Beginning
Motivation
Peter James
One writer asks the other, ‘What are you up to these days?’
He replies, ‘I’m writing a novel.’
The first one says, ‘Neither am I.’
The easiest thing in the world for a writer to do is to not write. Most novelists I’ve ever talked to could procrastinate for England. I’m just as much a culprit – I could captain the British Olympic Procrastination Team. Our motto would be Anything but writing!
Social media has been a wonderful boon for all of us procrastinators. We can avoid getting those first words down by checking email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever. When we’ve exhausted that, it’s time to let the dogs out again. Then make a cup of coffee. Next we remember something we need to order on Amazon. Then with a flash of guilt, we realize we forgot to call an old friend back two days ago. We know she’ll chat for ages, but get it out the way, and afterwards we’ll have a clear morning for writing. Or what’s left of the morning. Ooops, what’s that van pulling up outside? Aha, the plumber! Have to go down and let him in, make him a cuppa, find some biscuits …
But at the end of the day there is no escaping that if we want to make a living as authors, then we need to write. A mantra that always spurs me on is You cannot edit a blank page. It’s a sign that all of us should have on our desks. But that business of getting started in the morning is always hard. Graham Greene, one of my favourite authors, had a neat solution to this issue: he would always stop writing in the middle of a sentence. That way, his first task the next the morning was to finish the sentence – and it got him straight back into the flow.
It may not sound it, but I do actually love writing, although it took me years of perseverance before I could make a living from it, and during all that time I had to do a day job. My first three novels were never published (luckily, in retrospect!) My next three, not very good spy thrillers, were published but sold a negligible amount of copies – around 1,800 in hardback and 3,000 in paperback. But I kept going because I believed in myself. I changed direction, wrote two more novels, one a kidnap story and one a political assassination which were never published. Then, with my ninth novel Possession, a supernatural thriller, I struck lucky. Every major British publisher bid for the book and it was auctioned around the world, going into twenty-three languages. Finally, twenty-one years after I had sat down to type the first line of my first novel, I was able to actually make a living as an author.
Possession hit number two on the bestseller lists. But it was to be another fourteen novels and twenty years before I finally achieved my dream of hitting that coveted Sunday Times number one spot.
I’m seldom happier than when I’m hammering away at my keyboard and the story is flowing. I especially love the satisfaction of coming up with an inventive description for something, or a character I’m pleased with, or a plot twist that makes me punch the air with excitement. But it’s not been easy and writing never is. The hours are long and often lonely, and when I’ve finished I’m a bag of nerves waiting for my agent and my editor’s reactions – and then, much later, the reactions of my readers. Those nervous peeps at Amazon to see how the star ratings are going. Followed by an anxious wait for the first chart news … Plus the knowledge that I’m on a treadmill to turn out a new book every year – and my one golden rule is that with each new novel I want to raise the bar.
So, what is my motivation? Simple. First and foremost, it is the way I know best how to make a living. And that I want to do my best to try to please my loyal readers by making each book I write better than the last. I could list a dozen other factors, such as getting even with teachers at school who never thought I would amount to anything. Getting my revenge on the bullies who tormented me at school. A sense that I have something to say. A mission to try to understand human nature and why people do the things that they do. It is all of these and more. But at the end of the day my wife and I need food on our table and our animals need food in their bowls.
The late, odious film director Michael Winner was once asked by a precious actor, whom he had instructed to walk down a street, what exactly his motivation was in walking down the street. Displaying all his normal charm, Winner bellowed at him, ‘You’re walking down that street because I’m fucking paying you to walk down that street!’
Oscar Wilde, another writer whose work I love and admire, lamented on his deathbed, ‘I’ve lived beyond my means so I suppose I will have to die beyond my means.’ His drive to produce his great work was produced largely from his need to make money. He used his gruelling American lecture tours to help boost his sales there, and once famously said, ‘Of course, if one had the money to go to America, one would not go.’
Helping his nation to win the Second World War did little to help Sir Winston Churchill’s bank account. Having financially stretched himself buying his beloved country estate, Chartwell, much later he began writing the first of his six-volume opus, The Second World War, because he needed the money.
In 1974, scammed out of everything he had by a Ponzi scheme and left deeply in debt, Jeffery Archer penned Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less in a last-ditch attempt to stave off bankruptcy. It worked, launching a career that would make him one of the richest novelists on the planet.
It is pretty simple. If you are a professional author, money is going to be pretty high up your motivation list. Over the years I’ve met a number of people who told me they have writers’ block. But I cannot remember a single author who writes for a living ever telling me that. What other profession complains of block – other than perhaps plumbers? You don’t hear of solicitors complaining they have solicitors’ block, or taxi drivers saying they have cab drivers’ block, or accountants having accountants’ block.
I can’t imagine any professional author I know saying to his or her family, ‘Sorry everyone, I have writer’s block, I’m afraid there’s no food today.’
Sure, writing isn’t easy – if it was, everyone would be doing it. As it is, a great number of people do, mistakenly, think it’s a doddle. Margaret Atwood tells of the time she was at a cocktail party and had a what-do-you-do-what-do-you-do conversation with a rather pompous man. In response to her question he said, ‘I’m a brain surgeon. What do you do?’
When she replied that she was an author, he immediately responded, somewhat arrogantly, ‘Actually I’m planning to write a novel when I retire.’
‘How very interesting,’ Atwood retorted. ‘Because when I retire, I’m planning to be a brain surgeon.’
I often wonder, did he ever write that novel? And if he did, was it published? I’m doubtful of both, for one simple reason: lack of motivation. As a successful brain surgeon he was probably wealthy, living a nice lifestyle. In his mid-sixties, was he seriously going to lock himself away in his study for months and months of hard grind, trying to forge a whole new career, then go on the road and engage in social media? And then spend the next ten years writing more books to try to build his name? I doubt it, because I just don’t think he would have had that crucial motivation.
Thirty-five novels on, I still get a huge buzz out of the page proofs arriving. Out of seeing my publisher’s first cover ideas. It was a dream when I first began writing that one day I would see a copy of my book on an airport bookshelf. Now that dream comes true pretty much every time I enter an airport bookstore. I know I’ve been lucky, but I also I know how easy it is for an author’s sales to slide if they don’t keep up their standards. I guess my biggest motivation of all today is to keep that dream.
Getting Started
Janet Laurence
You may have an investigative character or a fiendishly clever way of disposing of someone buzzing around your brain. If this is the case, what are you waiting for?
Maybe you enjoy reading crime novels and feel that you could write one as good if not better than the ones you have come across. That is how Colin Dexter started during a wet holiday in Wales. His chosen setting was Oxford, a city he knew very well. The outcome was Last Bus to Woodstock, which introduced Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis. The rest is history. All you need is the right idea.
Ideas are everywhere, you only need to open your mind to the possibilities. Read the newspapers, browse the library, listen to people talking, in the train, in the office, at social gatherings; there will be stories that can form the basis of a crime novel. Look for motives, methods, and how crimes are solved. Do beware, though, of opening yourself to being sued through not disguising the source of your plot and characters.
The best crime novels provide characters that grab the reader and drive the story. They need to have attractive qualities but also flaws. Think about your friends, what makes you like them enough to forgive their drawbacks? Who are the people you meet or read about in your daily life that you remember and why? We are not talking background or appearance here, but inbred qualities. You need characters who will behave in ways that will take your plot in interesting directions and that the reader will enjoy spending time with. The investigator you create, whether a member of the CID murder squad, a forensic pathologist, or someone unofficial, needs to be interested in the human psyche, someone who can explore questionable situations and puzzle out unexpected answers.
There must be suspects with a motive for murder, one of whom actually is the murderer and must occupy a reasonable space in the action. No bringing in the culprit just before the end. Finally you need the victim, or victims. Often there will need to be a second victim, or even a third. There may be one or two subplots which somehow link in with, or reflect in some way, the main plot.
The actual crime doesn’t have to be complicated: it can be a blow to the skull with a blunt instrument; a hit-and-run with a car; a push off a balcony or through a window. Less simple will be poison; a gangland kidnap and torture before death; a fire that makes identification of the victim difficult; and so on. Your imagination can provide any number of other examples.
Every crime has a motive. What has driven someone to kill? In your novel there should be several candidates who can have a motive for wishing the victim dead. They are the suspects. It is difficult to keep the reader guessing as to which one was responsible with fewer than four suspects, though Minette Walters has in one instance done an excellent job with only three. However, more than six suspects and the reader, sometimes even the writer, can get confused.
Alongside motivation your investigator has to consider the evidence surrounding the murder scene. These days the official investigation involves forensic teams minutely scanning both body and area and sending samples to a laboratory for analysis. Personally, I don’t feel equipped to enter this world and these days much prefer to set my crime novels in the past, with three novels featuring the Italian artist Canaletto and two more set in the Edwardian era with Ursula Grandison as the lead character. I like to make my investigator use eyes, ears and brain to assess what the scene offers as evidence, rather than looking to science. It is possible, though, for a modern unofficial investigator to manage without the forensic science aspect.
Crime novels rose to popularity in the Twenties. Most relied on the puzzle element in their story to keep the reader engrossed. Some were fiendishly clever. In the Thirties, what is known as the Golden Age of crime writing, female authors such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Josephine Tey wrote detective novels with strong and memorable characters. Their investigators Lord Peter Wimsey, Albert Campion and Inspector Grant, have remained popular; new editions of their books are constantly being produced and their influence has continued into the present day.
Some element of puzzle, as superbly demonstrated by Agatha Christie, continues to have appeal. It is taken for granted that readers will look for clues to enable them to work out who ‘did it’ before the writer reveals the answer. There will be ‘red herrings’, clues that suggest the perpetrator is one of the other suspects, alongside subtle references that keep the reader in the dark until the denouement. There will usually be a number of ‘twists’, turning what has been suggested as the answer to the mystery on its head, maybe more than once, with a stunning ‘revelation’ providing the climax to the book. When I told P. D. James that I’d be hopeless at writing a crime novel as I could never sort out who ‘did it’ in any of the books I so enjoyed, she said, ‘It’s easier when you know who “did it”.’ This is true, though sometimes the writer will change their mind as to which suspect was the murderer. Ruth Rendell once said she had sometimes changed the perpetrator as she approached the end of a book: ‘If I can fool myself, then I’ll fool the reader as well.’
The setting and background to a crime novel can be anything that fires the writer’s imagination; it can look at a social problem such as knife killing or forms of dementia, reveal how a cruise ship is run or a television programme put together, or consider the need for food banks. Readers love to learn while enjoying a good read.
Most good crime novels will involve a theme, usually subtly suggested rather than shouted out. Writers such as Philip Pullman and Val McDermid say that they discover their theme while they are writing the book.
The denouement of a crime novel has to offer a resolution, one that will satisfy the reader. Many of today’s most successful crime novels work on a number of different levels but the ending has to bring the various strands together. Subplots should be settled before the final revelation. The main questions that have been raised need to be answered but there can be others left to the reader’s imagination, or that may provide hooks for another crime novel that includes a character or two from your initial one. Many authors find the kernel of their next plot emerging as they get towards the end of writing the current book.
To sum up, you need an interesting setting for your story, a strong plot, believable characters and a resolution that surprises whilst it makes sense of everything that has gone before. Writing a crime novel is hard work – Ian Rankin once said that being a crime writer was absolutely great, apart from the actual writing. There will be times, though, when the characters come alive, the plot explodes with new ideas, when that elusive ending is staring you in the face and you know that writing crime novels is the best thing in the world.
Finding Ideas
Freeman Wills Crofts
If we’re lucky we shall begin with a really good idea. This may be one of five kinds. Firstly, it may be an idea for the opening of our book: some dramatic situation or happening to excite and hold the reader’s interest. The standard way of finding a body in the first chapter, if hackneyed, is hard to beat.
Secondly, our idea may be for the closing or climax of our book. This must also be dramatic. As an example I suggest the well-known situation in which Tom, who thinks Jack is dead and has impersonated him, is unexpectedly confronted with Jack in a police office or court of law.
Our idea, thirdly, may be for a good way of committing a crime, probably a murder. It should be novel and ingenious – but not too ingenious – and if possible concerned with things with which the man in the street is familiar. This is probably the most usual way of starting work on a book. Every detective fan will think of dozens of examples.
A fourth kind of idea on which to build a book is that we shall write about some definite crime, such as smuggling, gun-running, coining, arson, or frauds in high finance.
Lastly, our idea may be simply to place the action in a definite setting, such as a mining setting, or a golf or fishing setting, or to lay our scenes in a certain place: a bus or an office, an opium den or Canterbury Cathedral.
We may of course build our book on some idea which does not fall under one of these heads. For instance, Dr Austin Freeman’s book, The Red Thumb Mark, was probably built on the idea that a fingerprint is not necessarily convincing evidence.
This then is the first stage in our work: getting the idea to start on. Our second stage is more difficult: we have to build up the plot on our idea.
We do this in a very simple, but very tedious way: we ask ourselves innumerable questions and think out the answers. One question invariably leads to another, and as we go on our plot gradually takes shape.
Sources of Inspiration
Nicholas Blake
Imagination at full stretch: emotional involvement … During the Thirties, I saw my little son narrowly missed by a road hog. Suppose he had been killed, and the police were unable to trace the hit-and-run driver? Such was the germ of The Beast Must Die. I tried to imagine myself into the mind of a man – a widower whose only child had been killed like this: how would he find the culprit, and how might he set about destroying him? Revenge, incidentally, seems to be the motive in quite a few of my detection novels, though I am not an overly vindictive person. Perhaps, if I had lived in the early seventeenth century, I would have turned out revenge dramas after the Jacobean pattern. But the point is that, if The Beast Must Die has a sharper edge than most of my thrillers, it is because it sprang from that initial involvement of my emotions, and because I was enabled thus to take the hero’s plight at a more serious imaginative level. This book has the one first-rate plot I have ever invented – a plot, by the way, which was no great shakes till, halfway through the book, I suddenly saw how the hero could use his diary.
The plot of A Tangled Web, on the other hand, was given to me gratis – by ‘The Case of the Hooded Man’, as Sir Patrick Hastings called it in his Memoirs, the first case in which that celebrated KC led for the defence. At Eastbourne early this century a policeman was shot by a burglar – a clergyman’s son who bore the most remarkable resemblance, in temperament and actions, to Hornung’s ‘Raffles’. Sir Patrick was chiefly concerned, in his book, with the legal aspects of the case. So I could exercise all my imagination in reconstructing the character of this young burglar, of his beautiful and innocent mistress, and of the ‘friend’ who proved to be their downfall – a man who, even through Sir Patrick’s factual account, shines out luridly as the nearest thing to Iago I have ever heard about in real life. My emotions, even at the distance of 45 years, became thoroughly involved with the burglar’s girl as I interpreted her. After the book was finished, inquiries among retired policemen who had taken part in the case discovered that several things I had imagined about the Iago character, though not mentioned at the trial, were in fact true.
The germ of A Penknife in my Heart was also given me. A friend suggested a story in which two men, previously unknown to each other and both needing to get rid of certain human encumbrances, meet by chance and decide to swap victims. Neither my friend nor I had read Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, or seen the film Hitchcock made of it. Later, I found that Miss Highsmith’s treatment was entirely different from mine; but its starting-point was identical – and, horror of horrors, I had given two of my characters the same Christian names as she had used for two of hers. The plot of A Penknife in my Heart is the most ‘fictional’ of the three presented here, and the most diagrammatic. To put flesh on it, I had to work myself into the minds of two very different men – a coarse brute and a weaker, more sensitive character, plunge as deep as I could into their weird relationship, and be each of them as he made his murder-attempt (upon a complete stranger), and live with them through the aftermath. It needed a pretty strenuous stretching of the invention.
Making Choices
Anthea Fraser
Crime writing is a broad church, offering a choice of police procedural, supernatural, hard-boiled, ‘noir’, psychological or romantic suspense, espionage, thrillers or whodunits, though sometimes the sub-genres can blur at the edges and overlap. I came to crime writing myself by way of paranormal books, which were enjoying a vogue at the time. When public interest started to wane, my agent asked if I’d like to change genre, and realizing there’d been a crime in each of the paranormals, I found I’d already made my choice.
It’s important to remember that although you’ll be writing over a period of months, the reader might take only a few days to read the entire book, so the same ‘tone of voice’ should be kept throughout. Sometimes I can tell where I’ve stopped for the day by a very slight but noticeable change of style, so I always begin by rereading (and heavily editing) what I wrote the previous day to ensure it flows without a break.
The main aim, of course, is to grab the reader’s attention from page one, and there are various devices to achieve this. You could start with a prologue covering an event that, unknown to the characters, has already happened. Or begin with an explosive incident that hasn’t yet happened, but which the reader is awaiting with trepidation until it occurs later in the book. Or you could have a catalytic event taking place in ‘real time’ which is the actual starting point of the story – such as the discovery of a dead body.
Conflict is, of course, a necessary component to a good story, whether between lovers, police colleagues or family members, and can pave the way to any number of situations, often resulting in murder. However the maxim ‘Write about what you know’ just isn’t possible when you’re dealing with murder, and anyway, what price imagination? I turn it round to ‘Know about what you write’, and try to make sure I check my facts – thoroughly – easy these days with the internet. When writing a police procedural, however, there really is no substitute for personal contact with a friendly officer who is prepared to answer any number of queries you might raise. What’s more, they seem to enjoy it, and I used to send my contact a copy of each book to thank him for ‘helping with my enquiries’!
If you’re lucky, you might find your characters already waiting in the wings, fully formed and ready to go, but failing that it’s useful to keep a ‘Faces and Places’ file containing photos torn out of magazines or newspapers of interesting faces (preferably not anyone well known) and the interiors of houses, or town or village streets along which you can imagine your characters walking. If any of these are applicable for the plot you have in mind, you can stick them up on a cork board in front of you. It’s helpful to look at them and think, ‘What would you do in this situation?’
Character names are extremely important and often people won’t come to life if you choose the wrong name. Sometimes, as the characters develop, it might be necessary to change one halfway through – no problem with the Replace All key. Since names go in and out of fashion, consideration must be given to the age and social status of the character. I also try to avoid any that are unisex or begin with the same letter, which might cause confusion.
The setting you choose is crucial; personally I’ve found it gives me more freedom to use imaginary locations. I do, however, picture them in a particular part of the country, and try to ensure the made-up place names fit in with those in the appropriate locality. Then I draw town plans, filling in shops, police station, church, etc., so that I know in which direction a character will turn when he comes out of his gate and – important in establishing an alibi – how long it will take to get from A to B. I also do plans of the main house in the story, again with the aim of being able to ‘see’ the action taking place. The reader should feel completely at home there, able to follow the characters as they move from room to room.
A series might require the invention of a complete county, in which case I draw a map of it, positioning towns and villages at random and working out the travelling distance between them in both mileage and time. I can then choose the one that best fits the plot, and if there doesn’t happen to be a town in a suitable place, I can always add a new one!
It can be quite a challenge to invent someone who’ll mature and develop and whose personal life will progress through an indefinite number of books – someone, in short, whom you could live with. Your characters will, of course, age and develop as you go along. Relationships will be formed or ended, family members might die, couples divorce and children be born.
One problem with a series can be timing – how much has elapsed between the end of one book and the beginning of the next. My DCI Webb series lasted for sixteen books and it became increasingly difficult to keep track of children’s ages and how long ago a certain event had taken place. So I invented my own time zone, in which the first book took place in year one and the second in the following year. The characters had met each other in year minus one or two. I could then check back in later books and life became easier.
After those sixteen books I wanted a rest from police procedure so wrote a stand-alone for the first time in years. And since I intended to limit police presence to the minimum, it had to involve a cold case that wouldn’t tread on their toes, a past murder in the family that had never been solved. Families fascinate me, the dynamics between the different members, the tensions and unsuspected jealousies.
After this book I wrote another stand-alone, but when I embarked on what was intended to be a third, I began to miss the comfortable familiarity of a series and decided to expand it into a new one, which became the first of the Rona Parish books. I didn’t want to return to police themes – in any case forensics had moved on in the past couple of years and I was out of date – but I wanted my protagonist to have a legitimate reason for repeatedly coming up against crime, so I made her a journalist and biographer. Both these seemingly harmless occupations led her, over the course of ten books, into considerable danger.
I have continued to slot stand-alones in between the series books. There’s a sense of freedom in being able to visit an entirely different location with totally new characters who will obligingly tidy up their problems within the covers of that one book.
A perennial question every writer faces is ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ They can, of course, come from anywhere – a snippet in the newspaper, an overheard conversation – and don’t discount dreams! I dreamed the idea for one novel and several short stories, so I keep a notebook and pen by my bed and make a quick note of any that might be useful before they fade.
If the title comes to mind first, that’s a great advantage and points you in the right direction. There are various ways of choosing a suitable title. I occasionally use quotes – and was berated by no fewer than three fellow crime writers for choosing A Necessary End, when their own books, also under that title, were still at the proof stage.
The title of Whistler’s Lane, one of the paranormal novels, actually evolved from looking at the portrait of Whistler’s Mother, when I toyed with the fantasy that the whistler referred to was not a proper name. Ghostly figures in a dark countryside came to mind, and the plot developed from there. Another time I heard someone on the radio refer to a Macbeth prophecy, i.e. a self-fulfilling one, and filed it away for future use.
In terms of choosing titles, my easiest ride was with the Green Grow the Rushes series. The song itself has appeared in many forms in ancient and modern languages from Hebrew onwards, and the first time it was written down in English was in 1625. Whatever the original meaning of the verses – and they’ve become distorted over the years, like a game of Chinese Whispers – I’ve always thought they were most evocative. Who were the April Rainers, the Nine Bright Shiners, the Lily-White Boys?
I’d originally intended to use two at most, but as I wrote, more ideas offered, until I realized I’d have to use them all. They weren’t written in order, but as ideas presented themselves. It was pure chance that the final three were Ten, Eleven and Twelve, and I have to admit Eleven that Went Up to Heaven was quite a challenge! Short of killing off an entire cricket side, it took me some time to come up with a hopefully convincing mass murder.
I used to plan my books meticulously, knowing how far the plot would progress in every chapter, though obviously changes were made as I went along. (In one case an old lady was due to be murdered, but I became fond of her so I spared her and killed someone else!) Then the time came when I was in such a hurry to start writing that I couldn’t be bothered planning and jumped straight in, pushing the plot ahead of me chapter by chapter. It all worked out in the end, and that is basically the way I write now – a rough idea of what’s going to happen, but letting the details emerge as I go along. Unlike most of my fellow writers, I never do drafts. I prefer to stick to the original, though since I can’t read a page without making alterations, it will inevitably have changed considerably by the time I reach the end.
It has been said that writing is 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration, and certainly it’s no good sitting back and waiting till you feel in the mood. If inspiration doesn’t come, I write anything, however unsatisfactory, like working in a new biro. Then, when the flow is re-established, I go back and polish it. And I always try to stop for the day at an interesting point, which will give me the impetus to get going the following day.
Putting Murder on the Page
Ann Granger
‘How do you write a book?’ an earnest woman once asked me. I gave the usual reply: plots, characters, etc. A puzzled frown appeared on her brow. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I meant, how can you put it all together?’ She mimed writing with a pen.
I had been expecting the often-asked ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ But she wasn’t worried about that. I realized she thought of ‘a book’ as a sort of mental Meccano structure. Perhaps, in some ways, it is. But I confess that, at the time, I was stumped as to how to reply in a single sentence.
Writing crime fiction is a slippery subject to pin down. No two writers go about it in the same way. How can we? The books themselves vary so much. One of the attractions of writing mystery/crime has always been, for me, that it is an umbrella covering such a variety of topics, interests, historical periods, and so on.
So, once our thought processes start jogging along, what happens next? Our books are all different. We are all different. We work in different ways.
The only explanation that I can give as to how write a book is to say that it begins by growing in my mind. That does sound rather uncomfortable, if not downright dangerous. But what starts as a germ of a plot with its characters, theme, and so forth does finally threaten to take over and exclude all else. So discipline is very important. Be in charge of the book and don’t let the book become your master.
I must add that writers tend to think a lot before they write anything. Some people might go for long walks, in order to be undisturbed when working out ideas or seeking the right turn of phrase. I’ve been told the poet Wordsworth (though not, of course, a crime writer) used this method, rushing back home to write down the resulting verse before he forgot it again. I’ve had some brilliant ideas in the middle of the night and forgotten them by morning. Or I’ve switched on the light and jotted them down, only to be disappointed when reading the scrawl by the cold light of day. Agatha Christie recommended doing the washing-up as a way of concentrating the mind. Or perhaps the creative activity takes place while staring into space – my own specialty.
There is no guarantee some brilliant idea will come to mind. But, like Mr Micawber, I hope something will turn up.
I have heard of writers who produce a minimum number of words each and every day, come rain or shine. If that is what works for them, excellent. It wouldn’t work for me. I should probably begin each day by binning every word I’d written the previous one.
There are the meticulous planners, whom I admire greatly but couldn’t emulate. There are others who sketch out a plot in general terms, perhaps under headings. Then there are those who know where the starting point is and can see the finishing post in the distance, but don’t know exactly how they are going to get there and so scramble over the obstacles as they go along, in a sort of literary Grand National course.
I start by jotting down a few general notes. I have a location in mind and a set of characters. I work on the principle that if a development in the plot comes as a surprise to me, then, with any luck, it will surprise the reader. I do know the identity of the victim when I begin, and I know the identity of the murderer. If you have created distinctive characters they will helpfully make their own contribution to the mix. ‘Distinctive’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘odd’. A few odd characters are nice, but a complete cast of oddities is confusing. Nor is it enough for a character simply to be eccentric. There has to be some form of reason at work, however bizarre.
It can help to make a few practical notes concerning the colour of a character’s hair or eyes, and also about age. Write down his or her date of birth. Bear in mind, if possible, where your plot is in terms of the working week. Offices and some businesses tend to be closed at the weekend after Saturday lunchtime. If a suspect or a witness is at work, it is no use your detective going to his house during the day.
Setting is important, and I have spotted a few useful locations for scenes of crime while travelling on trains, gazing at the passing countryside. I think to myself, ‘I could put a body there!’
Some years ago I went to the Chelsea Flower Show on a particularly wet day. Everyone there had crowded into the main marquee in a free-for-all. Who, in those circumstances, would be interested in a couple of strangers? Each person there was looking out for him or herself. I thought to myself that a murder could be committed there and no one would notice. The victim, mortally stricken, couldn’t collapse on the ground at once, not in that press. He would slump, allowing the murderer to grasp him and propel him towards the exit, telling everyone who might show surprise that someone had fainted and ‘needed some air’. The surrounding crowd would recognize an emergency and part just enough to allow assailant and victim through.
I went home and wrote a novel called Flowers for His Funeral in which the murder takes place very much in that way.
Make sure you have enough plot. This will probably mean at least one, even two, subplots. But be careful that minor characters don’t become more interesting than the main ones.
I have learned to watch out for a few things over the years. A single page may prove to be a minefield strewn with repetitions and contradictions. Reading aloud is very helpful here. A repeated phrase, for example, may not leap out on the computer screen. But if you have used one, or given the same adjective more than once in a single passage, you will hear it at once if you listen when it’s read aloud.
A section of dialogue can also benefit from being subjected to this test. Speech patterns are important and all the characters should not sound the same.
In my early days I read whole chunks of the day’s output into a tape recorder and played it back. Hearing your voice reciting chunks of your own prose comes as a bit of shock. I remember one of my offspring, on wandering into the room when the tape was running, saying unkindly that I sounded as if I am doing an impression of the Queen’s Christmas speech. I don’t record passages now, but I still read a page or two aloud, when it seems helpful.
When writing my early books, I found myself occasionally in danger of becoming addicted to a particular consonant, especially when thinking of names for characters. Possibly I am alone in that. I know I once wrote a whole chapter in which all the characters, including the corpse, had a name beginning with the same letter. Luckily, I realized in time but it was an alarm bell, and I still watch out for it.
Whether aloud or silently, always read through carefully more than once. Familiarity can be a trap here. You can find yourself skimming over whole pages, the text flashing by in a blur. So it helps to put the finished work aside and go away physically. Go on holiday, tackle the garden; just take yourself away from the work itself. Believe me, it’s much easier to spot the mistakes or glitches after a break away from your creation.
Intensity in Crime Writing
Natasha Cooper
The one thing – and the only thing – that a crime novel must not do is bore the reader. The old rules about what you may and may not include have gone. You can identify the villain in the first chapter if you want; you can have lots of blood or no blood; you can have any number of identical twins or secret passages; you don’t even have to have a killer. But you must keep your reader interested.
As you plan your novel, you may find the following ten points helpful.
1. Know your characters
You will find it easier to write engaging fiction if your characters feel real to you. Get to know them before you start writing. Who are they? What do they like? What do they fear? What do they want? Who do they piss off? What do they look like? What do they eat? What music do they listen to? What films do they watch? Are they snowflakes? Are they bullies? What are their weaknesses? What are their private tragedies? For what would they kill?
You don’t need to tell the reader everything, but you need to know it all. Some writers find that it helps to chat to their characters as they potter about, and no one looks weirdly at anyone talking in the street now because they assume everyone’s on the phone.
2. Write in scenes
To keep your novel vivid, you need to set the scene for each piece of action or dialogue or introspection. So think, before you write a word, about where your character is, who else is there, what can they see, what can they hear and smell and taste and feel. Once again, you don’t have to tell the reader everything, but you need to know it all so that you can select the most telling details to share with the reader.
3. Don’t waste time
It is all too easy when writing a novel to prattle on without much point, especially if you’ve given yourself a daily word-count target. Don’t. Think about why you are including the scene you’re writing. Is it to establish a character? Is it to advance the plot? Is it to heighten the tension? Is it to give the reader necessary information?
If your scene does not do at least two of these things, consider binning it.
Giving information is one of the hardest aspects of crime writing. Some readers love innumerable details about weapons, or the stripping of bones by pathologists, or the operation of complex financial frauds. Others don’t. They can, of course, skip anything that bores them, but you need to be judicious about the amount of information you give and the way in which you give it. Explanatory dialogue can be dangerous, and it often sounds impossibly artificial to the reader’s internal ear. If you need your reader to know about the speed at which a Kalashnikov pumps out bullets, it is probably best to announce it straightforwardly rather than to have characters sitting over a beer in a pub, with one saying, ‘I’ve always wondered how many bullets a Kalashnikov fires every second’, the second replying, ‘Well, it rather depends on the year it was made; some Kalashnikovs fire at …’
4. Realistic dialogue
If your characters sound like cyborgs, or DIY manuals, or pompous sermonizers, you will lose the reader. It is well worth speaking each piece of your dialogue aloud and possibly even recording some of it so that you can hear how it sounds.
Make sure that each character’s idiom is distinct from the others. Ideally the reader should be able to work out who is speaking without your adding ‘John joked jaggedly’ or ‘Maggie muttered murderously’.
Consider confining the relevant verbs to ‘said’ or possibly ‘shouted’ or ‘whispered’. Synonyms for ‘said’ can seem absurd. One historical novel published in the 1950s included, ‘“Honeycakes,” Jenny ejaculated as she sat among the gillyflowers.’ A more modern infelicity is: ‘“I don’t care,” she deadpanned.’ ‘I don’t care’ is quite enough on its own.
Every group, whether social or professional, has its own private language, and using the relevant ones will add authenticity to your novel. If you have the time and resources to hang around your target group and listen, you will pick up the right words and phrases; but you may not have time and so it’s worth finding a single individual – police officer, firefighter, lawyer, gang member – and asking how he or she would describe something specific. You don’t have to write your whole scene in the relevant language, but adding a few unexpected but accurate words and phrases will always help to convince your readers that they are reading something real. If your novel is historical, it’s well worth looking up letters and diaries of the period so that you can add an accurate sound to the dialogue.
5. Research
Don’t do too much research too soon. The risk is that you will include much too much detail in your novel. Read around your subject and then write, leaving space within square brackets labelled something like [add scientific detail here]. Experts are remarkably helpful and will give just enough information in reply to a specific question to add authenticity to a novel without overloading it. You are more likely to be able to ask the right question once you have finished your first draft.
6. Tension
All novels need tension to persuade the reader to turn the pages, but crime needs a lot of it. The most straightforward way of generating tension in your fiction is by setting up a question and delaying the answer for as long as possible. Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet provides a wonderful masterclass in how to do it. The Chorus tells the audience at the beginning that the play concerns ‘a pair of star-crossed lovers’, who ‘with their death bury their parents’ strife’. We know from the beginning that Romeo and Juliet will die but not how or when. Throughout the play there are scenes in which one or other is likely to be killed, but again and again death is postponed. By the last scene the audience is in the state most of us know when waiting in for the plumber all day, leaping up at the sound of a van in the street or a knock at the door, perpetually thwarted and twitchy beyond belief. You need to generate that kind of edginess in your reader.
7. Emotional intensity
No one can live in a state of unremitting drama, and any novel that makes its characters do that will lose credibility. You need to vary the emotional intensity, interspersing action scenes with reflective ones. Never forget that one emotion intensifies its opposite. If you are about to plunge your readers into tragedy, think about softening them up with humour first.
8. Adverbs
Many writers are tempted to add colour to their narratives with adverbs, but it’s a mistake. Adverbs diminish intensity. Don’t write ‘he ran breathlessly, hurriedly and clumsily to rescue the child from the fire’. Instead describe his headlong rush, perhaps showing how he trips and rips his skin on a piece of broken glass in the grass. Blood will drip unnoticed from the cuts as he forces himself on, panting and trying to control his banging heart. He can feel the heat of the flames on his face now and has to brush sparks off his clothes as he surges forward. The child’s screams drill into his brain as he trips again, spraining his ankle. Limping, he makes it to the burning building just as the child falls from the open window, missing his outstretched hands by inches.
9. Naming characters
When you are considering what to call your characters, do think about the reader. Similar-looking – or similar-sounding – names can make it hard to keep each person distinct. You will know who they are, but for the reader Dave, Dan and Dick will merge into each other, as will Maeve, Steve and Niamh.
10. Moving characters around
Don’t worry about getting your characters from room to room or even city to city. Use what filmmakers call the jump cut. In a novel this can be achieved by ending one scene in the attic bedroom of a flat in Rome and then beginning the next with a short comment about the new venue; for example, ‘The Whispering Gallery of St Paul’s Cathedral in London gave Jim an excellent view of his target.’
Above all, enjoy planning your novel and like your characters. Even the wicked ones.
Openings
John Harvey
The opening sentences of Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, published in 1929, are these: ‘I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit.’
It’s all there: the directness, the way it buttonholes you instantly, a hand taking hold of the lapel of your jacket while the voice speaks confidently, not overloudly, into your ear. And the poetry: the poetry of the vernacular, the rhythm of real speech.
The first sentence in his first novel. I wonder how many times he rolled the sheet of paper out of the typewriter, read it through, tossed it over his shoulder, lit another cigarette, set a fresh sheet in place and tried again? I wonder if he’d been testing it in his head at a little after four, four-thirty, those mornings it was impossible to get back to sleep? I wonder if he had it all pat from the start?
At the time of writing that first novel, Hammett was thirty-five years old. He’d been an operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a private detective working for an vast organization with government connections. He had twice enlisted in the army, world wars one and two, and it was during the first of these periods that he was diagnosed with the tuberculosis that would seriously affect his well-being for years. When he was no longer with the Pinkertons, realizing, perhaps, that henceforth he would be physically less active, he enrolled at a Business College and set about learning the business of writing.
Going back to the opening of Red Harvest made me think of the distinctive ways in which other crime books begin. Some, like the Hammett, are short and punchy, grabbing the attention at the same time as having a close-to-perfect satisfaction of their own. Others are longer, with a deliberately complex sentence that winds you along its length and so into both the style and the narrative. Others are paragraph-length and draw you in more carefully, and often then stay in the memory – sometimes after the book itself has been read, enjoyed and set aside.
Opening lines matter. Here is a selection of my favourite single sentence beginnings, some of which will be familiar, others perhaps less so.
They threw me off the hay truck about noon.
James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.
George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle
When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss
Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake.
James Sallis, Drive
When she was killed by three chest knife blows in a station car park, Megan Harpur had been on her way home to tell her husband that she was leaving him for another man.
Bill James, Roses, Roses
And here are two of my favourites of the longer variety, each humorous in its own way. The first is, of course, a well-known classic, the second by Brian Thompson, a writer whose forays into crime writing deserve to be better known and appreciated than I think they are.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Mrs Evans was teaching me the tango. As it happened, I already knew the rudiments of this exciting dance, but never as interpreted by Mrs Evans, naked save for her high heels and some Mexican silver earrings – a present, she claimed, from Acapulco. The high heels were there to add grace and I suppose authenticity, but even with them on, the lady’s head barely reached my chin. We swooped about the room, exceedingly drunk, to the most famous tango of them all, the Blue one. It was past two in the morning and the rain that had been forecast had arrived as grounded cloud, moping blindly about the streets, tearful and incoherent. But we were okay – we were up on the third floor, looking down on the damned cloud and having a whale of a time. Mrs Evans was warm to the touch and her make-up was beginning to melt. For some reason a piece of Sellotape was stuck to her quivering bottom, and as we danced I tried to solve this small but endearing mystery. It came to me at last; it was her sister’s birthday and earlier in the evening she had parcelled up a head scarf, some knickers and a Joanna Trollope paperback.
Brian Thompson. Ladder of Angels
It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Dr Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter. Murder is a serious business. The slightest slip may be disastrous. Dr Bickleigh had no intention of risking disaster.
Some women give birth to murderers, some go to bed with them, and some marry them. Lina Aysgarth had lived with her husband for nearly eight years before she realized that she was married to a murderer.
Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.
‘Something Should Happen Now’: Narrative Hooks
Peter Robinson
I always get nervous when I’m asked to write about the craft of fiction. As I teach creative writing courses often, I have read a lot of books on the subject. You know the sort of thing: 5 Shortcuts to Perfect Plotting, 3 Techniques for Creating Award-winning Characters, 10 Simple Steps to Writing the Greatest Crime Novel Ever Written, and so on. But when I write, I don’t think about these books; I just follow my gut instinct. As a jazz pianist needs to practise scales before moving on to wild improvisations, so a writer needs to become familiar with and internalize the basics of his craft in order to set off on a flight of fancy. For what is a novel, after all, but a flight of fancy? You may have studied plotting, structure, dialogue, description, action and character as separate strands of the writing process, and done all the requisite exercises, but when you start working on a book, they all tend to blur into one another, and when the writing is going well most writers rarely stop to make sure they have adhered to the three-, five- or seven-act structure, got their plot points in the right places or put in enough narrative hooks. When it comes right down to it, I can’t really know what will hook ‘the reader’, but I do know what hooks me. And I’m a reader, too, so maybe I’m my own best audience?
What is a narrative hook? Perhaps the best way to think of it is as anything that keeps a reader turning the pages. The writer’s least favourite question is ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ Usually when people ask that, they mean the outlandish overall concept for the book, such as a serial killer who skins his victims, but when you get right down to it, a book isn’t made of one idea. Every sentence is an idea. And in the same way, every page, or at least every scene or every chapter, needs narrative hooks. Perhaps the first lesson, then, is that you should always think of narrative hooks in the plural.
Beginnings are notoriously difficult; there’s no way around that. The main problem is that many writers, especially beginners, tend to put too much exposition up front. Someone is murdered in a particularly gruesome fashion in the first sentence, then the writer spends two pages giving us the victim’s life story. There’s very little narrative hook in that. Some more cunning writers try to get around this problem by using a startling prologue as their hook, often written in the present tense and italicized. This prologue, though full of atmosphere, mystery and menace, appears at first to have no relation whatsoever to the story that follows, and the reader is hooked on wanting to know what the hell it is there for. Eventually, all is revealed. The problem with this is that it has become a cliché. I should know; I’ve done it once or twice. In his ten rules for writing, Elmore Leonard advises us to avoid prologues. I wouldn’t take this as an absolute rule, but perhaps it is better to avoid routinely including prologues.
Too much attention is also given to hooking your reader with the opening sentence. Yes, it is all well and good if you can come up with a real humdinger, but in most cases, you won’t. By all means aspire to perfection, but remember, you can always come back to it later. What you really need to do is get the story moving. Becoming obsessed with the opening sentence is often a sure-fire way of procrastinating. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up like Camus’s Joseph Grand in La Peste, who was such a perfectionist that he couldn’t get beyond writing and rewriting the first sentence of his book.
Not all opening sentences hook the reader as strongly as Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone, in which she not only names the murderer but supplies the motive. The entire opening scene of this book merits study for any writer, as Rendell continues to describe the crime and its outcome in a way that seems to be ‘giving away’ everything we expect to find out bit by bit in the course of the reading the whole novel. Instead of encouraging us to stop reading, however, this technique proves to be perfect narrative hook, perhaps because it leads us to become more interested in how it all unfolds rather than simply what happens and to whom. As we read, we find ourselves watching a car crash in slow motion.
The lesson here is to think beyond the first sentence to the whole opening scene, for that is where you must set your first hooks. Most readers are generous enough to allow a writer a couple of chapters before deciding whether to give up or carry on. That’s where to concentrate your efforts. An agent or editor, should you be fortunate enough to come to the attention of one, will also read at least a few pages.
The first scene or chapter usually introduces the setting and the main character and kick-starts the plot, or sets the groundwork for it. It also sets the tone for what is to follow, and it must also raise a lot of questions we want answered or set up situations we want to see resolved. It gives you more than enough opportunities get your hooks into your readers. You need to give them a feel for the world they’ll be spending the next few hours in. The books we enjoy most are the ones that envelop and absorb us the most completely, that give us a place, or places, to inhabit, interesting characters to love or hate, action and dialogue that we want to go back and spend time with day after day, a fully realized world that we can immerse ourselves in. When you finish a book like that you should be feeling both joy and sadness. Sadness that it’s over, of course, but also joy because you had the experience, and you can have it again and again with more of that author’s books. If you understand that as a reader, you will also understand it as a writer. It will be your task to create that world, to provide that experience for others. It doesn’t matter whether you’re planning a series or just a stand-alone; the more you give the reader that glorious sensation of immersion in the fictional world you have created, the more successful your books will be.
The opening scene is where you must set your first and most powerful hooks. Think of it as a seduction. They need to know what kind of world they will be entering and what sort of ride they may be in for. For the hook is all about creating a world. It’s OK to be subtle, but make sure you set up possibilities, hints, whispers, a vivid setting, something that grabs the reader’s attention and makes her want to keep reading. Make the reader fall in love with the story. It’s as simple as that. And as difficult.
And after that? Don’t let up. Keep the hooks coming. My first editor went over my first manuscript with me, page by page. There were yellow Post-it notes everywhere, and around page thirty or so I noticed that she had written in pencil at the top of the page: ‘Something should happen now.’ Something happened five pages later, but she had sensed that my pacing was off, that I had set up a hook that didn’t pay off quickly enough, and I knew I needed to cut five pages from my first thirty to make something happen sooner. That was an important lesson to learn.
Of course, a hook may be greater or lesser in magnitude. There are big hooks, of which you will need fewer, and little hooks, of which you will need many. Yes, we may be hooked by the big concept – will the protagonist stop the serial killer before he kills and skins the young journalist we have come to like. But while all of that big stuff is important, and should always be in your mind, you should not lose track of the numerous little hooks you need to keep the story moving along. ‘Something should happen now.’ Maybe just a little thing. But something. Maybe in a subplot. One example is a relationship. The protagonist is having problems with his girlfriend, say, or his wife, or family. We should care about this and want things to be resolved. Or it could also be a health issue, the result of an X-ray, or a work problem – conflict with one’s boss or partner, perhaps – but it is all grist for the hook mill. You have so many opportunities. Don’t waste them. It’s like the fairground plate-spinner or juggler. The more plates your protagonist has to keep spinning, or the more balls in the air, the faster your reader will turn the pages. And if once in a while he lets a plate fall and break or drops a ball, then it means he’s only human, and the broken plate or dropped ball can work as a narrative hook itself, perhaps misdirecting us for a while.
A crime novel – by which I mean here a mystery, usually involving a murder, a police detective, private eye or talented amateur sleuth – is often more cerebral than action-filled, which can cause hook-related problems of its own. Raymond Chandler once wrote, ‘When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.’ He was describing the experience of writing for the pulps, but his words are often taken as advice about how to move on the action when you think the plot is in a bit of a slump and you need to re-hook the reader. It works. I know; I’ve done it! But you can only get away with it once, especially if your books are set in the UK, where guns are not so prevalent.
In a crime novel, you have a huge variety of possible hooks at your disposal, many things you can substitute for the man with the gun, either of greater or lesser intensity. Most obviously, you can place your protagonist in harm’s way. Some of the most effective lesser hooks are information, a revelation of some sort, or secrets and lies. It is always a good idea to hint early on that someone has a secret or is lying about something and to delay the revelation of what this is. You control this revelation; you can use it when you want, when you feel ‘something should happen now’.
There are numerous little questions raised in every chapter of every story, and each one of them is capable of becoming a narrative hook, so you need to exploit them to the best of your abilities and use both the question and its answer as a means of getting the most tension and best pacing out of your writing.
A good example in crime fiction is forensic information, all of which will eventually be pieced together to help form a solution to the puzzle (or a red herring, at least). First you get the crime scene sorted, the trace evidence packed away and sent off to the various lab departments. You’ve probably got fingerprints, possible DNA, hair, a footprint, a tyre track, a dodgy alibi, a mysterious stain, a witness or two to track down. The answers to all these questions can be spread out throughout your novel almost at will, and the information they provide can be used as and when you feel that ‘something should happen now’. Revelation is also a kind of action, especially if it is not the answer you have led the reader to expect.
Crime writing isn’t formulaic, as some critics would have us believe, but there are certain structural possibilities in the genre that may act as signposts along the road and help keep you travelling in the right direction. These will also offer opportunities for further narrative hooks. For a start, there will be the crime. It’s usually murder because, as P. D. James most perceptively pointed out, the taking of another life is one thing that can’t be undone. And it means the stakes are high. The victim is dead, and it’s left to society, or its representative in the form of the investigator – private or official – to find out why and, if possible, restore some sort of balance and order. This kind of situation is intrinsic to a crime novel and is a gift in terms of narrative hooks. A good writer makes the reader want to take the journey with the detective and find out who and, perhaps more important, why this victim was killed in such a way. You don’t have to do anything extra to get this hook – it’s a gift of the genre.
P. D. James also pointed out that this restoration of order can never be complete and does not always include justice. It also doesn’t preclude any of the devastation and heartbreak such a crime leaves behind in the community and the lives and psyches of those individuals involved. Catching the killer never brings back the victim; nor does it bring peace to those who, through being serious suspects at some point, may have lost their livelihoods, families and friends. Make readers care about these characters, however minor some of them may be, and you will have even more narrative hooks. It would be well to bear this is mind as you build up the characters and their relationships, along with the picture of a community under stress, as you will be setting hooks there that heighten expectations for something to happen later. Relationships will be altered, something will be lost, and perhaps something else will replace it. All these things you can prepare for by the judicious use of narrative hooks. Remember: ‘Something should happen now.’