Voices of the Dead

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An important difference between Peter’s books and mine, he writes his prose on a computer while I put down the words with a ballpoint pen. That’s all right. David Mamet said, “I think there are people who are sufficiently driven that even a computer is not going to stop them from writing well.”

And Pete is sufficiently driven.

After twenty-five years running a successful advertising agency — all while reading hundreds of popular novels and making judgments about their worth — Peter has attacked the world of fiction with a vengeance, writing five novels in the past five years and his publisher is after him to write another, a sequel to Voices of the Dead.

The key to writing successful books is developing the right voice to tell the stories, one that’s natural to the writer and flows without strain or too many words and uses the voices of the people in the book, their attitudes, showing rather than telling who they are. Peter read a lot of Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck — not so much the popular names on the Times list — none of the authors who have a co-writer on the cover along with theirs, though much smaller. It causes you to wonder who actually wrote the book. Peter has read my Ten Rules of Writing and it shows; he always leaves out the parts readers tend to skip.

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