A writer of commercial fiction knows his craft

As author talks go, Jeffery Deaver's speech last night at Barton College was exceptional. He unapologetically described himself as a writer of commercial fiction with no pretense of literary greatness. Yet, he is one of America's most prolific writers with 36 books and many awards and medals in his list of accomplishments, and he offered cogent insight and advice about writing, whether literary or commercial.

Deaver writes thrillers, and he's darned good at it. I've read only one of his novels (so far), but it kept me up turning the pages and cringing at one of the vilest villains I've ever encountered in fiction. He makes no bones about how he writes: He spends eight months outlining the plot, which invariably includes a number of surprises and plot twists. To keep all this in order, he has to write an outline that extends to 150 or more pages. Having read one of his thrillers, I was not surprised that his technique involved so much planning.

I felt some affinity to Deaver. We are about the same age, and we were both journalism majors. After earning his undergraduate degree, his goal was to be hired by the New York Times, he told me. To improve his chances, he went to law school with no intention of ever practicing law. But he ended up as a Wall Street lawyer and began writing fiction. The discipline of law school and the logical thinking of legal practice has helped him in his fiction writing, he said. All of that organizing and outlining are legal skills.

Although he is not a Tolstoy or a Faulkner and will never win the Nobel Prize for literature, Deaver has a deep appreciation of the written word and is a great advocate for writers, readers and libraries. Like other best-selling authors of his genre, he is a commercial success at a level few "literary" authors can claim. He entertains his readers. He gives them reasons to read and reasons to turn the next page. He respects their intelligence and their level of knowledge. He works hard at his craft and has earned his success.

Talks like his at Barton College last night are nourishment and inspiration for those of us who love books and authors and cannot get enough of the written word.

Doris Betts, writer and teacher of writing

Doris Betts arrived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill a year before I did. She came as a lecturer, a fill-in who did not have the academic credentials usually required of faculty members. But she had a couple of well-received novels under her belt, and she impressed her academic colleagues enough to not only win a spot on the faculty but also to become faculty chair and one of the most beloved professors at the university. I arrived with a very limited preparation from a small high school and unrealistic ambitions, thinking I might someday make a living as a writer, and was gone four years later.

I never knew Doris Betts during my time in Chapel Hill, despite taking every creative writing course I could, and never read her books until years later. I was privileged to hear her speak on several occasions and had the opportunity to talk with her on a couple of occasions. I've said many times that she gave the best speech on writing I have ever heard. She was the featured writer at a Barton College Friends of Hackney Library event several years ago. The twice-yearly library dinners attract a variety of authors. Some are more gifted as writers than others. Some are more gifted as speakers. I knew Betts was an exceptional writer, but her speech about why writing is important and how one goes about writing was as good as anyone will ever hear. She said she didn't outline her novels with incidents and turning points. Instead, she said she liked to bring her characters together on a page and see what happens. Her character-driven novels seldom attracted the attention of the suspenseful, who-done-it books, but her novels achieved the ultimate goal of great fiction — an examination of the human condition through characters who are as real as your neighbors and relatives.

With her death Saturday, North Carolina has lost a great writer. More important, it has lost a great teacher of writing, a great friend of writers and a great advocate of good writing. Her novel "Souls Raised from the Dead" is one of the most beguiling books you'll ever read. Betts brings together her distinct characters in trying situations and lets them work through their problems. In doing so, she gives a little explanation of what life is all about.

Ernest Hemingway, 50 years later

Maybe this 50th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway's suicide would be a good time for me to get back to reading the author I most admired as a teenager and young adult. I had veered away from my youthful fascination with Hemingway, the hard-driving, macho writer who could turn the simplest of sentences into lines of beauty. Far more than his illustrious contemporaries, I thought Hemingway's work was the epitome of good writing, and I devoured all of his major novels and particularly loved his memoir of Paris, "A Moveable Feast."

Only after I received a hardback copy of the memoir to replace my dog-eared paperback, did I re-read the book once more and find it wanting. The story of Ernest and Hadley and baby "Bumby" and F. Puss the cat, which had seemed so alluring the first time around, now seemed a bit juvenile and self-indulgent.

Nevertheless, Hemingway's terse, simple prose style has had a greater influence than any other author's on my own writing style. Hemingway honed his writing as a newspaper reporter, and I pursued a newspaper career with that thought in mind. I frequently advised young writers with Hemingway's maxim: "Write one true sentence" and then another and another.

Hemingway biographer A.E. Hotchner reminded me this week of Hemingway's untimely death (at my current age) and brought back my admiration and wonder of this man who, in his day, was even bigger than his fictional characters. I faintly remember the television news announcement of Hemingway's death, initially reported as an accidental shooting. At the time, I had never read any of his work. A few years later, a television viewing of the movie "A Farewell to Arms" turned me to the novel, and I was hooked.

I've not read much of Hemingway's short stories, and a volume on my bookshelf of his short fiction is now luring me. It's an appropriate way to remember him on this 50th anniversary of his death.

A book my father left behind

Books by Zane Grey were on the bookshelf when I was growing up, sharing space with the hardcover Bible study books and a few other religious books and fiction. My father was a fan of Zane Grey; they were his books. I remember seeing the hardcover books in his hand as he dissolved himself in the novel and, being interrupted, turned down the corner of a page to keep his place.

When my nephew, who now lives in the house where I grew up, offered one of those books to me, I accepted the gift as a small treasure from my past. This one, "The Man of the Forest," had my father's name and "Dec. '42" on the inside cover. It was my mother's handwriting, marking a date 75 months before my birth.

I had never read a word of Zane Grey, but I knew the name and was familiar with the Old West genre. Some years ago, I read magazines with full-page ads offering collections of Zane Grey novels. The name always intrigued me, the two simple syllables and the unusual first name made more rare by its starting letter. But if I expected something magical from Zane Grey, the novel that my father had read, perhaps many times, did not deliver.

Biographies say Grey's fiction portrayed an idealized version of the Old West. "The Man of the Forest" certainly follows that path. I had expected a more engaging, suspenseful writing style from an author known for "adventure" stories. I found instead an author who tends to wander off on some explanation of a character's personality or habits. Instead of following the advice of writing teachers to "show me, don't tell me," Grey repeatedly tells the reader things that would better be "shown" through the plot. Born in 1872, Grey writes like a Victorian with long-winded sentences and attributions saddled with adverbs, such as "resolutely," "firmly," "engagingly," and so on — wasted words derided as "Tom Swiftlies," to indicate they belong in second-rate juvenile fiction.

"The Man of the Forest" might not be the best example of Grey's writing, but I'm not tempted to sample others. Although his fiction inspired dozens of movies and television shows and his name is synonymous with Old West fiction, I found that the novel my father had cherished and kept for more than 60 years put me to sleep after half a page. It took me weeks to get through it, and I stuck with it not out of interest in Zane Grey but in dedication to my father, in wanting to share something with him. Now I've read a book he owned. I suspect he read far better books. I know I have.