Giveaway & Guest Post: William F Brown, author of The Undertaker

Bill Brown is the author of The Undertaker, which I reviewed yesterday giving it three and a half stars as an entertaining and exciting read. It is his sixth suspense novel, and now available on Kindle, Sony, Nook, and IBook. His earlier books include Thursday at Noon, published in hardback by St. Martins, with paper and foreign editions and favorable reviews in The New Yorker and other publications. The Allah Conspiracy was published by Beaufort Books. His newest novel, A Whisper of War, is with his agent making the rounds of publishers; and he is currently writing two more suspense novels. In addition, he has written four award-winning screenplays, one of which was optioned for film. Today Brown is talking about his writing and offering Book’d Out readers the opportunity to WIN one of three electronic editions of The Undertaker. Read on for details…

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People often ask writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” and, “Boy, it must take a lot of time to do something like that.” Every book takes its own tortuous path, some more easily and more successfully than others; but they all start with a simple concept and grow from there until they end up as a fully-developed novel.

My novels usually begin with an intriguing one-liner like that. It’s something that just hits me; like, “A guy’s in the window seat of an air liner coming in to land at O’Hare, looks down, and sees a man murdering a woman on a roof top as it flashes by below.” You then start asking a lot of who’s, why’s and how’s. Who were the people on the roof? What building was that? Why would he kill her? What’s at stake? Was he hiding something, or trying to shut her up? No one else saw it happen and there’s no body – not yet anyway. So, who is our guy in the airplane? Who are his friends and enemies? What’s going on in his life that this situation will make even worse? I keep expanding those threads until they reach a conclusion. That’s how I create a plot; but to make it a story, you must flesh-out those stick figures into interesting characters that drive the story and make it logical and inevitable.

Thursday at Noon, began with, “A burned out CIA agent in Cairo stumbles home one night and finds a severed head sitting on his rear stoop.” As with the others, the log line needs to be something incongruous, and a bit jarring. In screenplays, it’s called a ‘log line.’ The shortest I’ve ever seen is “Snakes on a plane.” It is something immediate and graphic, which writers and producers use to sell a concept, but it is equally useful to keep the story focused,

The Undertaker began with a similar one-liner, “A guy opens the newspaper one morning and sees his own obituary.” How did that happen? Was it a mistake? All the details are spot on; that was him, except the dead guy’s an accountant in Ohio, not a computer wonk in Boston. Worse, there’s a companion obituary for his wife! Who? Where? Why? For a good thriller, it needs to be life-threatening and exciting. It’s a ‘chase book,’ with Mafia hit men, the FBI, bumper tag on the Dan Ryan expressway, a bloody Back Bay row house, and lots more. To add to the terror, obituaries lead to funeral homes, bodies, embalming tables, and a scalpel.

Dramatic pacing is important. You can’t sustain terror for an entire book. The best example is the movie ‘Jaws,’ with a roller-coaster of peaks and valleys. You need that pus a dollop of humor and romance to keep the reader’s interest. To add more immediacy to the story line, I wrote The Undertaker in the first person. It was the first time I tried this. It won’t work for every story structure, but I think it really worked well for this one.

After my second novel was published, and after getting a few too many rejections on the next few; I turned to screenwriting, which was simultaneously the dumbest thing I ever did, and one of the more useful. It was dumb, because Hollywood is an insider game. While I won or placed in a number in a number of national screenplay contests, it cost me about five years during which time I could have been writing novels. The people who run the contests make a lot of money; but the odds are better of getting hit by lightening at Hollywood and Vine, than my selling a screenplay for a major movie. However, screenplays are highly structured and formulaic. Learning that methodology teaches dramatic pacing, thinking visually, thinking in short scenes, and to write much more focused dialogue. So, as I hope The Undertaker shows, the five years of books, classes, and writing screenplays, did make me a better novel writer.

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About the Author

William F. Brown lives in Columbus, Ohio. As the Vice President of the real estate subsidiary of a Fortune 500 corporation, he traveled widely in the US and abroad. A native of Chicago, he earned a BA in History and Russian Area Studies and a graduate degree from the University of Illinois. He has been active in politics and numerous civic organizations over the years, and served as a company commander in the US Army. In addition to golf and painting, he has traveled widely in Russia, Germany, the Caribbean, England, Ireland, Scotland, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Austria, Egypt, and Israel. The Undertaker is his sixth book.

Bill Brown Writes Novels

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