For writers seeking a how-to: Percy’s ‘Thrill Me’

If you are a reader — and I expect you are — you might like to take a crack at writing.

I know, it’s hard work. But here is a seasoned author who makes such daunting endeavors possible, even fun.

Check out — or better still, invest in — Benjamin Percy’s “Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction” (Graywolf Press, 175 pp., $16).

This man knows not only his onions but the entire supermarket smorgasbord. Percy is contributing editor at Esquire and writes the Green Arrow and

Teen Titans series at DC Comics. Wizard at work!

“I read a lot,” he reports, “a book or two a week. Westerns by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Spy thrillers by John le Carre and Ian Fleming. Techno thrillers by Tom Clancy. …”

And after: “Many years ago, I was lucky enough to study under Barry Hannah, whose voice in person and on the page was equivalent to a jazz saxophone on an ear-burning riff. On the final day of workshop, I asked him if he had any parting wisdom, and he licked his lips and narrowed his eyes and gave me the best advice of my life: ‘Thrill me.’”

Percy notes, “Beyond pacing, there is also the issue of tone.

Flip through a novel. Take a visual inventory of the way it’s arranged. Dialogue is peppered throughout, but most of the paragraphs are meaty blocks of action and summary that house the voice of the book, a voice whose tone and diction are typically established by the end of the first paragraph and maintained thereafter.”

His confiding advice: “How do you make a tissue dance?

“You put a little boogie in it.” So the abiding counsel and encouragement of Benjamin Percy to all ambitious authors, young and old alike, is: Read.

And write!

When I was in grade school at Franklin Sherman Elementary in McLean, Virginia, my class was thrilled to host a chalk talk, an assembly at which a famous artist and author named Wesley Dennis would show us how to draw horses.

It was a great experience and we learned a lot from it. Now Benjamin Percy provides the same spark for creativity in action for the wider, grown-up world as Wesley Dennis did for his younger audiences. “Thrill Me” is an opportunity to receive a magnificent demonstration of how to write good adventure stories by an action-adventure author.

Whether or not you take the writer’s world to your heart, you will certainly admire Percy’s creativity and energy as he takes you along for a riveting ride.

Buy the book.

His message: You can do this.