The Technology of Writing Your Novel

Article on MURDER BY 4 by Liz Zelvin

"Does anybody-or everybody-remember Mary Renault's wonderful novels set in ancient Greece? One of them, THE PRAISE SINGER (1979), is about the poet Simonides, who in Renault's imagined autobiography is a bard who has composed and memorized a wealth of poetry (his own and Homer's, for example) and travels around Greece reciting it. In his old age he gets very crabby about his apprentice, a middle-aged nephew he calls "the boy," who has started to rely on this newfangled invention, writing, carving his words onto a wax tablet with a stylus as he composes them. "How is the boy going to remember anything," Simonides complains, "if he writes it on the wax?"

We've come a long way, for better or worse, in 2700 years." Read the entire article here.

Elizabeth Zelvin's debut mystery, DEATH WILL GET YOU SOBER, is just out from St. Martin's. One related story, "Death Will Clean Your Closet," is nominated for an Agatha for Best Short Story. Another, "Death Will Tie Your Kangaroo Down," received an honorable mention in the first annual CrimeSpace Short Story Competition. Liz is a New York City psychotherapist who currently does online therapy.