series. His depictions of the different Native American cultures is always spot-on and he can make you feel as if you’re really out there in the American Southwest.

I can never manage to write a mystery, though I love reading them. I tend to skimp on red herrings and forget about wrapping up the clues properly. Hillerman, however, was a master of the subplot and a genius at distributing clues along the way to the ending. I never quite managed to figure out “whodunnit” before he revealed the culprit.

And I loved the way he depicted the Native Americans in his stories: just ordinary folks living their lives as best they could, trying to be the best human they could be–like all of us. They’re not stereotypical “Injuns,” but normal people you feel you could sit down and share a cup of coffee or a glass of beer with. Hillerman didn’t gloss over the problems of life on “the rez,” but he didn’t dwell them either. After all, we have plenty of poverty-stricken or drug-addicted whites barely hanging on or living on the streets. We’re all just human, after all.

I hope I learned a few things from Tony Hillerman: how to make your characters real people, how to sprinkle clues along the plot line of your tale, and how to make the setting just another character. I know one thing: I still enjoy rereading my battered paperback copies of his stories.

Thursday is the Pre-Converence Conference. Today we learned The Anatomy of Engaging Stories (Bill O’Hanlon)

 

Elements of an Engaging Story:

• Characters – must engage the reader; the reader must identify with the character in some way. Create a mental image of the character with names, appearance, gestures, dialogue, and what other characters say or think.
• Specific sensory details about people, places or actions – use the five senses!
• Action (Plot: beginnings, middles and ends) – the character must be frustrated or threatened or face conflict somehow, must feel called to act or thwarted in his action.
• Scene setting – props and sets; think more Little Theater than Hollywood – go for minimal props and setting (place/time/social)
• Dialogue – bring the reader into the moment
• Vague enough to allow for imagination (let the reader “hallucinate” much of the description)
• Repetition of sounds/theme/elements
• Revisiting the beginning at the end (story arc)

Elmore Leonard used the term “hoppetedoodle” (HOP-tee-doo-dle) to mean too much descriptive detail in a story.

We also had a great lecture about “The Language of Liars,” which is going to be quite useful to me with Chance! Then, it was Tony Hillerman’s 90th birthday party (with cake!), and a chance to see the new educational portal UNM is working on, to take Tony’s legacy to schools and educate young writers.