with Adam Mitzner
We are delighted to welcome novelist Adam Mitzner to Omnimystery News.
Adam's new thriller is A Case of Redemption (Gallery Books; May 2013 hardcover, ebook, and audio formats).
Today Adam writes about a topic that we often ask authors ourselves, How do you choose between a recurring character or a stand-alone?
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The most common question I received upon telling people that my second novel, A Case of Redemption, was going to be published was, "Is it a sequel to A Conflict of Interest?"
Photo provided courtesy of
Adam Mitzner
It isn't. And that's not because I don't like sequels or books that are part of a series, because I do. I've read all seven Harry Potter books and I'm a great fan of recurring characters from Hercule Poiret to Jack Reacher. But there's a philosophical difference between novelists who continue their protagonist's story through many books, and those that start new each time.
In most series, the main character's life arc is usually fixed from the outset. No matter how many murders Sherlock Holmes solves or how many schemes of world domination James Bond foils, when the next book begins, they're still the same, unchanged from their experiences in the last book.
I love those kinds of books, but it wasn't what I was going after with
A Conflict of Interest or
A Case of Redemption. Rather, my objective was to present a main character going through a life altering personal crisis amidst a page-turning plot. It was my hope that when the last page was turned, the main character was a different person than he was on page 1.
A Conflict of Interest opens with a quote from Dante about losing yourself in the woods in the middle of your life, and my aim in that book was to tell how my protagonist, Alex Miller, became lost and then found himself again. It's still a legal thriller, so there are twists and turns aplenty, but at its core
A Conflict of Interest is about a man finding himself. And once he's done that, and given all it took for him to get there, it seemed unfair, and, truth be told, a bit cruel, to make him experience another life-shattering event so soon.
And so with
A Case of Redemption, I began anew. That book's protagonist, Dan Sorensen, has many similarities to Alex Miller — they're both New York City attorneys who have lived the large law firm life — but whereas Alex's success left him empty, Dan's life was full until his wife and daughter were killed. Even though Dan Sorensen starts from a very different place than Alex Miller, his journey is just as life altering. Whereas Alex was looking for a way back to the life that he had, Dan's prior life is forever lost, and he's searching for something that will give his new life a sense of purpose.
Of course, just because I haven't continued with Alex Miller or Dan Sorensen, doesn't mean that there isn't a book (or maybe two) for each of them still to be written. After all, no one's life story is set by one event, and so there's certainly more to say about them.
Just not right now.
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Adam Mitzner grew up in East Brunswick, New Jersey, and graduated from Brandeis University with a B.A. and M.A. in politics, and from there went directly on to law school at the University of Virginia. After law school, he joined the litigation department of a large New York City law firm, and after a few more stops, is currently the head of the litigation department of Pavia & Harcourt LLP.
For more information about Adam and his work, please visit his website at AdamMitzner.com or find him on Facebook.
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A Case of Redemption
Adam Mitzner
