William Dietrich, author of the Barbary Pirates

Napoleon’s Career Advice

by bdietrich on July 29, 2013

Few have risen as high and fallen as hard as Napoleon Bonaparte, who could have written a good book of cutthroat career advice. I’ve been trying to summarize his philosophy, good and bad, for a class I’m planning to teach.

Here’s what he might tell a business school.

By the way, this is Napoleon’s take, not mine. He was emperor by 35 and dead at 51. I never get beyond the “good employee” phase.

Invent yourself. Napoleon was a nobody from the island of Corsica who made himself the most famous Frenchman of all time. Every success prompted him to raise his goals.
Know what you want. He wanted power and fame, and got them.
Work for yourself. Napoleon was an able subordinate, rising from captain to brigadier general in a year. But once he got control of the rag-tag French army fighting in Italy, he never looked back. He always wanted to be in charge, taking all the risk and getting all the credit. Even as head of state, he usually led his armies in the field.
It’s who you know. Robespierre of Reign of Terror fame helped Bonaparte get early assignments, and his willingness to marry the castoff mistress of a Paris politico (Josephine) […]

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Writing Advice From The Thriller Pros

by bdietrich on July 15, 2013

This year’s annual gathering of thriller writers in New York, called Thrillerfest, seemed to begin with an exclamation mark as the Manhattan skyline came into view on the taxi ride from JFK: the new 1,776-foot Freedom Tower, or One World Trade Center, that has replaced the hole left by the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers. It’s as striking from a distance as close up.

There were plenty of additional exclamation marks voiced by the presenters at Thrillerfest, as friendly a group of Type-A overachieving bestsellers as you’re likely to find. Lots of advice for the hundreds in attendance, including from the “history-mystery” panel I served on, headed by the ever-indefatigable and encouraging Steve Berry, another bestseller.

In an absolutely tumultuous book industry upended by Internet sales, e-books, self-publishing, and social media, it was reassuring how consistent the secret of success was - according to speaker after speaker.

It’s the book, stupid.

Or, as medical thriller Michael Palmer put it, “The only thing that helps books sell is to write another book.”

What ultimately sells books are readers recommending to other readers, the good ol’ word of mouth. I know because I bought a new David Morrell novel there after a friend insisted I read […]

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The Heroic Wounded

Happy Fourth of July!

International turmoil in Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere is a reminder of how lucky Americans are to have a stable, elected government. No one appreciates freedom more than writers.

As a young journalist I tested the limits a bit with a column questioning automatic recitation of the Flag Salute (patriotism that is mindless is not patriotic at all, I argued) and readers exercised their freedom of speech by giving me a piece of their mind, in a standing-room-only public meeting called to air the issue. One of the biggest audiences I’ve ever had, and no one was hurt. I got to be provocative, and they got to challenge me on it. Is this a great country, or what?

Heroes died and were wounded giving us such freedom (I just read Rick Atkinson’s excellent WW II history, ‘The Guns At Last Light’) and a couple recent incidents made me think about the freedom we give our thriller and fictional heroes. Including freedom from mortality.

A reader expressed impatience with the initial shallowness of my heroine Rominy in my thriller “Blood of the Reich,” fearing I’d created a female ninny of the worst cliched kind. The early chapters are indeed provocative in showing […]

The Barbed Crown

Ethan, Astiza, and son Harry are back on May 7, in The Barbed Crown. That’s the publication date of my latest novel, by HarperCollins.

Astiza? Wasn’t she carried off in a hurricane in The Emerald Storm? Well, yes, but thanks to a bit of ingenuity, dubiously claimed by her husband…

She’s smart, beautiful, and popular with readers. You bet she’s coming back.

“I was smuggled to France on a moonless flood tide,” Ethan begins, “soaked from rain and spattered with the blood of a sailor beheaded by a cannonball.”

Our hero has become an English spy, bent on revenge against Napoleon, and in the company of a beautiful comtesse named Catherine Marceau. But a number of surprises await him onshore, not the least of which is his wife. And then things get really tangled.

The Barbed Crown is the sixth in the series of Ethan Gage adventures, taking place in 1804 and 1805. Historical events include Napoleon’s coronation as emperor, his attempt to invade England, and the decisive naval battle of Trafalgar in which Britain was triumphant but Admiral Nelson was killed.

Once more, Ethan is in the middle of it all.

For those new to the series, it begins with Napoleon’s Pyramids set during Bonaparte’s […]

Terrorism and Real Risk

Please be afraid.

Thriller, horror, and mystery writers depend on it. We also depend on you being afraid of the wrong things, because the risk of what we obsess about is vanishingly small compared to what we’ll probably die of.

This topic came to mind during the non-stop, frenetic news coverage and citywide shutdown of Boston after the Marathon bombings. Perfectly understandable, and I was as glued to the drama as anyone.

But as tragic as the event was, it occurred in a world where about 6,850 Americans die every day, according to the Center for Disease Control. The vast majority, of course, succumb to sickness.

Globally, the casualty rate is 153,000 a day, or 56 million dead a year, which is within the ballpark of death estimates for all of World War II.

And soldiers were shooting more than bullets in that war. I once read Europe actually gained population during the war years.

I co-taught a university course on risk analysis and was fascinated by the numbers. Even taking into account the slaughter of 9/11, you’re statistically about twice as likely to be slain by a bee sting as a terrorist.

Makes for a bad thriller, though.

Between 1997 and 2001, and including 9/11, 3,974 Americans […]

Writing Commandments

These aren’t engraved on stone tablets. But I often give some version of this list when speaking to aspiring writers. Writing is challenging intellectually, and challenging psychologically. It takes discipline and persistence. So for what it’s worth…

Good writing is clear thinking. Can you summarize what you think?

Tell the truth. Be honest in your writing.

Be curious. Always ask, ‘Why’?

Be observant and precise. Books can succeed or fail on detail.

Don’t wait to be invited to write. Do it. Push your way in.

Tailor your story for your audience. Who is that? Visualize them.

Don’t preach. Readers want a story, not a sermon.

Teach us. Become a good researcher.

Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

10. Be concise. Short and simple is often better. When in doubt, cut it out.

11. Be a good employee of your publisher, not a butthead. Listen. Do what you promise.

12. Work hard. Everyone else is.

13. Define yourself and your genre.

14. Don’t expect overnight success. Develop your backlist and career.

15. Be you, not a half-baked imitation of another author.

16. Roll with it. You’re not in control, life isn’t fair, publishing is in tumult, shit happens, good happens, fate is the hunter, what goes around comes around, life is what happens when you’re making other plans.

17. Kicked in […]

Reality at the edge of the world

I live on the edge of the world.

My Pacific Northwest house faces the Salish Sea, an inland body of salt water that includes the San Juan Islands. It perches like a tree house on a steep hill, looking into the branches of conifers a hundred feet high or higher, with orange madrona trees woven through like thread.

The evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson would say my perch mimics that of my African prehistoric ancestors. We evolved in a savannah landscape where we looked for grassland predators and prey from the relative safety of clumps of trees. An urban apartment overlooking a park gives much the same sensation.

While far from utopian, my abode is fairly quiet, pretty, and bourgeois-comfortable. Until reality pokes in.

Which it does all the time. Having covered the Exxon Valdez oil spill as a journalist, I watch from my bedroom office window as a parade of oil tankers migrate in and out of the nearby refinery port here like balloons that might pop on the wrong rock. At least now they have tug escort and double hulls.

And I live a short distance outside the city of Anacortes, a refinery and boat-building town of about sixteen thousand with dreams of […]

Thriller first lines

“The last camel collapsed at noon.” This first line, in Ken Follett’s classic The Key to Rebecca, made me want to read more. I try for the same in my own fiction: a sailor beheaded by a cannonball in the opening of the upcoming “The Barbed Crown.”

Here’s some openers I’ve collected from others, for a blog I also posted at Thillercentral.org.

“‘Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.” No wonder I loved E..B. White’s Charlotte’s Web when my teacher read it in the third grade. It’s a thriller!

“It was a pleasure to burn,” is how Ray Bradbury started Fahrenheit 451.

“The screams had finally ceased.” James Rollins, The Judas Strain.

“I am a coward,” begins the narrator of Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity.

Not every beginning has to be a zinger. While mystery writer Elmore Leonard advises never to start with the weather, legions of good bestsellers have done just that.

Grabbing the reader by the throat sure doesn’t hurt, though. Here’s Leonard in Freaky Deaky: “Chris Mankowski’s last day on the job, two in the afternoon, two hours to go, he got a call to dispose of a bomb.”

Or Dean Koontz, Dragon […]

The Writer’s Odds

Thriller author James Patterson made $94 million in 2012, according to Forbes. He’s one of 145,900 American “writers and authors” counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a quarter of them part-time, two-thirds of them self-employed, and with median earnings of $55,420. (“Median” means half earned more than that, and half less, I believe.)

I looked this up for a couple talks I’m giving this week. People are often interested in a writer’s odds of success.

Pollsters report more than 80 percent of Americans would like to be author, and in 2011 statisticians counted 329,259 books published in the United States, and 2.2 million books published in the world. Google estimates 130 million books have been published in human history.

With electronic self-publishing, it’s become easier than ever to be “an author.” And harder than ever to get attention to your work.

Most successful authors have some combination of talent, persistence, and luck. The persistence stories are always encouraging. And daunting.

Mystery writer Janet Evanovich pulled in $33 million last year, but wrote for ten years before getting published. She labored first in the romance field before hitting it big with bounty hunter Stephanie Plum.

Stephen King’s first big novel, Carrie, was rejected 30 times. He […]

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author of Barbary Pirates