One of the best ways to teach involves good and bad examples. In many cases it’s easiest just to show the client someone who does it better than I do, or at least as well, and recommend they learn from it. Why not share that list?

Tightening: C.J. Cherryh’s fantasy and science fiction, and it’s not  even close. I often say that you could string a bow with her writing. If you are looking to see how someone gets away with the minimum words while presenting great narrative and dialogue, she’s your draft pick. Another author who doesn’t waste words is Tim Cahill (also mentioned below), whose laconic Sconnie style is that of a trained but taciturn journalist.

Dialogue: The art of dialogue takes time to acquire. There is a fine art to the correct density of dialogue tags (“he said”, etc.), how to present emphasis, and so on. The one that stands out to me is the early and middle work by W.E.B. Griffin, before his son’s name went onto the cover (and definitely before post-Junior’s hired pens were hired). You could always tell who was talking, and there were just enough adverbs in the tags (as in not many).

The Moment: If you read much fiction, and even some non-fiction, you have observed that some authors show a powerful sense of the key moment. Most very good storytellers must be cognizant of it, but a few do it with deft gravitas. My money there is on Frank Herbert in his Dune books (not the ones after his death, most of which I strongly suspect were written by ‘lancers).

Third Person Limited Point of View: For those not familiar, this means that the storyteller is inside the protag’s head but doesn’t assume the protag’s identity (which would shift it to first person: to “I” from the 3P “s/he.” All perspective colors our fiction with a basic approach; for example, the most common for first novels is semi-autobiographical 1P, probably because that’s suited to the skill level of most novice novelists. (That sounds waspish, but is not so intended. Let’s be real: there are novices in all fields, and they find certain paths easiest. Thus here.) In any case, my favorite example for 3PL is C.S. Forester, especially the majestic Hornblower novels. A deep dive into a man’s insecurities, disappointments, triumphs, and tragedies, the bohicas and terrors and even joys of military/naval life.

Mastery of English: Winston Churchill, and it’s not even close. Churchill is what I read when I need to be reminded what I am unlikely ever to be. William Manchester (including two of his three volumes about Churchill) is another candidate in a different English dialect.

Urban Paranormal: I admit that I am pretty much over this genre, but keeping an open mind. It’s not that I fundamentally hate it, but rather that it is so often so very badly done. Miniature dragons as part of huge elfy/vampy/wolfy spell battles on the San Francisco waterfront, and the next morning the city wakes up to business as usual? No. One thing I believe is that every fiction author gets one cheat: one step they don’t need to account for or fully explain, one leap of faith. To use that one on the notion that the rest of the world would just keep calm and carry on after zombies came pouring through town–that is not good. Some–and they know who they are–are so fetishistic they have to keep ratcheting up the monstrosity, like a bondage addict who must up-kink in order to keep feeling the thrill. The one who seems at least respectably tethered to the rest of reality is Patricia Briggs with the Mercy Thompson series.

Travel: This is my favorite besides history, so I’m fussy here. For a laconic outlook that reflects his Wisconsin upbringing, anything by Tim Cahill. He has the gift of being funny without appearing to try. For unconventional ways to write about nearly everything, William Least Heat-Moon. One gets the sense that Heat-Moon is simply a deeper and more patient observer than the average person.

Biography: You might not have heard of her, but Fawn Brodie flat killed it. Just five: Joseph Smith, Thaddeus Stevens, Thomas Jefferson, Sir Richard Burton, and (the only one I have yet to read) Richard Nixon. Brodie is that sort of biographer that helps one feel a deeper understanding of the subject’s times, not simply the life.

There’s also a long list of popular authors I consider inept, even unreadable. I’m not going to write a blog post about them because I can’t. Most of you can, but I cannot. I’m in the industry, albeit one of its tiniest lights, and there’s a non-zero chance I could run into someone. Some people have long memories, and I don’t have a need to go out of my way to put myself on the bad side of those long memories for zero benefit. The standards have dropped, and as some of them age, time is unkind to their skillsets.

Anyway, I might not write about that in a concentrated form, but you perhaps have ideas. If you’d like to discuss Popular Writers I Think Are Lousy in the comments, I’m not going to interfere unless it gets out of hand.