When Write Away was first published in 2004, I had no thought of writing a follow-up volume to it. But after a number of years during which I taught writing courses and appeared at writers’ conferences, I began to see that creating a process book that used one of my novels as an example of each step of my own process might prove useful to people who are interested in novel writing or in how this one individual writer approaches the complicated task of putting together a British crime novel.
Let me first explain how I developed my process for creating a novel.
When my first to-be-published novel was acquired by Kate Miciak at Bantam Books, I waited anxiously for an editorial letter. I knew enough about the craft of writing and the world of publishing to understand that it’s a rare occurrence for a novel to be accepted and then published without editorial input. So I understood that my work on A Great Deliverance wasn’t complete. What I didn’t see was that my work on A Great Deliverance was far from complete. The editorial letter I received from Kate three and a half months later was nine pages long, comprising twenty-two paragraphs. The twenty-two paragraphs consisted of nothing but questions. It was my job to answer these questions somehow in whatever way I saw fit within the body of the novel as I revised it. Looking back, I recall that creating the answers to these questions added in the vicinity of one hundred pages to the manuscript.
It was a task that I didn’t wish to repeat. So once I had completed it, I studied Kate’s letter to see how I could avoid having to do so much editor-requested work on my next novel. From my study of the letter, I saw that there were two areas toward which Kate directed most of her questions. One was toward a fuller examination of place, and the other was toward a fuller exploration of character.
So I asked myself: In my next novel, what can I do to illustrate place with more depth and verisimilitude? How do I make my characters more real? The answers that I developed gave me the first two elements of what ultimately became my process.
Initially, I came to understand that I would have to examine far more closely any setting I wished to use in the future. These were the days before the Internet, so the onus was on me to come up with a way to make place jump out for the reader. I did this by upping the quality and intensity of every prewriting activity I engaged in to understand a place when I was in England trying to decide where to set a novel. That meant making more copious notes about what I saw in every location, taking far more photographs, learning the flora and the fauna of any area in which I might wish to set a scene, recording all sensory impressions of a place, conducting interviews when necessary. I would also need to purchase brochures and books, Ordnance Survey maps, road atlases of the individual areas, and hundreds of postcards. I would have to learn the architectural style and the building materials of any county I was investigating, as well as the geology and the topography. I would have to listen carefully to people speaking around me. I would have to watch carefully people living their lives around me. From all of this, I would then create a setting, and I would do this in advance of any writing of the novel itself. In this way, when I placed a character in a scene of the book, I would have notes and photographs and maps and booklets to use in order to make the location real for the reader. If necessary, I would create my own map of the location, especially if I wasn’t using a place that actually exists or if I was combining several places into one for the purpose of my story.
Second, I would have to create my characters in advance. Once I had the kernel of the story (which quite often emerges from my experience of the place in which the story will occur), I would need to people that kernel with the various individuals who logically would be involved in the tale I wanted to tell. Since I write crime novels, this peopling of the story would begin with the victim and the killer and would spread out from there. But creating the characters in advance couldn’t mean just knowing that there would be—for example—five generic suspects, a generic killer, and a generic victim. Additionally, creating them in advance couldn’t mean I was merely giving them names and ages. Those pieces of information wouldn’t make them real to my editor or, actually, to me either.
So I decided I’d become my characters’ psychologist, social worker, historian, medical doctor, psychiatrist, religious adviser, guardian angel, omnipresent observer, parent, sibling, confidant, best friend, worst enemy, etc. In doing this, I would eventually know my characters better than they could ever know themselves because, in effect, I was the god who was creating them from nothing. I would mold them into real people in a document that I could turn to throughout the writing of the novel, and from this document I’d learn how each of them would act, how they would react, how they would speak, what their biases were, what they needed in life, what they wanted from life, what their agendas were, what their attitudes looked and sounded like, and what their hidden psychopathologies were.
After I did both the setting activities and the character activities, then and only then would I start the novel. This became the process I used when I wrote my second British crime novel, Payment in Blood.
The setting came from a trip I took to the Scottish Highlands and from the great house in which my husband and I stayed. It stood on quite a large property, and once I had a decent wander around the area, I realized that I could use it as the primary location for the book because it had all sorts of intriguing spots: an overgrown family graveyard, a misty loch, and an isle in the loch just to name three. Other locations also came from that trip, specifically the scenes in Hampstead and the chase scene that became the climax of the book.
Obviously, I wasn’t going to “create” Hampstead. It exists, so it had to be rendered as it truly is when it came to writing the novel. Thus, I would need notes, maps, and photographs to make that setting real. The Scottish setting, as I’ve indicated, I would base upon the great house in which we stayed as well as the land surrounding it, but I would need to map the property, and I would need to create the architectural exterior and interior of the house.
Additional locations that I’d use were places with which I was already familiar, as I’d stayed in that general area of London many times when traveling there over the years: South Kensington, Chelsea, and Belgravia. These were the spots—in close proximity to each other—where four of my five continuing characters would live: Lady Helen Clyde in South Kensington; Simon St. James and his wife, Deborah, in Chelsea; and Thomas Lynley in Belgravia. I’d already found specific streets and squares in which these individuals would have their homes. I’d prowled around enough—including staying there for five weeks one summer—that I thought I’d be able to render each neighborhood realistically, specifically Onslow Square, Eaton Terrace, and Cheyne Row.
In doing all of this and then forging ahead with the novel itself, I ended up with what I thought was a manuscript that was going to address all of Kate’s concerns. I did manage to address a number of them, for my second editorial letter was only two pages long instead of nine. It comprised nine paragraphs instead of twenty-two. That told me that I was on the right track, and if I expanded my approach for the third novel, there was a good possibility that I could create works requiring very little editor-requested revisions once I’d written a satisfactory draft. That would never be my first draft (no one has ever seen a first draft of one of my novels). But it would be a draft that I had taken as far as I felt I could without commentary or reaction from someone else.
How to expand the approach was the question. It seemed to me that I had the process of creating characters down fairly well, but there was more I could do on setting. Kate had not had any questions or concerns about the plot or the structure of the scenes, and she was fine with the dialogue. So it seemed to me that broadening my understanding of the setting, of the culture, of the traditions, and—perhaps most important—of policing was going to be worthwhile.
For my third novel—Well-Schooled in Murder—I decided to take on the challenge of writing about a British boarding school with the authority of someone who had actually attended one, which was as far from my personal experiences as an American Catholic schoolgirl as one could get. To meet the challenge, I began by locating British boarding schools that would allow me to visit while they were in session. And then I did just that, ultimately spending time at four.
The plot of the novel rose directly from those visits I made. Headmasters, teachers, and pupils—understanding why I was there—were enthusiastic about helping. Since a pupil was the designated victim, I was shown myriad places where a young person could meet an untimely end at the hands of another student or a faculty member or one of the non-teaching staff. I attended classes, was shown hidden spots where young people got into mischief, learned the vocabulary of the English boarding school world, and eventually came face-to-face with a young boy—called in to meet the headmaster for attempting to run away from the school to visit his mother, who was in the hospital—who would, in the novel, become Matthew Whateley, the child whose body is found behind the wall of the country churchyard in which the poet Thomas Gray is buried.
I had piles of information when I returned home. I used it to create my own British boarding school. I wrote the prospectus for the school; I mapped out the school grounds; I named the dormitory buildings; I placed it in West Sussex. This was, by far, the most extensive preliminary location work I’d yet done. Once I had it completed, I went on to create the characters. Once they were real, I added a new step to the process: the running plot outline, which I would write one section at a time and which would guide me through the plot and assist me when it came to keeping every detail straight.
When I had a draft that I was satisfied with—it was at least my third—I sent it to Kate. My work paid off. She accepted it without revisions and sent it off to the copy editor.
Thus my process was born, a process to which I’ve added elements as I’ve seen their usefulness to me. That’s the crucial part: as I’ve seen their usefulness to me. What’s useful to me isn’t necessarily going to be useful to anyone else, but for people for whom writing by the seat of the pants creates roadblocks and dead ends instead of thoroughfares, there might be something in these following pages that proves worthy of trial.
One might argue that I’m attempting to give you a “recipe” for writing a novel when, in reality, no recipe exists. One might also argue that I’m telling you that if you only do exactly as I’m advising you throughout this volume, you will indeed write a publishable piece of fiction. However, what I actually want to do is show you how a particular process that I’ve developed over time works for me. You can certainly follow the steps I’ll be describing in order to discover if they work for you. You can follow some of them and reject others. You can modify or tweak them in any way that meets your needs. You can reject them all and go your own way. But those three final words—your own way—constitute the point I’ll be trying to make. You’ll find the writing itself much more joyful if you develop a way to go about it.
Some writers use a process journal to do this.
Some writers like to construct a novel out of a series of scenes written in no particular order, stringing them together logically only when the entire story seems to have been told.
Some writers like to plunge into a moment of drama and then see what comes out of it.
Some writers come up with a plot and then use index cards and post them on a wall, shuffling until they have an order that best reflects what they want their novels to be about.
What I do is what I’ll be describing in this book, a process that has served me well throughout the creation of twenty-two of my twenty-four novels. As illustration of my process, I’ll be using one of my novels for all of my examples: Careless in Red. It isn’t necessary that you read or that you have read the book, but you might find it helpful to grab a copy in the event that you want to read further in a scene or a section from which I’m merely taking a few paragraphs. It’s up to you. However, do take note of the fact that there will be spoilers throughout, so if you hate spoilers and want to read the novel in advance of learning about the process I followed in creating it, please do.
As you read Mastering the Process, then, the only requirement is that you keep your mind open. As I always tell my writing students, take what you like and leave the rest.