Your novel  has a lot going for it: a wonderfully rendered rich tapestry of a setting most readers will find fascinating, a dysfunctional but loving family with conflicting aspirations at the center of which is a young man who keeps sacrificing his happiness to fulfill what he sees as his family responsibilities.

You have […]

Part of the problem is your approach to the story, which is heavily weighted in favor of narrative summary. Very often you summarize character attributes, scenes, dialogue, events, all sorts of developments. Narrative summary has its place and makes a fine showcase for that wonderful voice of yours, but readers need to hear characters speak, […]

As I said, a good memoir reads like fiction, with the author in the role of the protagonist. Not that it should be a series of dramatic scenes with the plot of the author’s life, but the events need to be recounted dramatically, and the author—the hero—is necessarily an invention, a character. This […]

Your battles are vividly described with details that put the reader on the scene. But these are cartoon battles, never credible because the level of violence dealt to Cramer is often greater than any human could survive. A middle-aged man who gets thrown with enormous force into wall after wall, or slammed against a marble […]

Although I thoroughly enjoyed your novel, I’m going to begin by setting you straight about its weaknesses, because so much of what I have to say is in the context of today’s ruthless and often dismal marketplace for debut fiction. 

That marketplace does exist. Publishers have to bring out first novels or they’ll never […]

A word about explaining emotions to the reader. Showing them is so much better. People love to pick up on the codes from the signals we all put out—we spend many of our waking hours doing it—and in literature it’s one of your strongest forms of reader participation. So the less you explain things to […]