Q: You have described your books as about an everyday person who gets thrust into an extreme circumstance. But I certainly think it’s possible that a book can be serious and entertaining at the same time.” There are serious books that serious people read, and then there are fun, light books that you read at the beach … and those categories don’t overlap. that this weird dichotomy has developed where we act like there are these two giant categories. “I think it’s unfortunate that it happens in academia. That doesn’t mean anything.’ I’ve had just as many colleagues who are very supportive of my writing, who read the books and buy the books. What kind of response do you get from colleagues and students about your books?īell: “I have certainly had colleagues of mine make snooty comments – ‘Oh, that’s just a mystery,’ ‘That’s a book you read at the beach.

Q: In the book, Connor gets some flak from his colleagues who congratulate him on his novel but also say they don’t read thrillers. … ‘Kill All Your Darlings’ is a book that does entertain – it’s a thriller, it’s meant to entertain, to have people turning the pages – but I think the book can also shine a light on this serious issue in academia.” But obviously, it hasn’t gone away entirely. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, we’ve made a lot of strides where we’re trying to be more informed and more aware of this. Inevitably some people take advantage of that power imbalance and it’s horrible to students, harmful to the whole university community when that happens. … There’s a power imbalance between professors and students. “The other part of the story is about the sexual harassment in academia. So the whole dynamic between Connor and his student, Madeline, a student who is more talented than him, and is more capable of writing the book than he is, that’s something that I think writing professors inevitably come across. Do you draw your stories from your experiences?īell: “There is nothing in the book directly based on anything that’s ever happened to me or that I have observed, but I’ve seen a lot of different students cross my path, students who are very talented, students who write really interesting things. Q: In “Kill All Your Darlings,” the book that Connor publishes is based on real people and events.

Could that actually be something that I did as a job as an actual adult?” So I started to really think, could writing be a profession? Not just something I was curious about, not just something that I did for fun. … Between my junior and senior year of college, I was back home in Cincinnati for the summer, I realized that I had to have a plan. Q: Is writing something you always wanted to do?īell: “I didn’t get serious about it until I was in my 20s, but it was always in my head that that was something that I could do. Here are some highlights from Bell’s recent chat with The Enquirer. Then the student returns, threatening to expose him, while the police wonder why the details in the book are similar to an unsolved murder. In the new book, Professor Connor Nye passes off a student’s manuscript as his own after she disappears. All that time in academia may have been fodder for his latest book. in creative writing from the University of Cincinnati. Xavier graduate is an associate professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, where he directs the MFA program in creative writing. When he’s not churning out novels, the St. Those are the lessons Bell imparts to his students.

“Really the outline is a security blanket, it’s a thing that I can fall back on if I feel like I don’t know where the book is going to go,” Bell said.Īnd “kill all your darlings” is writing advice from William Faulkner, meaning you may need to edit out your favorite bits. That’s true even in tightly plotted thrillers like “Kill All Your Darlings,” the latest novel from Westwood native Bell, which will be released Tuesday, July 6. “I’m always surprised by things in the book,” said USA Today best-selling author David Bell (not the same David Bell who manages the Cincinnati Reds).

Kill all your darlings