Wessel Ebersohn's Blog, page 14

Wessel visits prison

Wessel came to prison the other day. I knew nothing about it. He was there under the pretext of teaching the inmates to be entrepreneurs. I sat in. He’s not much of a teacher, I’ll say that for him. Fortunately he brought Miriam along and the inmates had the benefit of her wisdom. So the session was not a complete loss. I cannot imagine what an intelligent woman like Miriam sees in that scribbler. It beats me.

Some men want to be in prison

I was talking about prison life some time ago. There are a few inmates who prefer to be in prison. They are usually older men who have been in prison for much of their lives. They have settled into the prison routine and feel safer inside than out on the street.

Leaving prison is not easy in any society, but in ours in which a third of all adults are unemployed, it is even worse. The former prison inmate comes last in the job stakes.

Wessel Ebersohn’s sixty-eight rule of thriller writing

If you do try to write a long thriller you have to have a strong story line and a strong central character to hold the reader all the way. Even more than usual, your reader has to be able to identify strongly with the main character.

The classifier

I called Wessel Ebersohn last night to ask him how The Classifier was selling. “Very well,” he said. “It’s a damned good book.”

“You think a lot of yourself, don’t you,” I said.

“Read it yourself and you’ll see,” he told me.

“I have,” I said.

“Well?”

I hung up. I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of telling him I liked it. I can’t stand that kind of person. You have to remember that he interrupted writing about me to write this book. I have a special interest in it.

Why finctionalise stories?

Incidentally, I cornered Ebersohn when he was at the prison last week. “So tell me,” I said, “why don’t you just write the stories as a straight history of the case? Why fictionalize them?”

He grinned at me like an idiot. “So that I can improve on them.”

Can you believe such arrogance?

Wessel Ebersohn’s sixty-seventh of thriller writing

Be careful when writing long thrillers. The shorter a thriller the easier it is to keep the tension high. Many publishers want thrillers to be contained in less than 80 000 words. Apart from the cost challenges faced by publishers, it’s not a bad idea from a story telling point of view either.

Victims of murders are mostly women

The feminists say, men kill woman in almost all murders. Men respond by saying, what about Dahmer, he killed young men? What about all the female poisoners? What about the Nazi concentration camp ladies.

The truth is that these arguments really are the exceptions. Most murders are by men and the victims are women. There’s no getting away from it.

Gordon on prisons

What annoys me about this little bugger is his comments about our jails. His professional spin doctor is doing his best to paint our prisons as being worse than they are.

Are our prisons perfect? Of course they are not. But nor are prisons anywhere else. The inmates of prisons are to a large extent the rejects of society. Many of them are violent. Those who are in for life feel they have nothing to lose. With such inhabitants things are never going to be perfect.

The worst aspect of our prisons at the present time is that many of them are overcrowded. Given our national resources, the standards of food, care, distractions and medical treatment in our prisons are good. In any event, what gives a killer the right to avoid justice because he does not like the prison?

International scrutiny for prisons

Just lately our prisons have come under international scrutiny. An individual who is suspected of murdering his wife while on honeymoon in Cape Town is trying to avoid extradition from the United Kingdom. Under his circumstances I would too. I have not been there myself, but I’m sure it’s not fun being tried for murder.

Wessel Ebersohn’s sixty-sixth rule of thriller writing

Above all, keep the story line tight. Thrillers depend on the story line. Whatever else is in the book, the story is the point and no time should be wasted in the telling of it.