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Module # 12 Poison Pens:
Writing Crime Fiction Introduction
You can also watch Minette and Mark in action by viewing video clips from the masterclass at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/getwriting/eventsvideo. Case Studies Mark Billingham: Before I sold my first book, my agent was sending it out to publishers and she asked whether I minded if she called it a thriller. She could have called it a bloody cookery book as long as it got published. People do tend to make judgements about what the content is going to be if you're called certain things, which is why I like the American way of calling it mystery instead of crime fiction because there's always going to be a mystery in there somewhere. Again, if you're called a thriller writer, especially a male thriller writer, I think people imagine it's going to be full of bombs and spies and hardware. Minette Walters: The point is, don't be afraid of being branded, because you've immediately got slots on a bookshelf. Booksellers are much more inclined to buy the books which can easily go into a section of their shop than to buy a book which is outside their classification. I think the problem is when you don't think you've written a crime novel and everybody else does, then it's difficult if you're put into a brand that you don't want to continue in. PG: So when you've got a blank piece of paper in front of you, where do you start? MW: For The Sculptress, I thought how interesting it would be to write a book about a possible miscarriage of justice in which the convicted person was so intimidating, so unattractive that nobody wanted to listen to her, and that would be the real miscarriage. So that's what I started with, how do you create this character and situation? But I could not find Olive Martin at all, she just wasn't working. I'm a regular prison visitor, and at the time I was going through all this, I was given a new prisoner to visit. I saw all my prisoners in a very small room, and he was about 6'8" tall, 6'8" wide, and stank to high heaven. He was up against the door and I was trapped by the wall - I spoke to him for forty minutes and he never said a word, and I realised there was no way I was going to leave the office unless he stood up to let me go. I suddenly realised that the one thing which is truly terrifying is physical bulk and that was how Olive was born. So I started with very little and with some help from one of the prisoners (who turned out to be a very nice man and not guilty by the way), I was given Olive Martin. MB: I have to start with an opening scene, like from a movie, because I don't really know where it's going but it's based on what you'd call in movie terms a pitch or a hook. Increasingly publishers want to know what the hook is and you need to describe your book in a sentence. And with my first book, Sleepyhead, I had this simple idea - is there anything worse than death? I'd read a book about a syndrome whereby you can see, feel, and hear everything around you but you can't move, so I had an opening scene of someone waking up and being utterly paralysed. When I sent my book out to an agent, I had that hook on the bottom of the manuscript and a year and a half later, it was on the cover of the paperback. It's starting from that simple idea in a sentence and running with it from there. Series vs Stand-Alone MW: I keep everything in my head, including my story, so I don't write biographies, structures or anything like that. What I do are lots of experiments at the beginning with ideas and the characters to carry them, and I urge you to try this is. Do some experimental writing based on an idea that you're interested in with two or three characters. Write four or five pages and then leave it for a week. You'll find when you come back to it that those people have positively grown in your head, because the mere fact of starting to delineate them on the page means you've started the process. So I'm a great believer in allowing the subconscious to work on things. MB: There's a point at which you get very paranoid about the word 'cliché' particularly when you're writing detective fiction. When I got to a scene where my main character, Inspector Tom Thorne, was listening to music, I had to decide what kind of music he likes, but it couldn't be jazz because Resnick likes jazz, and it couldn't be prog rock because Rebus likes prog rock, so I made this really stupid decision that he didn't like music. A couple of days later I thought, 'Don't be ridiculous, everybody listens to music at some point.' There comes a moment when you realise these things happen to coppers in the same way that a cowboy has a hat, a horse and a gun, and there are certain things you just have to embrace as being part of a very long and honourable tradition. In terms of the formation of the character, book by book the reader knows as much about him as I do. There's certainly no biography - I forget how old he is, and I have to go back and check. MW: Not having a series character, I'm always fascinated by them, so what's your relationship with Tom Thorne? Conan Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes so much he had to kill him, and Agatha Christie felt the same way about Hercule Poirot, so that's one of the reasons I don't have one. MB: I don't hate him, but where we differ in terms of our attitudes to characters is that in no way do I feel Tom is controlling me. I'm doing the typing, he will do what I tell him. I know that wasn't what you were saying but there are writers who will claim that the character made them write in a particular way, and I think that's nonsense. But then I'm envious of people who can write stand-alones because if I could think of a plot for one I'd write it like a shot, but every one I think of he forces his way in. Not in a kind of 'you will write about me' way, but because I want to put him in it. MW: I've always thought the problem with series is not only that you always have one or several characters reappearing, but you're also restricted to place and time. Do you find that confining, Mark? MB: I've just had a meeting with my American agent and he said it would be great is if Tom could go to America in a future book, which probably says something about American publishing. If I wrote stand-alones, then I could do that a lot easier because I hate that idea of a cop going to New York and solving crime on holiday! The world of crime fiction publishing loves series novels - when I was meeting publishers to sell my first book, the first question was, 'is this the start of a series?' But what's heartening is that some of the biggest writers in the world now, like Dennis Lehane and Harlan Coben, have been writing mid-list series for years and the novels which sent them stratospheric were stand-alones. So there is plenty of room for both. But series can also put readers off - if they pick up a book which is the twenty seventh John Smith book, they'll put it down because they haven't read the other twenty six. Making It Real MW: For those of you who've read my books, you'll know I don't put a huge amount of description in about people. Funnily enough, I do give descriptions of their houses because I feel that where people are living says an awful lot about them. But don't think that there's an easy short cut to characters simply by giving a very full description of somebody, because the fact that someone has beetling eyebrows has nothing to do with what goes on inside their head. Character comes through speech and action, so concentrate on that and practice writing dialogue. Think of yourself in a social situation, asking questions of people you've never met before, and do the same with your characters. Just by getting them to ask each other very simple questions, you will learn something because each time one of the characters has to reply, you as the author are answering the question. Once you have your characters talking to one another, and to yourself, then you're creating people. MB: There's a wonderful piece of advice I once heard that when you write a scene of dialogue, do a search for words like 'hello' or 'goodbye', all that introductory stuff, and then cut them all. Just get right into the middle, go right for the meat of it, so again you're laying it all out for the reader, but you're not making it all pat PG: One of the purposes of dialogue is to convey information which mystery novels have a lot of. How do you convey all that backstory elegantly? MW: I have a method which includes using emails, memos, newspaper clippings, that kind of thing. What I can say in an email would take a chapter of dialogue so that's a handy little trick. I think there's nothing more boring than plodding through a whole chapter of dialogue just to get one fact, particularly in crime writing which is a suspenseful genre. I think it's very important to balance pace all the time against delivery of information, and if you're having to slow your pace all the time to deliver a fact, you need to find a different way of doing it. MB: If at the end of a chapter I look back and think I'm in exactly the same place as when that chapter started, then I know it needn't be there. Literary fiction can do this, crime fiction can't. We all have this paranoia about plots getting saggy in the middle, which is when you remember Raymond Chandler's approach which was to add some more action or another body. Red Herrings MW: I don't do plot schemes, I'm a fly by wire writer. People think it's quite a frightening way to write but I absolutely adore it, because it means you tear up a lot. But it doesn't matter because as Doris Lessing said, if you didn't like it the first time, you certainly won't like it the second. If you write in an exploratory way, you do have to be ruthless because you're bound to take a wrong turn at some point. That's where the hard work is and for every book I write, I delete about 30,000 or 40,000 words. But I wake up every morning thrilled because I want to know where I'm going. MB: I have a beginning and an ending, and I don't know how to get from one to the other. I know who the killer is, and I have the final scene which again I see in my head very visually but I don't know how to get there. There's a wonderful Michael Connelly quote which is, 'You can see the light at the end of the tunnel but you don't know what's in the tunnel.' It's like solving a series of problems. You write what's happening to your characters and you'll find your way there. PG: Whichever method you choose, how do you put in the red herrings? MB: I like to imagine I'm the reader and I know that when I'm reading a crime novel, the tiniest thing can set me off - if a new character is introduced and they happen to mention they're adopted, you instantly ask why? You file that piece of information away as a reader, hoping it'll pay off somewhere down the line but it doesn't. I don't think that's the writer cheating the reader, but sometimes the readers will see red herrings where there aren't any. Also, whenever any major new characters appears, the very fact that it's a mystery novel and there's a killer somewhere means the reader will assume there are a suspect. One thing I hate is the kind of novel where the killer doesn't appear until the last chapter because anyone can do that! You do have to keep the killer in plain view, and if you don't do that, you're cheating. Fingerprints & Forensics MW: At the end of chapters, you do need to leave that unsaid question mark - it's no good ending a chapter with a nice kind of closure, but if the people and the story you're writing about engage the reader, they will want to read on. Without being horribly rude, there is a lot of general fiction where that doesn't happen and I would say that's because they're overwritten. We have to remember we're writing suspense and I don't think a crime novel without suspense is really a crime novel. By writing the way I do, the suspense is there for me too, because I wake up thrilled and excited! MB: It's that awful thing about looking at what you've written and just cut, cut, cut. James Lee Burke has a wonderful phrase, when he says that a novel is finished when nothing rattles. It's horrible having to hit the delete button but it has to be done. MW: The best advice I can give you is, when you've written something, go back and take out two out of three adjectives and the same for adverbs. If your prose is good enough, you don't need them. Ask yourself, do I need to mention that the cat is a tabby cat? Cat will do unless it's really important to the plot, and the minute you take them out, your prose will tighten up. [At this point, Mark and Minette took questions from the audience.] Q: I don't know if it's a response to public taste, but I've noticed that many crime novels build up the horror by having a lot of forensic stuff. Are there any secrets to portray and build up horror without endless body parts? MB: If I never read another post-mortem scene, I'll be happy. But I've certainly used forensic detail in my books and the way modern policing is, you have to use those procedures and be abreast of the way it works. MW: The first thing to do is don't write about serial killers because post mortems feature hugely in such books. Just have one murder in your entire novel, and write a historical one which is why lots of people wrote historical crime before forensics really took off. The other way is to have a body discovered twenty years after it was murdered because all that will be left will be bones, then the forensic detail becomes fairly minimal. Making Crime Pay MB: The first thing to say is you can become a slave to research, and I did start that way but I'm less worried about it now - I have to keep reminding myself that I'm writing fiction. But you do get letters pointing out mistakes. MW: A lot of people worry about the research side of crime writing and in a way it's a testament to most crime writers that we do feel responsible, we have a duty to make things as accurate as we can. But you can go really over the top on research and it's so in your face when you read it, and funnily enough it comes back to the post-mortem question, because I think a lot of writers have gone over the top. So what I do is write the story and do the research afterwards, that way I can keep the pace of the story going and I know where the gaps in my knowledge are. If you want to do police procedurals, you can do no better than watch The Bill, because that has a consultant policeman who checks all the details. Q: On selling a book to publishers, how much do you give away in the synopsis? MB: In my experience, I didn't know what the rest of the book was going to be. I sent in the first 30,000 words to an agent plus a synopsis and it was trying to strike that balance between 'I don't want you to know what happens,' and 'I don't know what happens'. But I don't think your prospective publisher or agent will care that you've spoiled the plot, they just want to know it's going somewhere. Not even that, but if you can add the next two or three books in the series, even better. MW: If you've written a whole manuscript, don't even waste time - send the whole thing. One of the problems of writing on the wire is if you don't know how things are going to pan out, you can't send a first chapter and a synopsis. So I finished writing The Ice House before I sent it to anybody. If it's good, they'll read the lot. I'm against advising people that by writing a first chapter and a synopsis then somehow you'll land a contract. If you've got time and energy to finish your novel, and do the drafts required to bring it up to what you believe is good scratch, then submit the whole manuscript, but don't forget to include the return postage! Further Reading Useful Links More on Get Writing Tip: Plotting is Active Tip: Choosing a Genre Try different clearly-defined genres for fun and see what you can do. Try
and write in the style of a Mills and Boon romance, a historical
bodice-ripper, a hard-boiled thriller and so on. To do this you will need to
identify the elements that come together to form the type of prose you are
trying to write.
Tip: Write What You Read Tip: Removing Dead Wood
(LU)
Exercise: First Impressions
(OU)
Exercise: Dialogue
(UOE)
Exercise: First Impressions Credit:
Open University (OU) |