Motivational Monday -- How to Write a Red Herring [Link]

By Tana French as told to Lila Shapiro

Tana French is an author of murder mysteries who is less concerned with whodunit than with the inner lives of her detectives. In her first book, In the Woods, which came out in 2007, she let what actually happened to a pair of vanished children remain a mystery because she didn’t think her detective was equipped to face the truth. French, a Dubliner who originally trained as a stage actor, has published six more books since, each one further cementing her reputation as a writer of “cultic devotion,” as The New Yorker put it.

The announcement of her latest, this spring, was met with feverish anticipation and a scramble for advance copies — the novelist Jeff VanderMeer pleaded on Twitter: “Who do I have to offer bird seed and bark butter to … to get an advance copy of the new Tana French?!” She’s famously good at a particularly eerie brand of red herring — that alluring detail that seems like the key to solving the crime, only to prove a clever bit of misdirection. In The Witch Elm, out this month, she breaks from her own convention by writing from the perspective not of a detective but of the victim of a crime. Still, the same rules apply: French’s red herrings are not just shiny lures but windows into her protagonists’ deepest fears and flaws. Here, she walks us through how she lays the tracks, starting with the red-herring masters she admires.

Read the full article: https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/tana-french-on-how-to-write-a-red-herring.html

[Link] Who Gave You the Right to Tell That Story?

Ten authors on the most divisive question in fiction, and the times they wrote outside their own identities.

By Lila Shapiro

A few years ago, a writer named Ashima Saigal from Grand Rapids, Michigan, witnessed an incident on a bus in which a group of black kids were mistreated by the police. She was disturbed, and soon after, she wrote about it. Later, reading over what she’d written, she realized the story wasn’t working. She’d tried to write from one of the kid’s perspectives, but Saigal, who is Indian-American, wasn’t sure that she had the skill or knowledge to write from the point of view of a black child. She decided to sign up for an online creative writing course called “Writing the Other.”

The course was founded by the speculative-fiction writers Nisi Shawl, who is black, and Cynthia Ward, who is white, nearly twenty years ago. They’d met a decade or so earlier, at a fantasy and science-fiction workshop, and were inspired to design their own writing class after a conversation with another classmate, a white friend who’d declared that she’d never write a character who didn’t share her background or identity because she’d be sure to get it wrong. “My immediate thought was, ‘well that’s taking the easy way out!’” recalled Shawl. While imagining the lives of people who are different from you is virtually a prerequisite of most successful fiction writing, the consequences of doing it poorly have grown more serious since the pre-Twitter, pre-woke ’90s, as the conversation about who gets to tell whose stories has moved from the fringes of publishing into the mainstream. J.K. Rowling, Lionel Shriver, and Kathryn Stockett have all caught heat for botching the job. In the young-adult fiction world, a number of books have been pulled in advance of their releases for clichéd and problematic portrayals of minorities. The conversation is often depicted in the media as a binary: On one side are those who argue that only writers from marginalized backgrounds should tell stories about people who share their cultural histories — a course correction for an industry that is overwhelmingly white — while on the other are those who say this wish amounts to censorship.

Read the full article: https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/who-gave-you-the-right-to-tell-that-story.html