MICHAEL R. FRENCH
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MICHAEL R. FRENCH - AUTHOR BLOG

TAKING NOTHING FOR GRANTED

2/9/2021

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​With a new White House beset by critical challenges, for now my attention is more riveted on the January 6, 2021 Capitol  attack and desecration.  With more FBI details emerging about the planning and execution of the insurrection, how deep the roots might reach, and how audacious the Trumpian strategy to possibly impose martial law, the words “shocking,” “unprecedented,” and “complicity” aren’t enough.  

​The realization that things could have been so much worse doesn’t mean that next time they won’t be worse. I’m not thinking of another attack on the Capitol.  For now I’m hopeful of a period of positivity and peace.   But there are far more things that can go wrong that we don’t know about, than things we do know.  History has never moved so fast, attention spans been so short, memories so inundated and selective.  Instead of divining  the next decade by  what you might feel and want, or what you think is just and right,
 study history.  Read about the cycles of governments, dynasties, and political parties. Nothing lasts forever, but your dreams will last longer if you don’t let your guard down.   When the future arrives, you want to be able to recognize it.

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"Cliff Hanger : Jump Before You Get Pushed" - Review by Dale Travous

1/28/2021

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Amazon
Michael R. French's novel Cliffhanger is a story set in the middle of the country in the near future and flows around an endearing young woman and her bid for the position of senior class president. The overall substance of the story is of consequences and the additive choices made to produce them,  of how choices and actions made at this moment can be amplifier through time to create consequences of greater scale in the future. I think that even if ones interests lie outside that of high school political campaigns, it is effortless to be quickly drawn into a very good story so very well told.

​​Mr. French's manner of story telling is unique and his writing masterful and precise. I feel I'm being mesmerized bass I read- if that can be possible - as if I'm watching a painting being made, brush strokes by brush stroke. His style is invisible, he is not standing between the reader and the story. And the story seems to materialize out of itself.
 
 Mr. French's #1 talent as a writer is his way of generating living, breathing characters. I became aware of his flair for this about half way through the book. I had been reflecting upon what I had just read when I realized that I have a high definition image of the main character, Brit, and that I have no recollection of reading lengthy passages that describe her in such fine detail. My dawning was this:  she was assembled by me from lots of little pieces, unrelated quirks, gestures, stray thoughts. Perhaps this is the same mechanism that we use when we come to "know" someone, that we form a composite from the bits and pieces of what we observe. Here we areaquainted with High School seniors in the process of sifting and solidifying the traits that will define their future roles. The readers are on a parallel course with that of the characters, we are aquiring an ever increasing detailed image of them as they gain deeper understanding of themselves. In one memorable scene, we become more familiar with Nathan through the eyes of Brit as she clandestinely surveys the contents of his bedroom through a closed window. His possessions help us to understand the diverse factors influencing his internal make up, subtle hints ,that become obvious with hindsight , of the ingredients that will flavor his unfolding personality disorders.  Here, Mr. French's fluid manner of description is cinematic, successfully emulating that of Hitchcock in the opening scene of Rear Window.
 
 Cliffhanger is a purely fun-to-read novel. We become witness to aspects of average American High School life coalesce into a promise of a greater future, one that they will play a part in designing.
 
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AUTHOR’S NOTE

8/31/2020

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Until now, I have never rewritten a previously published novel of mine, never changed a jacket design or a title, and never envisioned how an extensively revised story could be more provocative than the original. 

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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Making your Characters Authentic - Part 7

8/27/2017

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  1. All good writing, whether its plot, theme or characters, involves a high degree of problem solving.  You start your novel after doing the prep work described above, yet as the words march across the page,  something feels a little off. You can’t put your finger on it.  What have you forgotten or overlooked? Where is the spontaneity and energy?   The pieces fit beautifully when your first imagined them, but suddenly they’re like reading a foreign language.  Take a break.  Do something else with your life that week, or work on a different part or aspect of the novel.  Ultimately, the biggest problem, when you finally solve it, can becomes your best writing. 

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Making your Characters Authentic - Part 6

8/27/2017

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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.

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Making your Characters Authentic - Part 4

7/31/2017

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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.   

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Making Your Characters Authentic - Part 3

7/17/2017

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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.  

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Making Your Characters Authentic - Part 2

7/7/2017

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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.      

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Relevance and Relatability

3/28/2016

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 I hope readers of the novel can relate to [the characters'] 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.
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. 
Jaleel Robeson's Facebook Profile
Alex Baten's Facebook Profile

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    Michael R. French

    Michael French is a graduate of Stanford University and Northwestern University. He is a businessman and author who divides his time between Santa Barbara, California, and Santa Fe, New Mexico.



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