The Write Stuff

Thriller writers make terrible patients. I’m proof of that. Since I’m constantly looking for ways to kill or main my characters, I do a lot of research into weird diseases, poisons and the like. As a result, there is hardly a symptom that I haven’t experienced, at least psychosomatically. I am what you might call a paranoid hypochondriac. If I don’t develop a disease on my own, I’m sure someone plans to give it to me. When I don’t feel well, I don’t think stomach flu. It has to be Ebola or rabies. I’ve spent a lot of time in bed, an easy chair and you know where else, all of which are conducive to catching up on one’s reading. That is a mixed blessing, since one of the books I read was All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. A superb book, 10 years in the making, which immediately made me want to give up writing, because I’m not sure I belong on the same planet with talent like that. It didn’t help that as soon as I got the book, Doerr won the Pulitzer Prize, an ...

This is a column about generations. As in missing them, or being caught between them. It is, of course, is a situation not unique to my writing life. For example, I was too young for Grace Kelly, and now I’m too old for Amy Adams. Don’t think that doesn’t bug me every day. On a more rational note, I was born in the waning days of World War II and thus am not part of “The Greatest Generation”, which beat the Nazis. World War II is considered a just war, and provided a clarity of purpose that many subsequent conflicts have, to say the least, lacked. In WWII, we were attacked, everyone enlisted and went to fight enemies so cartoonishly evil that seven decades years later they can still be trotted out in books and films to evoke a visceral reaction. Now, someone does something bad to us, and by the time a soldier finishes basic training, he or she is sent to fight someone else (usually by some politician who never got closer to a uniform than watching a war movie about the Naz...