How do you decide which form is the best vehicle for a story idea?  Sometimes it seems obvious, the subject matter cries out for the length and complexity of a novel, or it’s a sharp, closely focused snap-shot suited to short fiction.  Other times something that originates as an idea for one form ends up, through happenstance, to see life in another.

I’ve had experience of writing a book and then adapting it for TV (Blue Murder) and of taking a TV script of mine and reworking it as a novel (Hit and Run).  One of my TV pitches became a novel (Witness) and has since been optioned for TV though has not as yet got any further.  Another TV treatment was transformed into a short story for radio (Boom).

I enjoy working in different media.  In my previous incarnation as a community artist I worked in a multidisciplinary company and relished the interplay of ideas and the development of projects involving visual and environmental arts, film, music, drama and creative writing.

My latest venture is a collaboration with my partner Tim, who is a visual artist. He has reworked my short story DOA (originally published by The Do-Not Press in the anthology Crime in the City edited by Martin Edwards) into a graphic short.  My role in the process has been to pare back the story, originally around 1200 words, to its absolute essentials, and comment as a first reader on the images that give the story a new identity.

It’s an experiment and I expect it will appeal to a quite different readership from that for my full length novels.  All I can say is the drawings are brilliant.  Honest.  And yes, I’m biased.  You can see it here and make your own mind up http://tinyurl.com/pkfjyxk

The great writer Elmore Leonard died recently and many people passed on his 10 rules for good writing, as follows:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.  If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Make sense to you?  I think there is a lot of good advice in there but also that rules are only worth keeping if they work for you and for the book you are writing.  Here are my gut responses/thoughts to these rules.

1. It was a dark and stormy night. As a reader I’m hooked. Love it.  Like weather.  A lot.  Maybe it’s a British thing?
2. Some prologues work, some don’t.  I’d ask if it was really needed.
3. Okay as a generalisation.  But never say never.
4. A little variety is okay,  Just a little.
5. I agree!  Though I’d maybe allow seven or eight per 100,000 words (I have never written a book of anything like that length!)
6. Yes to the latter.  ‘Suddenly’ I can handle – sparingly.
7. Bare true dat.
8. Beg to differ here – it’s a matter of personal writing style.
9. Ditto no 8.  I relish descriptions of locations that help me see/taste/smell and hear just what it’s like.  Books that take me to unfamiliar places, vividly depicted, are among my favourites.
10. Well, maybe but do all readers skip the same parts?

What does make sense in all this is that these are the techniques that worked for Leonard, whose novels are a joy to read and who has a very specific voice.  But pick another writer and I think their own rules would differ depending on the style of their prose and the way they like to tell their stories.

 

Another batch of recommended reads.  Lots of variety, too.  In this list there’s a brutal and blackly funny Western, a science fiction mystery novel, a hilarious yet moving take on modern American life as well as some excellent contemporary crime fiction.  Happy reading.

After The Fall by Charity Norman

The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

Nina Todd Has Gone by Lesley Glaister

Everyone Lies by A.D. Garrett

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes

The Detective’s Daughter by Lesley Thompson

Phantom by Jo Nesbo

I began a new book recently.  Although I have been busy for some weeks creating characters and their stories, developing the ideas for the murder case, and researching on topics I needed to know more about, for me a book isn’t started until I write those first lines.  That’s the ‘proper’ work of writing and no matter how much plotting and planning I might have done in advance (and that varies from book to book) it is in the process of writing that everything is given life and form and new ideas often emerge.

The finishing point is not quite so clear cut.  I think there are two of those.  The first is when I scrawl the last sentence, put the closing full stop.  And the second is when after typing up, editing as I go, polishing and amending in the light of feedback from my writers group and doing a final read through I have a whole book, ready to send off my agent and editor.  Of course there will be further work to do – changes suggested by editor or agent, copy edits to agree, proofs to be checked, cover images to consider but in my mind the novel already exists, fully formed.  And what comes after, crucial though it is (and it is!) I see as part of the production and publishing process not the creative process.

Last week I went to the BBC Writersroom TV Drama Writers’ Festival in Leeds.  My main aim was to galvanise my interest in screen-writing again because, like most creative endeavours, it often feels like an uphill struggle – or whistling in the wind.  I was extremely, I mean EXTREMELY, lucky to see my first TV pitch, Blue Murder, get greenlit and become a successful returning series.  That is the stuff of fairytales but since then, I’ve had much more experience of not getting projects off the ground.  Of having meetings with commissioners and producers where I pitch my ideas and see them crushed (in the nicest possible way) one by one.  The responses usually go along the lines of ‘we’ve got one of them in development, we don’t want any cop shows, we don’t do private eyes, we’re hanging fire on legal dramas, we’ve got one of them, and one of them, and (insert name of uber-writer) is doing a show looking at that world with us.’

What was refreshing about the conference was understanding that this is how it is, 99% of the time for all writers, even the ones who seem to be at the top of the game.  And that scripts can get written and paid for and everything be going swimmingly until the plug or rug is pulled.  A panel with Danny Brocklehurst and Toby Whithouse and Mark Catley looked at ‘The One That Got Away’ – and there was more than one – they were myriad!  And then there are the fairytales.  Wonderful to hear Chris Chibnall talk to Ben Stephenson about Broadchurch, Sally Wainwright and Nicola Schindler discuss the development of Last Tango with Peter Bowker and Dominic Mitchell and the team at BBC North describe the creation of In The Flesh.  All shows I love.  Good too to meet writers from theatre and radio and swap stories of where we’ve been and where we’re going – or would like to go.

So, when I can possibly carve out some time from my novel writing I will work on some new ideas to pitch for television.  I will!  Just don’t hold your breath…

PS The BBC Writersroom is a very useful website – do have a look if you’re not familiar with it.   http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/

Here are the books that I’ve enjoyed most over the last couple of months.  Some funny, some sad, all compelling.  I hope you enjoy them too.

Crocodile Tears – Mark O’Sullivan

Tell The Wolves I’m Home – Carol Rifka Brunt

Hungry, The Stars and Everything – Emma Jane Unsworth

Where’d You Go, Bernadette – Maria Semple

Just What Kind of Mother Are You? – Paula Daly

In Her Blood – Annie Hauxwell

A Land More Kind Than Home – Wiley Cash

Precious Thing – Colette McBeth

The Yellow Birds – Kevin Powers

(Spoiler alert – some stories from the Sal Kilkenny series revealed here.)

The truth is always stranger than fiction and one of the spookiest things in being a writer is when something you think you’ve dreamt up turns out to exist in real life.  There are two particular times when this has really struck me.  The first was with my debut novel Looking For Trouble.  When I set out to write the book I didn’t know where it would take me and I was disturbed to find myself writing about organised child sexual abuse in children’s homes run by the local authority.  News was just emerging back then (1992) of suspected cases of  paedophile rings violating vulnerable children and young people but it was still very much under the radar.  Some time later I met someone who had worked in social services in Manchester City Council and who had read the book at the same time as an undercover inquiry was going on into exactly this type of crime in the Manchester area.  She almost sought me out, thinking I had some insider knowledge that they might draw on.

A second example was with Go Not Gently, the second Sal Kilkenny novel.  In this a number of unexpected and unexplained deaths in old people’s homes leads to a discovery of horrendous malpractice by the local GP who ‘cares’ for the residents.  Sometime after publication, news broke of the horrific crimes of GP Harold Shipman in nearby Ashton-under-Lyne.

In both cases it was complete coincidence that I had chosen these topics – or they had chosen me.   The stories emerged through the writing.  I hadn’t picked a topic, researched it and then given it to my PI as a case.  Perhaps there is an element of a writer picking up on the fears and rumours and speculation in the air at the time, on the undercurrents of anxiety and whispers of wrongdoing.  There’s also an element of writing about what you fear – and then real life showing you those fears are well founded.  In much of my work I write about what I dread – about my nightmares writ large.  And of course I sincerely hope none of them come true.  But life continues to be ever stranger, darker and more harrowing than fiction.

I hate research.  I think, as a writer, that’s probably a minority position.  Most writers seem to relish it, waxing lyrical about libraries and reference books, research trips and source material.

There are three reasons I hate it: it’s tedious, it takes me away from writing and it’s scary.

Tedium first.  I find it very hard to connect to non-fiction, my eyes glaze over and my mind wanders off.  It takes me a week to make it through Saturday’s Guardian – in small chunks at a time.  Practical research is easier than reading – visiting a location to check it out or meeting someone to talk about their area of expertise – but even so it is something I would avoid if I could get away with it. Because…

… My second point – it takes me away from the writing.  I want to tell a story, I invent the characters and a situation, I know roughly where I am going and that’s what sets my heart beating, that’s what gets me up in the morning.  Not another two hours spent on Google and Wikipedia or at the library.

And scary?  Because you can get it wrong!  Fiction is never wrong, it’s only a point of view, an offering which you hope will mean something to other people.  It might be badly written or unsatisfying but it can’t be objectively incorrect.  However research is about facts and figures and dates and procedures that are objective.  Mistakes are possible.

When I started writing I chose a private eye as my protagonist, I based her in Manchester and gave her the problem of juggling work and childcare.  That immediately let me off huge swathes of research as there were no rules whatsoever to being a PI, I lived in Manchester so knew the city well and I was steeped in my own real-life attempts to find a balance between work and home life.  But as I developed as a writer and broadened my horizons, I was drawn to tackling subjects that couldn’t be done without proper, careful research.  So, for example, recently I’ve written fiction or drama about assisted dying and life in a women’s prison, about the Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya, and the way dangerous driving offences are investigated.  The writing couldn’t happen without the research (though I did persuade my partner, who is a history buff, to read some of the books about the Mau Mau for me and mark relevant sections).  The meetings I’ve had with solicitors and women prisoners have been incredibly useful and illuminating and I’m glad that the work I’ve produced is as authentic as I can make it.  But with each new project my heart sinks at the thought of yet more research.

DIY is one of my hobbies and I guess research is a bit like having to get all the gubbins out and prepare the space before you can actually get cracking.  An inescapable, necessary and unrewarding part of the job.

Words are the writer’s medium, the raw material, the building blocks with which we construct our stories.  A follow-on question to, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ might well be, ‘Where do you find the words?’  How do we translate that vision in our head, that image in our mind’s eye, that scene, the picture of a character into marks on the page or screen?

For myself it’s an organic process, the words come into my head, sometimes visit my mouth (I shape them as I’m writing, tasting them which must look bizarre and is one reason for not writing in front of an audience) and then they travel down my arm to my hand and through the pen to the page.

As I’ve said before I don’t like to analyse the process of writing too much (superstitious) but as I write I am often automatically seeking out better words to capture what I mean.  My first draft has plenty of crossings out.  A grey sky will become a blank or bleak sky.  ‘How are you?’ will be replaced by, ‘You okay?’ or, ‘How you doing?’  There are dozens of choices as I write.  And a sense of the rhythm of the words, the beat beneath them, figures in there somewhere.

Then there is the Thesaurus.  I love the Thesaurus.  I’m prone to repetition and finding alternative words helps keep that in check and introduces variety into my work.

Sometimes I collect words as I read other people’s books.  If they strike me as particularly eloquent or visceral then I jot them down and when I am tidying up my prose I consider whether there is a good place for any of them.  Often they don’t fit or they don’t suit my style so they languish on the list for the future.

You may have read lots of rules about writing: cut out your adverbs, avoid the passive voice, don’t split infinitives.  None of these rules help me, I ignore them all.  I prefer to rely on my instincts.  And I constantly break a rule that I was taught at school – never start a sentence with ‘and’.  (See what I did there?)  I also have loads and loads of sentences that are not proper sentences even though they start with a capital letter and end with a full stop.  I leave out the subject or the verb or both.  Suffice to say the grammar and style function on my word processor is permanently disabled.

It works for me.

It’s the question writers get asked most.  Sometimes I make a jokey reply: ‘Off a stall in Longsight Market.’  Truth is, I’m a little reluctant to examine too closely how ideas come, I don’t like to analyse my writing process.  For me, writing is about letting go, freeing up my mind to play, create, invent and I fear that too much unpicking of that might make me self-conscious, hamper that flow.  In a similar way, as a reader I don’t want to analyse the books I’m immersed in, I want to suspend disbelief and accept the world of the story and connect with the characters.

What is true for me is that stories come in different ways, some grow from a phrase that triggers a situation, and an idea of character in that situation.  Some follow from seeing an image in my head: dust motes in sunbeams in a hallway, Victorian tiles, the house holds a secret.  Particular books might start more cerebrally – thinking about a theme that seems ripe for exploration or a situation that would petrify me, or even an incident I experience that suggests a parallel in a fictional world.  These are all seeds.  In order to germinate them I need to have a sense that there’s potential in the ‘idea’, which I can only explain as a spark, an excitement; when I consider it my mind goes racing ahead.  But I can’t make real progress until I discover the characters.  I can’t go anywhere until I’ve worked out who the people are, what they’re like and named them.   And then the story, the ideas develop and change as I write.   Like mould or grass or fruits.  What a job, eh?  Love it.