I’m going to ask a slightly personal question. One that I’ve been thinking about a lot.
When was the last time you really, deeply listened to somebody else?
Lately, I’ve been doing it a lot. Most recently, I held listening sessions for a wonderful small community in Maine that, like many other communities across the region, is facing significant changes within the next few years.
Change is not always bad.
But it is usually hard.
I asked questions like: What are your hopes and dreams for children in your community? What skills, knowledge, and traits do you believe are important? What are some things your community does really well that you want to continue to invest in? What are some things you believe your community should invest in more?
During these sessions ten to twelve community members took turns responding. I listened, wrote down what I heard, and repeated the themes that emerged. We had a few simple rules. Center children. Phones off and away. And wait your turn in the speaking order.
At the end of my last session, which went thirty minutes over the allotted time, one man hung back. At the beginning of the conversation, he was upset. He felt there was an agenda. One he wasn’t part of. But as he listened to others and as others listened to him, his demeanor changed. He expressed real concerns and shared things in the community he valued. As his tension eased, so did the tenor of the conversation. By the end, the group was joking and laughing together.
As I was packing up my chart paper and getting ready for the long, dark, rainy drive back to Portland, he said, “I feel really good right now. We should do stuff like this more often.”
I left feeling deeply hopeful.
And deeply sad.
The loneliness epidemic that we are grappling with now is not new. Robert Putnam wrote extensively about this in his 2000 book BOWLING ALONE. In it, he chronicled the decline in American community and connectedness.
Fortunately, there are things we can do. They just take effort and attention.
There are a great many studies that show the simple act of listening to other people, when there is a shared community value – like children and learning – has significant benefits that include reduced stress, lowered blood pressure, improved mental health, reduced loneliness, boosted self esteem, and increased empathy.
Listening is a strategy marketing teams and people in leadership have been leveraging for years. Take the 70/30 Rule. To goal is simple. The other person talks 70% of the time. You listen actively, paraphrase, and ask follow-up questions 30% of the time. This strategy prevents you from jumping to solutions before you have an understanding of the real needs and root causes of an issue while building trust and connection.
As a parent, I often employ a strategy I like to call “The Captive Audience.” It’s simple. You sit in the car with your child for a 20-30 minute stretch with no music. No technology. Just you and your kid and the open road. Usually, at around the twelve minute mark, my son will say something. Usually it’s a question. Usually I answer by saying something like, “Hmmm,” (insert long pause here). “That’s a really good question. I have to think about it. What do you think?”
And then we’re off.
So what does listening have to do with writing?
Reading is a way to connect, to feel heard and seen and understood. Good books communicate values, ideas, questions, and characters that help us see the world more clearly. And by extension, help us see ourselves in a new light.
Listening can help writers develop an “inner ear” about cadence and vocabulary. It can allow writers to empathize with characters. It also deepens the ability to integrate subtext and ambiguity.
And then, of course, there is the inspiration.
Every writer has borrowed a snippet of a conversation from a corner store or airport or crowded bar. So if you take nothing else away from this, always be mindful of what you say in public.
You never know if it’ll end up in somebody’s book.
What I’ve got going on
Big news. My story “Beautiful, Dangerous Things” was selected for inclusion in the Best American Mystery and Suspense of 2026 edited by Megan Abbott and Steph Cha.
I just found out about another acceptance to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine for the September/October issue for the second of my Portland PI stories. That brings my run to: “Generous Strike Zone” in AHMM (March/April), “The Best and Sweetest Things” in EQMM (May/June), “A Well Worn Path” in EQMM (July/August), and “We, the Aging” in AHMM (Sept/Oct).
I was invited to the Edgars in NYC thanks to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Award. I had a great time, saw some old friends, and am really very grateful. I wore a fancy red suit and saw some great friends. (Me and Kate Hohl.)
There is nothing quite like seeing Times Square lit up at night with the rain coming down and all sorts of people from all sorts of places brushing shoulders and taking pictures.
Talk soon. Be well. And let me know what’s up with you.
Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Gabi Stiteler (Monday), John Clark (Tuesday), Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Thursday), and Allison Keeton (Friday).
As for writers who dump their completed manuscripts into Claude or ChatGPT, or any other AI program for a preliminary edit, I can only shake my head in disbelief. These are the same programs that participated in wholesale pirating of published works, copyright notwithstanding. What in heaven’s name makes you think they’re no longer harvesting your words (a/k/a training) simply because they’re being forced to pony up damages? That seems naïve, but your mileage and tolerance limits may vary, and I’ve been told the developmental and line edits are exceptional. They should be. They’ve used outstanding models for their frame of reference.
If that’s the case, how can authors, or anyone, protect themselves from the insatiable appetite of AI? In the spirit of everything old becoming new again, we might want to consider taking a page from our past and penning our stories with….pen and ink. Come to think of it, that would also resolve the question of AI as an author. At least until robots learn cursive, followed by pounding away at manual typewriters. Right, not much of a leap. It’s a brave new world, and a scary one.
When I’ve climbed up the slide and am at the top and the only way down is in front of me, I wake up with a new excitement – I know it’s gonna be tough-going, but at least I know there’s a single exit to where I am going.
Sometimes I wish I was writing a screenplay. During my years in Hollywood, I was told over and over that the ‘big action sequences’ could be/should be written like this: Crazy action push and pull in (pick location) that includes cars, trucks, planes and ends inside (location) finally with a face to face confrontation…
Because I write with, and about cops, in my Joe Burgess police procedural series and in my nonfiction, I have an entire shelf about cops. One of the great books is Mark Baker’s Cops, another Adam Plantinga’s 400 Things Cops Know. Another, not for the faint of heart but worth getting from the library, is Practical Homicide Investigation. (A note about that: when I got it from interlibrary loan, a concerned librarian asked if I really wanted to read it before handing it over.) For anyone interested in police shootings in the cops’ own words, I co-wrote, with retired Deputy Chief Joseph Loughlin the book Shots Fired: The misunderstandings, misconceptions, and myths about police shootings.
Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Kate Flora (Monday), Jule Selbo (Tuesday), Kait Carson (Thursday), and Joe Souza (Friday).
Back in the 1950s and early 1960s the options were pretty much limited to talking on the telephone or writing letters. I’m not sure how I acquired my first pen pal, but I know there were pen pal sections in many publications, printing names and addresses of people looking for people to write to in other countries. One of those publications was a comic book I read regularly about a young model named Katy Keene. I wrote to one of the addresses in the pen pal section, possibly in Australia, and in time a letter came back. The person who originally advertised for a pen pal had done so several years earlier and was now quite a bit older than I was but she passed my letter on to a younger friend and I corresponded with that girl for a number of years afterward.
I wish I still had those letters. If any of them sent me photos of themselves, those are long gone too. Sadly, so are most of their names. If I could remember more, given today’s technology, I might be able to reconnect with a few of my pen pals. There was Heather. Was she from Australia or New Zealand? I had a pen pal in each country. There was Carole from Bristol, England. I thought of her the first time I visited Great Britain at age twenty, but by then I’d already forgotten her last name and street address. My pen pal in India was a boy. He asked me to trace my feet and send the tracing to him. Nothing kinky. A few months later he sent me a pair of shoes and I sent back a photo of me wearing them.
In college and after I exchanged regular letters with family, in particular my parents and grandfather. Later we kept in touch with college and Navy friends by exchanging annual Christmas letters. That, too, has gone by the wayside. For one thing, I realized that mine ended up being the same letter with different book titles to reflect the current year’s work. We lead very dull lives.
Meet our guest poster, Jessica Berg.
