Friday, July 6, 2012

Do Novels Ever End? by Warren Adler

Hi, folks.

Today is Warren Adler day. We will feature this well-known author of books like WAR OF THE ROSES and RANDOM HEARTS on the first Friday of each month throughout 2012.

Please help me welcome this most generous bestselling author today to Murderby4. Warren, welcome and thanks for sharing your insight with our readers.



Aaron Lazar
www.lazarbooks.com
 
 
A writer’s mind is like a house with a thousand doors, all operated by some pre-tech system that opens and closes as if controlled by something akin to an infrared target line. Apparently, I crossed one of those lines and opened a door somewhere on a top floor of the house.

I now realize that I came back to Beaulieu, which is just a walking distance from Cap Ferrat which was one of the European settings for the The David Embrace, a novel just published exclusively by Amazon.

There it was unfolding before my eyes, The Grand Hotel beach club where the two fish out of water lovers first meet. People from different worlds, with far different agendas, suddenly bonding mysteriously. There was the spot, the actual spot where I chose the hired killer to view the yacht owned by his target.

Call it a thriller, a love story, a tale of deception and betrayal or however one wishes to categorize it. I pay no attention to genre. Essentially, it is an exploration of the mystery and power of human attraction which seems to be the central theme of all novels.

Looking back over most of my thirty or so published novels,  I seem to be obsessed with transformation, characters becoming, always becoming, following an arc of change over which they have little or no control. The plot line of The David Embrace leaves southern France and goes on to Florence, the place to where our mismatched lovers escape from their previous lives.

Florence is central to the story because it is here that one of the great wonders of the world lives in resplendent glory, Michelangelo’s David, that masterpiece of sculpture that cannot fail to move anyone who comes under its spell. It has made a profound impact on the main characters of this novel.

The point of this little essay, aside from the obvious flacking of the novel, is that I believe I was drawn back to this place so that I can walk through that open door and perhaps write a sequel. To me, many of the characters in my stories continue to be alive even after I have completed the story cycle confined to the specific novel. The fact is that a writer can never write finis to the life of his or her characters because they continue to live on. What happens next is always on the mind of both the reader and the writer.

Oddly, the only novel that I have ever written a sequel to was The War of the Roses, and the two main characters actually died at the end of the novel. What had obsessed me long after the novel was written, long after the movie was made, was what happened to the children of these poor deluded souls who allowed greed and hate to destroy their lives. Thus came The Children of the Roses.

So here I am back to the scenes of The David Embrace, rerunning the story and noodling the possibilities of what happened to these star-crossed lovers who went through so much pain and angst to keep the fires of their mysterious attraction continuing at white heat.


Warren Adler

www.warrenadler.com



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Warren Adler is a world-renowned novelist, short story writer and playwright. His 32 novels and story collections have been translated into more than 25 languages and two of his novels, The War of the Roses with Michael Douglas and Random Hearts with Harrison Ford, have been made into enormously popular movies, shown continually throughout the world.

Today, when not writing, Mr. Adler lectures on creative writing, motion picture adaptation and the future of Electronic Books. He is the founder of the Jackson Hole Writer’s Conference and has been Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Jackson Hole Public Library. He is married to the former Sonia Kline, a magazine editor. He has three sons, David, Jonathan and Michael and four grandchildren and lives in New York City.

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