“When you die, I believe, God isn’t going to ask you what you published.  God’s going to ask you what you wrote.” (McNally, T.M. “Big Dogs and Little Dogs,” in Martone, Michael, and Susan Neville. 2006. Rules of thumb: 73 authors reveal their fiction writing fixations. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books).

There’s a certain wisdom to that remark, but, with all due respect to McNally and to God, the Almighty isn’t in my target demographic.  God, perhaps, will read my unpublished manuscripts, but the ladies in the Hungry Readers Book Club won’t read my books unless they’re published.

Now that The Other has been released, I find myself pondering two questions that readers often ask me.

Where do your story ideas come from?

Every book starts from an idea. Where do these story ideas come from? In the case of The Other, I found the story idea when I went down a rabbit hole. I trust you know what I mean. You start out searching for a certain bit of information. You have the best of intentions, but something grabs your attention, and you’re pulled just a little bit off course. Then there’s another grabber, and another, and before you know it, you’ve lost sight of your original question and instead you’ve spent the day reading about Camp Wille und Macht. At least, that’s what I did.

Camp Wille und Macht was the first Nazi youth camp in America, established in the summer of 1934 on the banks of  the Delaware-Raritan Canal. It only stayed open for a few weeks, but it became the prototype for camps in New York and New Jersey, as well as other sites scattered across the country.

I don’t write nonfiction. But I believe that fiction can reveal emotional truths in a way that a strictly factual account cannot. I set out to write a fictional account of a Nazi youth camp, on a fictional canal in a fictional New Jersey. And like most writers of fiction, I started with a simple What if?

What if the lock tender on the canal was Jewish? What would his  life be like if one hundred teenagers dressed in brown shirts erected tents in a field that abutted his home? What if those brown shirts spent their days marching along the towpath?
And then I asked myself, What if those brown shirts returned today? What would you do to protect your family if the Nazis came to town?

When does the book become real to you?

When I first get the idea for a book, the story exists in my head, only. I’ll carry that imaginary world around in my head for months, perhaps years. There are milestones along the way. A finished manuscript. A book contract. Final edits. A book cover. Advanced Reader Copies. The book release.

Then something remarkable happens. After the book is published, a stranger reads the book. Maybe you. And the story that was stuck in my head, gets stuck in your head too. That’s when the book becomes real to me. When the story that was stuck in my head, through the magic of reading, gets stuck in your head too.

The Other is a story of faith lost and faith found. Although the story is fictional, the problem of hate is all too real. And it is not ancient history.

If you read The Other, if the story gets stuck in your head, perhaps you’ll spare a moment to reach out and let me know. That’s the reality that makes a writer start thinking about the next great story.

Jeff Markowitz is the author of six mysteries, including the award-winning dark comedy, Death and White Diamonds. Jeff spent more than forty years creating community-based programs and services in New Jersey for children and adults with autism, including twenty-five years as President and Executive Director of the Life Skills Resource Center, before retiring in 2018 to devote more time to writing. In October 2021, a puzzle hunt based on Jeff’s novella, Motive for Murder raised more than $1 million for at-risk children in NYC. Jeff is a past President of the New York Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. He lives in Monmouth Junction NJ with his wife Carol and two cats, Vergil and Aeneas. 


 

Having recently published my first novel, I feel fortunate to have sampled the pleasures many aspiring authors despair of ever experiencing: the momentary disbelief when a publisher says “yes;” the tactile thrill of holding the printed copy of your “baby” for the first time; the rush of excitement when a complete stranger posts a laudatory review; the warm memories triggered when a hand from the distant past reaches out and pats you on the back; the encouragement implicit in an eager inquiry about the next installment in a planned series.

Grateful as I am for all these delights, what has struck me most profoundly is the individuality of readers’ responses. How differently readers react to this or that character or plot twist or interpret the meaning of an exchange of dialogue. The first time I read her a passage out loud, my own wife was aghast to learn that I pronounced the first name of my protagonist, Bruneau Abellard, with a drawn-out emphasis on the second syllable, lobbying vehemently for her Bruno over my Broo-know. Some found Bruneau’s on-again, off-again girlfriend overbearing; others wished she was more assertive. The city of New Orleans, where the novel takes place, was perceived as beautiful or threatening; fragrant or malodorous (author’s note: both these things are true!); mysterious and cloistered, or open and welcoming. And so on.

What the novelist comes to realize is that once the reader takes the reins, she is off and running, beyond your control. You have provided a map, and a well-marked trail, but she is free to wander where she may.

Contemplating the wondrous, and wonderful, phenomenon of the “runaway reader,” brought me back to my long-ago grad school days, when in a literary criticism class, we waded through a fascinating if at times impenetrable tome called The Implied Reader. Its author, German philosopher Wolfgang Iser, is best known for pioneering a school of literary theory called “reader-response” criticism. To crudely oversimplify, Iser’s central insight is that reading is as much an act of creation as writing. As she writes, an author may have a particular reader in mind, but that reader is a mere construct of the author’s imagination. The actual “flesh and blood” reader brings her own experiences and sensibility to her encounter with the text, creating impressions and points of view that are uniquely her own.

Remembering Iser’s treatise and experiencing for the first time the subtle shock of the runaway reader, brings me to two parting thoughts. The first is that I am now better able to articulate my longstanding aversion to the audiobook format, at least when it comes to works of fiction. I understand the appeal of the medium and suppose that listening to a novel beats never picking one up, but I remain firm in my conviction that the audiobook experience is a pale simulacrum of the real deal. The mostly passive -- dare I say, lazy? -- act of “listening” as a narrator appropriates the characters’ voices, cannot possibly replicate the creative engagement inherent in the act of reading.
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My second, and parting insight, is that releasing a published novel is not unlike sending your kindergartener off to her first day of school. You’ve done the best you can to prepare her for this moment, but now she must make her own way in the world.


Norman Woolworth’s first novel, The Lafitte Affair, is a historical mystery set mostly in present-day New Orleans, with glimpses of the city during its “Belle Epoque” of the 1820s. In a starred review, Kirkus called it “a well-crafted mystery that is beautifully written, educational, and all-around entertaining.” BookTrib deemed it “a savory jambalaya that tempts you to take another bite and keep turning pages.” And Readers’ Favorite gave the book five stars, saying “the novel is as much about the city’s colorful characters as it is about the unfolding mystery.” It called the novel “a fast paced, edge-of-your-seat read … worthy of the big screen.” Woolworth is a retired corporate executive who resides in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife Lori and their blue-blooded mongrel, Nola.