Aging & Wisdom Quote by Donald E. Westlake

Westlake is quietly staking a claim against the prestige myth that style arrives first, like a signature cologne sprayed over whatever plot happens to be handy. He starts with the “old campfire sense” of story, invoking a pre-literary social contract: someone leans in, others hush, and suspense does the heavy lifting. That phrase isn’t nostalgia so much as discipline. A campfire tale has to move. It can’t hide behind ornament or theory because the audience can wander off into the dark.

The subtext is craft pragmatism with a sharp elbow. Characters aren’t divine inventions; they’re functional outgrowths of narrative pressure. Even casting is framed like logistics: which actors “should best be cast” is a writer thinking in motion, hearing cadence, seeing bodies in space, testing whether a scene plays. It’s also Westlake’s reminder that character is performance, not a psychology dossier. If the part can’t be inhabited, it’s not alive.

Then he turns the knife toward language, but not in the way MFA culture often does. Words matter “more than anything else” because they manufacture the story’s atmosphere, not because they prove intelligence. The intent is almost industrial: diction as lighting design. In crime and comic caper - Westlake’s home turf - a single word choice can tilt a moment from menace to farce, from cool competence to panic. His context is mid-to-late 20th-century genre writing where “plot-driven” is used as an insult; Westlake answers by arguing that plot is the engine, and language is the smoke that tells you what kind of fire you’re standing near.