MattRees.net

In a Jerusalem café, I was drinking an espresso with Stephen Victor, an Oregon-based practitioner of a process called “family constellations.” I mentioned to him that I thought the process might be useful in my research for A Name in Blood, my historical novel about Caravaggio. Stephen agreed. Though the most common use of constellations [...]

Historical novels vie with crime and romance novels for the titles of most derided and most widely read literature. They’ve had a bad rap ever since the 19th century, when the swashbucklers of Alexandre Dumas looked pretty wooden next to Dickens, and cartoonish in comparison to the depth of Victor Hugo or George Eliot. There [...]

Recently, in this (cyber)space, I started to explain why I’ve turned to historical fiction, after previously writing a book of nonfiction and my four Palestinian crime novels. I wrote that historical fiction casts today’s deepest issues in an unexpected (historical) context and can therefore make us see them anew. It’s also a dramatic way of [...]

Writing of the disdain expressed for genre novels by critics, Raymond Chandler said that there were just as many bad “literary novels” of the type favored by critics as there were bad genre stories – except that the bad literary novels didn’t get published. In other words, there’s nothing inherent in so-called genre fiction that [...]

If there’s one thing that authoring a series of novels will teach you, it’s that you can’t wait for inspiration. But you can prompt it, give it little electric shocks that’ll keep it bubbling within you. Here are a few methods I use to do that. I go to the places I’m writing about. I [...]

On the “Writers Read” blog, which is run by the indefatigable Marshal Zeringue, the latest post features my most recent reading. It’s not what you might think — in other words, it isn’t detective fiction (well, there’s one such book, sort of…) and it’s not full of books about the Middle East. Have a look [...]