The earlier book, The Beginners Guide to Winning an Election, about a no-holds-barred high school political campaign, began to strike me as having more plot and characterization potential than I could have foreseen three years ago. The ability of a cunning virus to devastate cities and their economies is matched by its power to create terror, depression, and anxiety about the unknown. Meanwhile, America’s age-old struggles over racial justice, income equality, women’s rights, and affordable education, to name a few, rage on. The will to find legislative compromises has given way to stalemates, distrust, and deviousness.  In addition, politics has taken on the aura and importance of religion.

My new novel, Cliffhanger, probes deeper into two, starkly different candidates in an Indiana high school election.  The year is 2030. The idealism and candor of novice politician Brit is no match for her experienced, charismatic opponent, Matthew, or his shoot-from-the-hip campaign manager, Nathan.  
 
There are good reasons never to bet against Matthew in any election, though few in the thousand-strong student body are aware of his and Nathan’s secrets for winning.
 
A revered and eccentric history teacher at the school has another take on the election. Without saying it out loud,  for fear of ridicule, Mr. Wilson believes  one of the two candidates  could be  pivotal in helping save civilization in the 21st Century.  A 16th-century mystic and prophet, Nostradamus, predicted that  in the year 2048 an elected government would deliberately create enough paranoia and anxiety  to chip away at everyone’s sanity.  
 
Years after  their high school graduation, Matthew and Brit separately come  to the same conclusion.  As they watch their school and home town collapse in unexpected ways, they form a team for protection.  A romance blossoms,  only to  erode from their clashing wills, but it revives when the two have to face a common enemy:  An annoying kid from high school has become a leader of a new political order with chilling intentions. 

​In the sequel, Apostles In Black (to be published fall 2021), lessons first learned in high school politics become a map to Mathew’s and Brit’s survival.
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Try to have one of your characters do or say something in the course of the narrative that’s totally original…something that’s never been done in another movie or film.  This is not easy to achieve, but if you have an imagination, have some fun with it.  You’ll go down a lot of dead ends, but if you’re lucky, you’ll end up on a mountain peak.  Remember that the event has to be plausible, but originality is usually memorable.  No matter how many crime stories we read, for example, the great ones take our thoughts and emotions to unexplored places.  It’s what readers talk about in reviews and blogs.

Most writers are more comfortable delineating one sex (or gender) over another, which often dictates their main characters and the genre a writer chooses.   You can still be a male and write fantasy romances, or a female skilled at describing war scenes, but whatever your strength, play to it. 

​Very few writers do everything well.  The best write about what they know, and their characters evoke passion, empathy or curiosity in a reader.   

It’s great to surprise a reader with the unexpected, helping give a twist to the plot and the character, but whatever transpires, it must have credibility.   Unless she’s a prodigy, a twelve year old girl is not going to solve the murder of her parents that happened ten years earlier.  A surgeon who graduated from Harvard is not likely to leave a sponge behind in his patient’s abdomen.  If you go for low probability events, or extreme twists, you have to back them up with plausible explanations.  The “willing suspension of disbelief” only goes so far.  Once a reader becomes skeptical that the writer doesn’t know what he or she is talking about, it’s tough to win them back.  

Great characters, to enhance their arc, should have a fourth or fifth gear that seems to come out of nowhere.  For example, villains can turn into heroes with an act of kindness that we would never have anticipated, yet when we read the novel closely, we realize that the seed of kindness was planted by the writer from the beginning.  Similarly, characters we start off admiring suddenly disappoint us when they hurt someone they love.  If they don’t realize what they’ve done, figuring out the “why” makes them even more interesting.  Well-conceived characters can help with plot troubles, too, if the writer wakes one morning and isn’t sure where his or her  story is going (happens to most of us).  Instead of robbing a bank, for example, your destitute character decides to give away his last fifty dollars to a stranger.  The wife who has been cheated on, instead of taking revenge on her husband, is filled with insights about her father.  A deeply-felt, richly-imagined character is your writing buddy, your co-conspirator, and their importance to the final product can’t be overstated.      

I try to challenge myself as a novelist by communicating what I understand the world to be.  I like reading other writers who storytell a different vision than mine, as their narrative is as unique to them as mine is to me.  Everything is about a point of view, realized through  three-dimensional characters embedded, hopefully, in a compelling and memorable plot.  

In Once Upon a Lie, a story of the Eighties, my two principal characters seem as different as the Americas they live in—one in a white and privileged enclave in Los Angeles, the other a Texas town with walls to climb if you’re poor and black and have the ambition and talent to escape.  Their paths cross and a relationship as complex as their differences begins to bloom.   Jaleel and Alexandra (“Alex”) deal with societal problem as well as the personal ones they make for themselves. I hope readers of the novel can relate to their struggles and impulsive judgments, even when we react by thinking,  “no, please don’t do that!”  Their lives twist and turn like ours, and realistically not everything ends up tied in ribbons.  But life lessons are real.  Jaleel and Alex even have their own Facebook pages, their interweaving stories continuing in the present, picking up where the book leaves off.