♪♪ -In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

This is the New Hampshire Authors’ Series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

♪♪ -I'm Rebecca Rule, and welcome to the New Hampshire Authors’ Series.

We're here at the Dimond Library on the campus of the University of New Hampshire, and our guest today is author Bill Tapply.

Welcome, Bill.

- Thank you.

- I'm going to say... [applause] We're happy to have you here.

[applause continues] I want to say a little bit about Bill by way of introduction, he's the author of 40 books, give or take.

About half of them are mystery novels featuring Brady Coyne, attorney and sleuth.

Hell Bent is his latest Brady Coyne mystery, and it's just out.

Fresh off the presses.

He also writes elegant nonfiction about fishing and the outdoors, and is a contributing editor for Field & Stream and a columnist for American Angler, who has written, really, thousands of articles.

Not an exaggeration.

He's currently a writer in residence at Clark University in Worcester.

His book, The Elements of Mystery Fiction shows readers exactly how to write a whodunit.

He lives in Hancock with another writer, his wife, Vicki Stiefel.

We're happy to have you here.

-Thank you, happy to be here.

-As I wrote your introduction, I got nervous about the verb to be, [William chuckles] and it reminded me of Don Murray, who was the first person we interviewed on this series, and he was always, I studied with him, and his mantra was, write with nouns and verbs, get rid of the adjectives and the adverbs and as I read mystery... how to write mystery fiction I heard that voice again.

And then I found an article that you'd written about invisible writing.

And I love that term.

And I wonder if you talk a little bit about that, about really the craft of writing and what you try to achieve on the page and maybe read a little bit from that.

I think, what do what I go, what I go for, and what I appreciate when I read it is writing that doesn't call attention to itself.

You know, when when I'm telling a story, when I'm writing a novel, I want my readers to be thinking about the characters and thinking about what's going on.

And the same thing when I write about fishing or whatever I write about, I don't want them thinking about me.

So the and I came upon this early in my life because my dad was a writer and he didn't use the phrase invisible writing, but that's what he basically taught me was strong active verbs and specific solid nouns.

And you create pictures for your readers and they can see what's going on.

The other, the other phrase that we back, back and forth write is show don't tell.

And it's the same thing.

You know, we don't tell our readers how to feel.

We don't intrude on what we're writing.

You should be invisible.

You, the writer, should be invisible.

And you do that through nouns and verbs.

So your father was a very well-known writer?

Yes.

He was in his field.

In his field?

I mean, everybody who was a hunter and a fisherman in the 40s, 50s and 60s and 70s knew of my dad.

H.G.

Tapply.

He was known as Tap.

Horace G. He hated his name, so he was known as Tap.

I mean, wouldn't you, if your name was Horace?

And you followed in the family tradition?

Well, after a fashion I didn't intend to follow.

I certainly intended to.

I loved fishing and the outdoors right from the get go.

And he.

He was a great dad.

He took me with him wherever he went, you know?

But, the last thing I ever wanted to be was a writer, actually.

Because?

Because I saw him do it.

And, it was painful and difficult and, it looked hard, you know, I mean, literally, I would he had an office in the basement in our house when I was growing up.

And his day job was in advertising.

So he went off and beat his brains out in the advertising world in Boston.

He came home and after dinner, he went downstairs to write because he had this column in Field and Stream for 35 years.

He did it.

And that's if you can imagine the pressure of having to come up with, it wasn't a column.

His column was several sub parts, and each part was an idea.

And he had to come up with those every month for 35 years.

I mean, he didn't get any break from that.

So he came home from from advertising.

He'd go down to the basement to, as he said, to work, to write.

And there were glass doors on his office.

And I used to go down as a kid, and I was a pre-teen, I guess you'd say, and I'd look at them through the And it wasn't like I'm saying, oh, did daddy come back.

It wasn't like that.

I just, you know, I just go down and and glancing through and he'd be sitting there and I could see the pain.

Yeah.

He'd be hunched over his typewriter.

I could see the tension in his neck and in his shoulders and his fingers would be like this, poised over the keyboard.

And he'd smoked a pipe and he'd be clenching.

And you could see his jaw muscles and the room was half full of smoke and periodically he'd start beating away at the typewriter and it stop and look at it, glare at it, and then look at it, glare it, reach.

Grab that piece of paper, throw it over his shoulder, put another in glare at it some more I mean, who wanted to do something like that?

But but you know, so.

So it deterred me.

I was always pretty good at writing, and I kind of faked my way through high school and college by writing.

Didn't have much to say, but I said it well, you know, you had a facility.

I had a facility.

And part of it was because my dad had given me certain thoughts about writing, but I didn't want to be a writer because I saw that it was really hard to do.

But when I started doing it and I learned that he was right and it was hard to do, I was ready for it.

Yeah, and that made it easier.

I said, okay, it's supposed to be hard.

It was hard.

Now you're hunched over your computer throwing paper.

Throwing figurative pieces of paper.

Well, I picked out this little scene from your essay Invisible Writing, which is an interaction between you and your dad, which I think is just wonderful.

I wonder if we like to do some readings.

Yeah.

As part of this series and hear the hear the author's words come off the page.

Well, this is how when I was a like a freshman in high school, I used to show my stuff to my father, had a very, very tough English teacher, and he didn't give me good grades, I expected good, I had good grades in my writing, and he didn't give me such good grades.

So I would show my my writing to my father for his advice.

I said I watched his face while he read my story.

It gave nothing away.

When he finished, he looked up at me.

You certainly attended to your verbs, he said.

That was.

We'd already talked about that.

He jabbed at the paper.

Where did you get this one?

Nicotine.

I learned that last year.

Good word, said Dad.

What's it mean?

Wink.

That's a better word, he said.

Who are you trying to impress?

I smiled, old Miniver my English teacher's name was Mr. Cheever.

We called him Miniver, after the Edward Arlington Robinson poem.

An obituary.

Anyway, old Miniver.

Now that I think of it, I said He mentioned the same problem on my last paper.

Dad handed my story to me.

Invisible writing.

He said, understand?

No, don't try to impress your reader with how cleverly you write.

He said these fancy words, all these adjectives and adverbs and vocabulary words.

He pronounced the word vocabulary as if it meant disgusting human waste product.

All they do is call attention to you.

You don't want your reader aware of your writing at all.

If you do your job, you'll have them thinking about your ideas, your arguments, your characters, or whatever it is you're trying to communicate.

If someone tells you, wow, that's great writing, you know you failed.

You mean all my other teachers over the years?

He shrugged.

You've been getting bad advice.

Well, I said, I appreciate yours.

You do?

Yes, sir.

That's a good start, he said.

My next attempt brought new advice.

Tighten it up, find the one right word and get rid of a dozen wrong ones.

Yeah, I said, but then my stories will be too short.

Short said Dad, is good.

For the rest of my high school career, I was stuck with Mr. Cheever.

I was stuck with Mr. Cheever.

The following year too I shared the drafts of my papers with dad.

He always found something new to criticize.

Invisible writing, I learned, demanded conciseness and clarity, along with precise, unpretentious and hard working verbs.

It didn't come easily to me.

I labored over my stories.

I tried to anticipate dad's criticisms.

Writing isn't that much fun anymore, I said to him after one of our criticism sessions.

Fun?

He smiled.

Writing is hard work if you intend to take it seriously.

It's ironic, but the more you learn about writing, the harder it gets.

I guess I'm beginning to see that.

But you're taking it seriously, I want to get it right.

Maybe we'll make a writer out of you yet, he said.

Over my dead body.

I thought.

And how ironic that you became a writer of murder mysteries.

Over my dead body, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, you learned a lot from your dad and his friends about writing and about fishing.

Did the two have anything in common or the other way to phrase that is, what is it in your nature that draws you to both these activities?

Well, you know, fishing is exploring.

It's discovering.

It's taking an unknown, the kind of fishing I like to do, fly fishing for trout is, you know, we can get metaphorical.

There's the water, there's the surface, and this mysterious thing is going on underneath the surface.

And your your goal is to try to figure out what's going on under the surface, where the fish live, where they are, what they're eating, how they're behaving, and so forth.

And kind of to make the make what's under the surface apparent and visible.

And I think we do that kind of thing with writing.

I know we do that kind of thing with solving mysteries.

I've made that comparison my, my guy Brady Coyne, is a fisherman and, you know, he finds the act of fishing, puts him in the kind of a frame of mind to think about mysterious things, too.

But I wouldn't take it too far.

No, really.

I mean, fishing is fishing and writing is writing.

And you like them both?

Well, I already said writing is hard and painful work.

You wouldn't do it if you didn't love it.

What, write?

Yeah.

I love having written.

I mean, I do, I, yeah, and the way I write, what I read, where I start today is with what I wrote yesterday.

And I love playing with words.

I love sentences, and I love that part of it.

The act of creation.

That's what's really hard.

Truthfully.

So, so, I do like a lot of parts of writing.

Well, I didn't know.

I mean, I had read your mystery novels before because I love mystery novels, but I had never cracked one of your nonfiction books about fishing because I'll, I'm not an angler.

I was as a kid, but I'm not anymore.

You could be.

I could be.

But, but, but I, I love these books.

I love this book in particular.

And, and I have an example.

And I thought maybe you could, read a little bit of this, but this is from your, the essay that's called Trout Eyes, which is the title of the book.

Okay.

Well, we were fishing the frying pan, which is a lovely trout stream in Colorado, hoping to tie into one of that river's famously piggie rainbows.

I was high sticking a mysis shrimp.

See, that's why it's interesting to me that you say you like this because, I mean high sticking a mysis shrimp.

Does that make any sense?

No, no.

Okay.

It doesn't need to make any.

There's a lot of poetry I read that doesn't make sense either.

But I still like it.

I was high sticking a mysis shrimp imitation through a deep slot and having no luk at it.

When Sandy came along, he was our guide.

He watched me for a few minutes and pointed and said, look there, there you go.

See it?

I looked where he was pointing.

What?

I said, I don't see anything.

He blew out of breath.

Right there.

Look, man, I shrugged, I am looking.

Sorry.

He took off his sunglasses and handed them to me.

Try these.

I took off my glasses and put on his.

Suddenly I could distinguish every pebble on the stream bottom.

My glasses are polarized.

I said, what's with these?

Amber maximizes contrast.

Awesome.

I don't see any fish, though.

He sighed.

See that square boulder?

Look two feet upstream and one foot to the left, just behind that rock with the white on it.

Nice fish.

I looked hard and suddenly I saw it.

First I saw a crimson slash, then the shape of its head materialized.

Then the curve of its belly, then its wavering tail.

A big fat rainbow.

Now that I see it, I said to Sandy, I don't understand how I couldn't see it before.

It's obvious.

You've got to find your trout eyes, he said.

Like bone fishing.

It takes a day or two on the flats before what the guides call your bonefish eyes kick in.

You need the glasses for vision polarized to the glare around, for the contrast.

And it's ideal if you have an overhead sun and you can climb a rock or a bank and look down into the river, but it helps if the surface is smooth.

Even so, just being able to see isn't enough.

Your brain has to recognize a trout to understand what it is your eyes are seeing.

You hardly ever see a whole fish.

You look for a line, or a color, or a shape or a movement, some little anomaly that isn't a rock or a stick.

After you've done that a few times, those little trout clues get filed away in your brain.

Okay, so now that you see it, go catch that fish.

I adjusted by position and drifted my shrimp imitation onto the trout nose.

It was intense, knowing that my fly was approaching a large trout, anticipating the take, then feeling the let down as the fly drifted past.

On the fourth or fifth cast, I saw its head up to the side, instinctively I lifted my rod and felt its weight, and a few minutes later, Sandy netted a 19 inch rainbow trout.

It was shaped like a watermelon.

I patted my chest and blew out of breath.

I thought that was going to give me a heart attack, I said.

I swear that was the most fun I've ever had catching a trout.

Thank you.

I think that's beautiful.

When you see that fish and the shape of the fish, and the way you describe that in this book is just full of that kind of attention to detail.

I think we should talk about murder.

Okay.

Because much of your career is spent, you know, writing about murder.

You have these two characters, Stoney Calhoun and Brady Coyne.

And you write in series.

So what makes a good protagonist?

What makes a good main character for a murder series or a mystery series?

You can stick with them for a while.

I've been really lucky.

I mean, I.

Put Brady Coyne in the first book I ever was not not the first one I wrote, but the first one that became a book.

We've all got I've got a couple of books on the under the bed, you know, but.

And, if you would have asked me then what does it take for to create a protagonist that will last?

This is my 24th book with him in it.

I mean, which you all should be astounded.

24 is an enormous number to write.

I mean, I'm astounded.

I'm not sick of them, and I'm not.

And that I've written more in my series than Sue Grafton has written in hers, for example.

I don't I'm not saying that like, look at me.

I'm just saying it's kind of an amazing thing that that I've stuck with him.

In the first novel, I just needed the lawyer, I needed a lawyer.

And I thought, oh, I'll see what how it works to make the lawyer the narrator.

And it seemed to work and they bought it and they said, well, we need another one.

And I said, oh yes, he said this is the Brady Coyne series.

This is book number one on the Brady Coyne series.

And I said I didn't realize that.

So I had to write another book with the same guy.

And it just kind of has gone like that one book at a time.

Does he surprise you still?

Does he surprise me?

You know, he does.

Again, not by any great dramatic things, but but in small, interesting ways.

He's like the person that I know that I like.

And, you know, if you hang out with people that you've known for a while and you like them, there's always surprises because they have new things to offer.

And they they'll tell you things that you didn't know, or they'll do things that you didn't realize that they could do.

And so writing in his first person narrative and writing in his first person voice, and sort of listening, channeling him, which is kind of what I do when I'm trying to tell a story.

I it goes through his consciousness, which, of course, is in my consciousness.

We do all kinds of things and does things that I don't expect.

I try to plan these things, these novel, I mean, these a mystery novel is something from my point of view.

You can't just wing it.

You know, there are things about clues and and, you know, suspects and stuff you have to do.

So I try to have that sort of figured out, but still in the telling.

You have a direction.

Yeah, in the telling of the story, through his voice and through his eyes and ears, all kinds of interesting things happen.

Well, one thing I love about him is that he's funny.

He has a great sense of humor.

And it just in this little section, he's having some some, just just a little taste of of Brady Coyne, and I just it's just a couple paragraphs, but just to hear I think you're the dialog is so crisp and so funny and it carries it carries the book in many ways.

This is just a little example of Brady Coyne dialogue.

Well he, yeah, this is the place where, his the detective's partner picks him up at night to take him to, see a dead body because he has been involved in the person who is the dead body and Horowitz is the detective, and Marcia Bonetti is the detective's assistant, and she's the one who's come and picked him up.

So he says, I slid into the passenger seat beside Marcia Bonetti.

She'd been Horowitz's partner for several years, probably because no one else would get along with him.

She was dark haired and small boned, with high cheekbones, big black eyes, and a generous mouth.

She looked about as much like a police officer as I looked like a sumo wrestler.

How are you?

I said.

Fine, so what's up?

Dead body, she said.

Who?

I don't know Where?

Aktin.

I don't know about you, I said, but all this banter is exhausting me.

She glanced at me.

Sorry.

I bet on the ghost and six this morning.

I was looking forward to a quiet evening in my PJ eating popcorn, watching TV with my family.

Murderers are inconsiderate that way.

Bonetti didn't smile.

They sure are, she said.

Where in Aktin?

I'll show you, she said.

Okay, Mr. Coyne?

Sure.

I said, okay.

It must be fun to write that.

Yeah.

Dialogue is fun to write.

Yeah.

Just stand up and ask a question.

Thanks.

I'm an aspiring writer, and I find that if I wait for inspiration to write, I don't get very far.

So could you talk a little bit about your process?

Sure.

Good question.

It's a good question.

And the answer is really easy.

You've got to do it.

I mean, I don't mean to be glib because it's hard.

And if I could, if I, if I could give you a gift, the gift would be the gift of self-discipline.

I'm serious.

You know, if you can't do that, it doesn't matter how good you are because you're not going to write.

You're not going to write often enough, you're not going to write regularly, and not much is going to happen.

I know, I know a lot of people.

They want to be writers, but they wait around until it feels just right.

And and there's always something else going on because writing is hard, you know?

And it's if you're able to make up excuses for yourself, then you're not going to write.

He offers that gift to you.

Yes.

Sherry.

Both of your protagonists, Stoney and Brady, are men, but I find your women characters very interesting.

Evie and, Kate in the Calhoun series.

Could you talk a little bit about, the difference in writing about or being a woman and a man in the writing process?

And how did you come to this complex understanding of us?

If my wife was here, she'd go, who, him?

You know, I think part of it, insofar as that's true and that's a lovely thing of you to say.

You know, if I get female characters right.

It's sort of like people say, how can you write about murder?

You know, you've never murdered anybody.

And I mean, how can I write about women?

I've never been a woman.

I'm sure that that many of my female characters are kind of idealized versions of women that I've known and loved, you know, and what I've and composites of the things that I, I myself appreciate about women.

And part of it is knowing that my daughters and my mother and my wife and my ex-wife and other women that I know will be reading these books, and I don't want to insult them.

And I know what I know what is demeaning to women, and I don't want to do that.

So the, you know, the the positive women in the book, the women that my male characters are attracted to at least are, they're to me, they're the kind of women that other women would appreciate.

Okay.

And I'm fairly self-conscious about doing that.

And I think that when you say, well, I like Kate, and Kate is Stoney Calhoun's love, and I have a rocky relationship, but there's a strength there and so forth.

I'm saying something about a relationship, not just about a character and, characterizing Stoney by the way I create Kate.

He's the kind of guy who would love a woman like her.

I mean, that's part of the thing that I'm saying about that.

Brady's the kind of guy who would love a woman, like Evie.

It's really not easy for him at all.

And things may be changing there, but, anyway, it's a it's a great question and I, you know, that the answer I know is complicated and resides in my own subconscious to a great extent.

Well, thank you so very much for coming out today and for talking so articulately about the process and introducing some people to your characters and reminding other people of characters that they've lovedfor many years We really appreciate it.

Thanks a lot.

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