From the first
minute you get that initial what if? moment, you spend the next few days
playing about in your head with ideas. Why is this such fun? Because everything
is new and nothing is off the table.
In St Paul’s
first letter to the Corinthians, he tells us about faith, hope and love and
adds that the greatest of these is love. Borrowing from Paul’s example when you
are writing any novel, there are three things that are key. Plot, setting and
characters. But the greatest of these is characters. Most new crime writers do
not realise this. They believe plot is everything but without characters in
conflict, you do not have a book.
The plot—see my
May 2021 blog here —is simply the events that happen in your story. The setting can
be wherever you want it to be, especially if you are writing a genre novel like
a crime novel. You can set it in mediaeval times, Tudor times, the 1950s or on a
space station. The elements of your story remain the same. Of course, the
setting will affect everything to do with your characters. So if you are
setting it on a space station in 2025, your characters will not behave in the
same way as a group of ordinary people in, say, 1381.
This is when your
research begins—see my March 2021 blog here. If your research is not thorough and
accurate, you will lose your reader. I know of one quite popular author who
regularly gets facts wrong—-facts that are easily checked by a fast Internet
search. For me, this is unforgivable and it shows contempt for the reader. Don’t
do it.
If you are
researching something historical, make sure that everything—dress, speech, events,
social mores etc—is accurate to that period. As an extreme example, it would be
very stupid for anybody to suggest that William the Conqueror’s troops used
guns at the Battle of Hastings. Getting research wrong is lazy and sloppy.
Once you know
your characters—see my July 2021 blog here—and you know that your research is
accurate, start working on the conflict, suspense, and tension between the
characters and in the events of your story—see my August 2021 blog here. Do bear in
mind that in a crime novel the protagonist and antagonist have a mirror-image
of the same need. The protagonist needs to solve the crime and find the
perpetrator. The antagonist needs to make sure the crime isn’t solved and
he/she stays free, even if that means a couple more murders.
When I get to
this stage, I have several methods of working my ideas through to the stage
where they either will or will not work. One is a timeline for the protagonist
and, more importantly for the antagonist. Of course, in a crime novel you also
need clues so that you can seed, together with red herrings, throughout the
text. Your entire focus where clues are concerned is not simply to enable the
protagonist and the reader to solve the mystery, but also to confuse the protagonist
and the reader with those delightful little side alleys that lead to dead ends.
This is where you can make the antagonist have such fun.
If you can make
your protagonist and the reader not know which way is up, you have the basis of
an excellent crime novel. However, always remember that without believable
characters who are in conflict with each other and sometimes with themselves,
the book will not come across as a satisfactory whole. We all know that you can
make cakes using no eggs or no flour and they taste okay, but the most
satisfactory cakes contain both eggs and flour.
My next task is
always to plan the events in the order in which they happen—see my April 2021
blog here—where I talk about the different ways to outline your book and how to
decide how much or how little outlining is best for the way you work. I have used
index cards that can be moved about to change the order, a white board to
connect A with B etc. I have also used the Scrivener software. Find what works
for you.
Now comes the
not-so-easy bit. Writing the first draft. For me, this has to be a white-hot
romp with no second thoughts (they are for the editing process), following the
outline I’ve written but with plenty of space for me to veer off the main path
if I get a oooh, if X does that, it will make Y think this moment. Keep your
dialogue realistic but sharp—see my October 2021 blog here. Keep raising the stakes
for all the characters. Above all, enjoy watching your story grow under your fingers/as
you dictate etc.
While we are on
this subject, it has been scientifically proven that we use different sides of
our brains for creative stuff and evaluation stuff. I know many authors who
absolutely cannot write a sentence without going back over it and polishing
there and then. That, for me, is absolute death to my creativity. I am quite
happy to write a chapter and edit it first thing next morning before writing
the next one, but to edit while writing is not working in an effective partnership with how
your brain works. It slows down that first draft from a canter to crawling through
mud. The book may well, in consequence, lose momentum.
Over to you. Have
fun. Next month, in the final blog in this series, I will write about how to
fit your writing in with your life. It’s all about balance and discipline and
planning. See you there.
