writing technique

eReaders – this is what I use mine for…

/ Caron Allan / 8 Comments

I got my first eReader around 12 years ago. It only lasted a couple of years and then needed replacing. But the one I have now, I’ve had since then, almost ten years. The poor thing should be in a retirement home for bewildered gadgets by now.

What do I use it for?

I play games: An eReader is great for playing games on but still looking busy. You’re playing truant really but everyone leaves you alone in case you’re doing something important. What games do I play? Nothing modern – no ‘call of’ anything or ‘squid’ something… I keep it simple.

Woodblock game – it’s similar to Tetris. The thing I really like is being able to change the background, so I can have a wintery scene with snowflakes coming gently down, or a very therapeutic green leafy scene with raindrops trickling down my screen. Love it! Great for hypnotizing me into another world where sudden ideas come out of the blue.

Spider solitaire – I think my win rate is something like 6% – I mean I’m absolutely terrible at it. But it’s great for killing time waiting for something or someone.

all these books on one eReader? Yes – but for me it’s not the same reading experience

I don’t stream anything, I don’t listen to podcasts or even music on my eReader, don’t even have social media or my emails on there. But I could…

My favourite thing about my eReader is Evernote. It’s a note-making app. I very, very rarely go out and about without at least one notebook with me. Though that is a good way to acquire new notebooks – I’m out in the big wide world (at least twice a year, just to keep my hand in) and realise I ‘need’ to buy one because I haven’t brought one with me. It’s not an option or an extravagance…honest! I sometimes need to make a note of something that has either just caught my attention or something I’ve just thought of – so on it goes to Evernote, which syncs with my computer once I return to base. Here is an eclectic array of notes I have on Evernote:

  • Rose Petals and White Lace (next Dottie book) – William gets demoted and chastised for his ‘mishandling’ of the Parfitt case which resulted in Gervase Parfitt ***************** (spoiler alert! Sorry, you’re not allowed to read that in case you haven’t read the others!)
  • Story Idea – A woman who works in a big house as a companion or governess, comes out of an upstairs room at night and bumps into a man in a mask and a cape. He smiles and bows and puts a finger to his lips, saying, ‘Shh! I’m a secret agent on a mission!’ She laughs, assumes he is a guest at the party downstairs that evening. She says something like, ‘Why sir, your secret is safe with me, I shall never betray you.’ He could then laugh and present her with a rose, ‘A token of my deep appreciation,’ or maybe (even better!) he could say ‘perhaps this rose will buy your silence.’ Anyway, he compliments her eyes or something. And after these sexy pleasantries are over, he goes back downstairs and she returns to her room. And in the morning discovers there has been a jewel robbery!!!! Or a murder????
  • Haiku – from Feb 2019 (as I said, I’ve had my eReader almost ten years btw, some of these notes go back a long way) February’s here/Green shoots promise the/end of winter’s icy hold
  • My daughter, talking in her sleep when we were on holiday, ‘That comment sounds pretty cool!’ I thought it was an odd thing to say. I asked her about it in the morning, she had no idea what it related to.
  • Exclamations of the 1930s (gleaned from Agatha Christie and Patricia Wentworth’s books of that era): ‘Oh my hat!’ ‘What the devil…?’ ‘So-and-so can go hang as far as I’m concerned’, ‘Oh my word!’ ‘That’s frightful!’ ‘Blast it!’ etc. I try to use one or two of these from time to time – they are so ‘of their era’ that I think they lend a bit of local colour.
  • Philamot: According to my Patricia Wentworth book, The Rolling Stone, a fashionable colour either late 1800s or early 1900s was Philamot (lovely word) from the French feuille morte meaning dead leaves. (a kind of beigey fawn)
  • Minette Walters’ The Ice House: I noted, “watching this again after many years, I’m struck by the similarity between the ice house in this and the Neolithic tombs of Skara Brae and other Orkney sites. What if a landed family discover their ice house is not as usual 300 or 400 years old, but three or four thousand years old…?”
  • Fab quote from TV series Endeavour: ‘Don’t let him worry you, ‘cos his sort’s nowt a pound and sh*t’s tuppence, as my old gran used to say. Northerner.’ (that was Fred Thursday talking to Morse… Love that quote, it made me spit my coffee all over myself.)
  • Standard issue firearm for British army for both world wars was the Webley mark IV revolver, taking a .38 calibre bullet. It remained in service until 1963.
  • And this one from 2014: if a person is standing when they are shot dead from the front, they always fall and land with one leg crossed over the other at the ankle – this is known as ‘dead man’s fall’. (I think I used this in Scotch Mist…)

Oh yes – I also have books on my eReader!  You were probably beginning to wonder. To date I have purchased around 700 eBooks, though my preference is for paperbacks. With eBooks I very often forget I have them on the reader. I only find out when I go to buy them, and Amazon smiles, shakes its head, and says’ You’ve already got that one, you eejit!’

Usually, if an author is new to me, I ‘try’ the eBook as a kind of taster. If I like it I will then – obviously – buy more of their books, but if I really love it, I will swap to paperbacks. I get a lot more out of a paperback, I seem to find it easier to immerse myself in the story whereas reading an eBook can sometimes (for me) feel like it all happens on the surface and I don’t truly ‘lose myself’ in the plot.

What about you? Do you read eBooks? Do you have a dedicated eReader or read books on your phone, tablet or desktop computer? Or are you strictly ‘real’ book all the way? Do please let me know!

I work on several different gadgets, but my own computer in my own office is my favourite!

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From Idea to Publication

/ Caron Allan / 2 Comments

There are a number of components to creating a book, and I’ll admit I hadn’t realised just how much was involved when I set to write my first one. Which has still not been published, by the way, it was truly terrible. You’re welcome.

A writer begins with the germ of an idea, a creative spark, just a little something that falls into the imagination from the ether and says, ‘Hey, you know what would be a good story? This…’ It’s hard to say where inspiration comes from. It’s the first question people always ask me: ‘Where do you get your ideas?’

And it’s almost impossible to answer that, because ideas or inspiration can come from so many, many varied sources, and are often a kind of amalgamation of a number of different threads that come together seemingly from nowhere. I wrote a blog post about this a while ago. If you’d like to read it, you can follow this link:

After the germ or spark, comes the ‘mulling things over’ phase. You begin to add more and more to your idea, like the layers of an onion. You test it to see if your initial thought will work in practice. You begin to think of snatches of dialogue, or scenes or names or any number of little details that add the colour and richness to your bare bones. At this point I usually have to start making notes, a bit worried I’ll forget something – I know what I’m like!

Then comes the beginning of the writing. For me, this usually happens quite quickly – I feel very excited, I write as fast as I can in an actual paper notebook, I’m not one of those people who creates a first draft on a computer or who uses a special app. This is the honeymoon phase that I never want to end. It is joyful and fun.

BUT.

Then comes the dark night of the soul, the ‘I can’t write for toffee’ phase, imposter syndrome raises its ugly head, and I am consumed with doubts about myself, my ability and my work. At this point all I can do is to dig deep and become really stubborn and tell myself I WILL do this. I push on, writing even though I’m pretty much convinced that it’s a waste of time. I didn’t realise until just a few years ago that almost everyone feels like this about their work, whatever it is. It’s taken me many years to realise that persistence is my most valuable tool. Another thing I’ve blogged about before!

Finally my first draft is complete. I let myself and my story rest for a few weeks or several months. I take a break to enjoy doing other things, like cooking or gardening, I read loads, sometimes do a bit of editing or proofreading. I blog, of course, and dip in and out of social media. Or dare I say it – I might go out – (we are able to do that now in the UK, not sure if that will all change again, it still seems a bit naughty to go out of the house for anything other than the bare essentials).

There’s till loads to do on the book. A first draft does not a book make, and I will need to revise, edit, polish, revise, edit and polish several times over before it’s ready to be ‘properly’ edited, have a final proofread, then released on an unsuspecting world. At this stage, I need to let go of my favourites – not necessarily in a ‘kill your darlings’ kind of way, but just letting go of scenes or phrases and being honest with myself if they just don’t work.

Then my technical – or lack of – skills come into play. These were the things that provided the biggest learning curve for me as a new self-published writer some years ago. I didn’t have the money to pay someone to do all this for me, and I wasn’t with a traditional publishing house who do so much for their authors. So I had to learn how to create a reasonable book cover, (Canva, I love you so much), how to format my eBooks and paperback books, and how to make marketing materials. I had to learn what metadata was, and how to use advertising. I had to learn to negotiate the online world to publish and market my books. People were very kind and there are loads of helpful sites and books if you get stuck or don’t know how to do something, but you have to be determined to work your socks off and learn a ton of new skills, even if you are not a techy kind of person.

But finally, the big day dawns and your book – or my book, in this case – is out there is the big wide world. It’s a bit scary, doesn’t seem real, and is hard to believe you actually made it from that first little spark of an idea months or sometimes years earlier. The book writer’s journey has often been compared to pregnancy and the birth of a child. I think that’s a pretty good analogy, especially when it comes to the ‘don’t you ever come near me again’ part of the process, and the shouting, swearing and throwing things. Certainly I’m not raring to get writing another book as soon as the first one has come out. I need my recovery time of a month or two before I’m ready to start all over again.

Aww, doesn’t my new baby look cute?

***

Extras… the minor characters every mystery story needs

/ Caron Allan

Extras complaining to the author about not having a name – again.

Last week was all about the main characters – the detective, the villain, the side-kick and of course the victim(s).

This week, I’m interested in thinking about the minor characters – or extras – in my head I see these as a kind of walk-on part, much like those in any TV show or movie. They don’t always have lines. Sometimes they don’t even have names. They might be described as ‘an elderly dog-walker’ or ‘the woman behind the shop counter’. They crop up everywhere the story goes – in shops, houses, on village greens, in museums, and at dinner parties.

But why are they there?

Extras fulfill a number of criteria and needs for the author and the reader.

  • they can deflect attention away from the culprit or villain.
  • they can provide the reader with useful clues or snippets of information.
  • equally, they can provide us with (less useful, sometimes) red herrings and wrong-turns.
  • they enrich the story so it doesn’t consist of just your four main characters, unless that’s the whole point of the story.
  • they can give us a sneak-peek of something that might happen in a later book if this is a series.
  • they act as a kind of commentator or dramatic chorus to comment on the action or criticise or laud the ‘hero’.

But life as an Extra can be tough and is often unpredictable.

Police or other people in authority (completely unaware all too often that they themselves are Extras, can bully them or wrongfully arrest an Extra and accuse them of terrible things they haven’t done.

You need a huge range of skills as you may be called upon to perform almost any task from forensic assistant to chambermaid.

As an Extra, you might be completely overlooked by the reader who doesn’t even notice you, let alone what a magnificent job you do pretending to be an elderly dog-walker when you’re really a young woman in her twenties on her way to college and you don’t even like dogs.

Alice was at the party with two friends. Who were they? No one knows.

And they never remember your name, which is why you have to have a description attached: Miss Jones, the games mistress at school where victim used to teach. You might even find yourself very near the bottom of a long list of characters, a list designed to help readers remember all the people in the book they’ve met but don’t remember.

No one asks your opinion. ‘Tell us, Poirot,’ they cry, at the end of the book. ‘Who did this dastardly deed? and why?’ I mean, all the Extras probably know this information too, don’t they. But no one ever asks them. They just come in with the tea tray and leave without anyone noticing.

Likewise, no one ever asks an Extra if they’re okay and how they feel about being shut up in a big country house with loads of stairs, and a murderer roaming about bumping people off willy-nilly.

And as if all this is not enough, when the author gets bored, you might even end up as the next victim, just to ‘spice things up a bit’.

How is that fair? It’s not just a policeman’s life that’s terrible hard. Try being an Extra for one book, let alone a whole series. I’m only surprised they don’t have a union.

‘I hate being in crowd scenes,’ said the person in the red outfit. ‘So do I!’ said another person in yellow. ‘It’s so anonymous.’

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The Language of Flowers #flowersinbooks #literaryquotes

/ Caron Allan / 4 Comments

Flowers. They are always mentioned in books, right?  Whether they are a metaphor for the transient nature of life, or for resilience, or else portrayed in a more traditional way as indicating someone’s feelings or emotions, they are the writer’s favourite motif.

In one of my books, they represent something sinister–a kind of veiled threat, when Cressida received dead flowers from an unknown source. But flowers have been written about for centuries by some of the world’s greatest authors.

Do you recognise all of these quotations? There’s no prize, but you can feel very proud of yourself if you do! Hopefully after reading a few of these, you’ll feel as though you’ve had tea in the garden on a sunny afternoon.

“If a kiss could be seen I think it would look like a violet.”

L. M. Montgomery: Anne Of Avonlea

″‘Really, there’s nothing to see.’ Nothing… only this: a great lawn where flowerbeds bloomed…”

Philippa Pearce: Tom’s Midnight Garden

“How extraordinary flowers are… People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”

Iris Murdoch: A Fairly Honourable Defeat

“A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.”

Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass

“In joy or sadness, flowers are our constant friends.”

Okakura Kakuzo: The Book of Tea

“Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;

And ’tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.”

William Wordsworth: Lines Written in Early Spring

“Nobody sees a flower – really – it is so small it takes time – we haven’t time – and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”

Georgia O’Keeffe

“All day in grey rain

hollyhocks follow the sun’s

invisible road.”

Basho (translated by Harry Behn)

“Have you blossoms and books, those solaces of sorrow?”

Emily Dickinson: Letters

 

“All the men send you orchids because they’re expensive and they know that you know they are. But I always kind of think they’re cheap, don’t you, just because they’re expensive. Like telling someone how much you paid for something to show off.”

Winifred Watson: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

“You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation.”

Stephen King: Salem’s Lot

 

“And over walls and earth and trees and swinging sprays and tendrils the fair green veil of tender little leaves had crept, and in the grass under the trees and the gray urns in the alcoves and here and there everywhere were touches or splashes of gold and purple and white and the trees were showing pink and snow above his head and there were fluttering of wings and faint sweet pipes and humming and scents and scents.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden

“There has fallen a splendid tear

From the passion-flower at the gate.

She is coming, my dove, my dear;

She is coming, my life, my fate.

The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near;”

And the white rose weeps, “She is late;”

The larkspur listens, “I hear, I hear;”

And the lily whispers, “I wait.”

Alfred Tennyson: Maud Part 1

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Van Gogh and the need for models

/ Caron Allan / 3 Comments

When Vincent van Gogh wrote to Emile Barnard in 1889 from the asylum in which he had voluntarily placed himself, he said he was ‘suffering under an absolute lack of models’. He was not talking about people to pose for him to paint, he was talking about people to look up to, professionally, role models, people he aspired to follow and to learn from. He was faithfully working on his painting, turning out canvas after canvas, but had no one close by who could help him grow as an artist.

Alice Walker, in her collection of essays entitled In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (such an inspirational book, I still have the battered copy that I bought in 1989 in London’s Tottenham Court Road at a bookshop specialising in feminist and womanist works) quotes this moment in Van Gogh’s life, and discusses it in “Saving The Life That Is Your Own – the importance of models in the artist’s life”. She highlights the need for writers–and all artists–to find worthy and strong role models to help us grow and develop our skills. Her book helped me hugely as an aspiring writer in my late 20s.

There have been a number of special books which have influenced me as a writer over the years. Here are some of them. (Some of them are quite old now, but I think you can still get them…)

In her 1934 masterpiece Becoming A Writer Dorothea Brande said, “A writer writes” which writers hear everywhere, and you may think it’s an obvious statement to make, but think about it for a few minutes, it’s deeper than you think. It’s not about writing being just a one-off event, ‘I wrote a book’, but an ongoing, permanent relationship with words. This book is considered a little out of date by some or a bit patronising, but for many writers, Brande’s book is the seminal work aimed at writers who are right at the start of their writing journey, or who have lost their creative impetus and need a fresh perspective.

Writing a book can be compared to climbing a mountain, and the higher you get the more scary it feels if you stepped back from the process to look at what you were doing. So, as Mary Wibberley in her book To Writers With Love said, ‘Don’t look down!’ – just keep moving forwards until you reach the end. Or should that be, THE END. She also commented that finding your story is rather like creating a sculpture out of a block of stone. It takes time, and you shape the story roughly then polish and hone, several times. This book was another huge help to me as a new writer.

Alice Walker taught me that in spite of this need writers often have to be alone to concentrate on their writing, we also need others to look up to and observe and learn from, to share our journey with, to laugh with, to cry with, and everything in between. I–and you–cannot grow or function in isolation. And life’s journey is too hard to spend all your time alone.

It has never been easier than today to find others for inspiration and support. Many of my closest friends are other writers I have come across through conversations on social media. And they have got me through so many tough times, times when I felt discouraged, or felt like giving up, or felt like nothing seemed to be working. I am so grateful to them. If I ever win an award, my ‘Without whom…’ speech will be long and tearful. The internet is full of tips, hints, writing websites, blogs, epublishing platforms, how-tos and advice, writing circles, book reading groups, as well as technique and knowledge webinars. My advice is to dig into these writing groups, make friends and be kind. We all need the human element. There is no need to suffer under a lack of models any more.

It is an odd thing, being a writer, because just like other ‘normal’ jobs, sometimes you don’t want to do it, you don’t want to write, or you’re fed up with everything you write: it feels stale or trite or clichéd or flat or bumpy or… ‘hard, dry…’ Sometimes you hate being a writer. Sometimes you write something so good, you can’t believe it came from you. Or you become convinced you have depleted in one sentence your entire reserve of ability, and that you will never be able to write again. Other times you feel as though you’re banging your head against a brick wall, desperately trying to get an idea out, and you can’t even remember what a verb is.

Van Gogh said, “However hateful painting may be…if anyone who has chosen this handicraft pursues it zealously, he is a man of duty, sound and faithful.”

All Van Gogh’s works now with free cat

It does sometimes feel as though, as writers, we are undertaking A Quest as we try to ensure our red herrings are subtle but present, and our sleuths remain believable and appealing yet somehow stand out from the crowd of other fictional sleuths. Loathing may be present for at least a third of the book. You may well come to dread the very thought of looking at your draft again. But look at it you must, for the good of the book, and your writer’s soul. And you have to make yourself do it even if you don’t want to. You can’t just sit and wait for inspiration to strike. As many well-known and successful authors have commented, if you only write when inspired, then you’ll probably never write a thing.

Van Gogh went on to say, “What I am doing is hard, dry, but that is because I am trying to gather new strength by doing some rough work, and I’m afraid abstractions would make me soft.”

Like him, we devote ourselves to diligently plodding through our notes, our research, our first drafts and our revisions. At times it feels like hard, dry work. But we cannot leave it until later. If we do, we will lose our impetus, we will forget that special key phrase, that small detail on which the whole plot turns. Therefore it’s important to keep going, keep moving forward. But you don’t have to do it alone. Join a group, make friends, open up to others and as they embrace your work, you can embrace theirs.

Be careful with your criticism. Remember their style may not be yours, their story may differ from yours, their experiences, their character – they are not you. But like you, they have a dream – so try not to trample, but to encourage. One harsh word or thoughtless comment can make someone give up writing for weeks, even months, so be kind, be gentle. We creatives are sensitive people. You may not ‘gel’ with everyone, but those you do, support them wholeheartedly. Try to keep an open mind. You may not like or agree with what people say about your work but listen to them anyway, consider what they say, don’t get miffed or precious: you need these people and they need you. And more than one viewpoint is valid. Together we can get our work drafted, revised and rerevised, edited, rererevised, proofed then put it out there into the world for the reading public, sharing one another’s triumphs as well as the doubts.

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These fragments I have shored against my ruin

/ Caron Allan

I first shared this blog post in 2016. To date, it’s still my best-performing blog post. Not sure if that is because it’s one of my shortest – I am quite a waffler these days.

But I love that line. It’s line 431 from T S Eliot’s The Waste Land. The first time I read the poem, when I got to this line I burst into tears, because it seemed such a beautiful summation, of the poem, of my life, everything. Words do that to me–I’m a very emotional person, I’m glad to say.

I believe that our lives are made up of fragments. We are, in essence, a walking, talking collection of every experience we’ve ever had. This includes what we’ve read. Words.

So often I am out and about–yes, I escape now and again–and I hear something, see something, smell something which provokes a memory of something I’ve read. Most often it is snatches of conversation I overhear, being nosey and a crime writer, which as we all know gives me special dispensation to eavesdrop on others. (‘I ain’t been dropping no eaves, sir, honest.’) Words seem to lead to more words.

I hear someone say, ‘The wonderful thing…’ and mentally I’ve added ‘…about Tiggers is Tiggers are wonderful things.’ (I didn’t promise it was anything erudite!) Or someone may say ‘Wherever I go…’ and I think to myself ‘there’s always Pooh, there’s always Pooh and me.’ (By the way, Winnie the Pooh is not just for kids. Just read the chapter called The Piper At the Gates of Dawn…)

It’s not just A A Milne, though. So often snatches of Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, songs, poems, plays, hymns, prayers, all sorts of words come into my head. I can’t look at spring flowers without thinking ‘A host of golden daffodils’ or ‘April is the cruellest month’. (The Waste Land again!) A tall person becomes ‘thou painted Maypole’. A mouse is a ‘wee sleekit cowrin tim’rous beastie’. (Burns of course, who else?)

If something annoying happens, I hear Miss Marple whisper, ‘Oh dear, how extremely vexing,’ or I hear someone say something stupid, and Mr Bennett’s frustrated, outraged, ‘Until you come back…I shall not hear two words of sense spoken together’ comes to mind. I share his pain. In extremis, ‘I shall be in my library; I’m not to be disturbed.’ (Not unless there’s cake or Midsomer Murders.) Or I might hear Miss Silver’s indulgent, ‘In their own way, men can be quite useful.’

Or if sorrows come in, it’s Matthew Arnold’s painful comment filled with longing, ‘Ah love, let us be true to one another,’ because he believed that one another was all we have. (Dover Beach).

Or…

There’s always another wonderful sketch of words from someone who lived many years before my time. Or a contemporary. Or the next generation. We all use and need words.

And because of this, none of us can ever come to a text, for the first time, or the tenth, ‘cold’ or ‘new’. There is really no neutral approach in the human soul. We bring with us the sum of all our experiences and emotions, our world-view and our beliefs, and those inform what we read, and mercifully sometimes, what we read can inform all those things too.

When I was studying literature ‘back in the day’, I remember The Waste Land was one of our set texts. Critics deplored it, dismissing it as a pastiche, a patchwork quilt of other peoples’ work, revealing only a good memory for quotations. Students shuddered and declared it was one of the worst experiences of their life. But for some of us, there was a sense of ‘wow, I never knew poetry could be like this!’

When I read his words, ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’ (line 431), I said to my tutor, I think he is saying that literature, that words, will save us in times of crisis, bolster us when we are at a low ebb. I was told I was wrong, but in spite of that, I still choose to believe this could be one meaning of these, for me, immortal words. These fragments of remembered stories, poems, previous experiences, feelings, of words, I have stored up, internalised, to use as a defence, shored against my ruin, my unhappiness, times of want, misery, sorrow and confusion. Ruin.

For me it is a reminder that many things in life are transient, passing, temporary, but I will always carry within me the sum of what I have read. Just read Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 and tell me I’m wrong. It’s short, it’s sweet, it’s got a cheeky grin at the end. It’s perfect, and all human life is there.

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Holiday reading

/ Caron Allan / 1 Comment

This week, I’m being spoiled rotten by another kind author’s contribution of a blog post. So I shall immediately, and with gratitude, hand over the reins to Gordon Lawrie:

Gordon Lawrie was a secondary teacher in his native Edinburgh for 36 years until he could no longer resist the challenge of writing a novel. His first awful attempt remains buried undiscovered in a safe place, but a couple of romantic comedies followed before his first crime novel, The Midnight Visitor, appeared in March 2022. In addition, he is the Founding Director of Dean Park Press, which provides services for self-publishing authors, and the editor of the online publication Friday Flash Fiction.

 He has his own website, www.lawrie.info  where you can find lots more embarrassing information about him, as well as a great deal of free stuff to read. He also has a Twitter account: @thesaucers where he sometimes says more than he should about the government of the day, golf, birdwatching and his beloved Hearts football club.

 I’m pretty addicted to crime fiction. I think it might my need for escapism, but I also enjoy being challenged in a non-confrontational sort of way. I’m addicted to Wordle, too.

I’ve written a handful of novels now, some of which have been better than others. What seemed to work best for me was romantic comedy, but there’s little money in romcoms unless Danny Boyle or someone equally famous decides to turn your novel into a smash hit starring Hugh Grant. No, crime fiction is the way to go if you’re trying to make a living from your writing. Crime – whether it’s a detective thriller or a courtroom drama – not only holds out the prospect of a modest income; there’s half a chance someone will try to use the characters to turn your stories into a TV series. That’s why I started to write my DI John Knox/Sister Mary Maxwell-Hume mysteries. Shameless, I admit it.

But be under no illusion, crime writing is hard. There are so many strands to keep track of: the plot, of course; the characters; the pace; maintaining the general suspense; and of course the reader has to feel satisfied by the eventual solution. Ideally, the reader should end up feeling like the detective’s sidekick, wondering how they managed to be so stupid as to miss the giveaway clues that were the key to solving the mystery. Keep your Booker or Nobel Prizes. Writing a crime novel is the true Everest of literature.

Crime writing, though, is far from homogeneous. Readers of Caron’s blog will be familiar with her cosy country-house whodunnits (that’s an official term, not an insult, by the way). Or perhaps you prefer Raymond Chandler-style hard-boiled thrillers, usually told in the first person to allow the writer to make acerbic observations on the social circles in which he – it’s almost invariably a ‘he’ – moves. There’s a whole genre of historical crime fiction, whether it’s Brother Cadfael in a monastery, or the exceptional Bernie Gunther series mostly set during and in the aftermath of Nazi Germany. There are any number of “noir” crime thrillers: Nordic noir, tartan noir, Icelandic noir and so on. Recently, Richard Osman and others have written successful crime novels with comedy overtones. My fellow Edinburgh author Olga Wojtas is currently having lots of success with a bonkers time-travel comedy crime series. Her librarian protagonist is sent back in time to solve assorted mysteries (the latest being to exonerate MacBeth and discover who really killed King Duncan). Janice Hallett’s The Appeal is written entirely in emails and texts. There’s plenty of choice.

But although I’ll read virtually anything, my all-time favourite crime genre is what I’d term “holiday crime”. Set in some lovely location that I’m either familiar with, or would like to go to, I’m transported there as I turn the pages. I particularly like the ones set in Italy – Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series set in Sicily; Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen set in various cities; but above all Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti series set in Venice.

Venice is a city I think I know fairly well, and each of Leon’s novels takes me there on another holiday. An American, she was a Professor of English Literature at Venice University, and she clearly casts herself as Paola, Guido’s wife. What we end up with is a series of novels where the plot is almost secondary, sometimes even thin, but the reader doesn’t mind because there are so many other things to enjoy – the interplay between familiar characters; the politics and society of Venice; Guido and Paola’s own literary preferences; Venetian cuisine; but above all the city itself. There’s even a book of walks called Brunetti’s Venice where you can trace the steps of the great man for yourself. (I’ve done a couple. How sad is that?)

Living in a tourist hot-spot like Edinburgh, you’d think I’d find it easy to weave the city into my books. But there are so many outstanding crime writers who also live here – Kate Atkinson, Ian Rankin and Alexander McColl-Smith to name just three – that I feel rather in awe of their skills. And because writers still have to concentrate on plot, characters, pacing and all the other aspects of a novel, they also have to be careful that describing ‘scene’ isn’t perceived by the reader to be mere padding. That’s especially dangerous if your reader is from your own home city; they probably don’t need to be given a guided tour.

You might not even have heard of Donna Leon, because the only TV series that’s ever been made of Commissario Brunetti’s mysteries was in German. More surprising still, Leon has expressly forbidden her novels ever to be translated into Italian – she’s completely unknown in Venice itself. That might be the secret. The reader needs to feel they’re off on holiday, and it’s not much fun trying to escape in your own town. I think we all learned that during the pandemic.

Thank you so much, Gordon, for this fascinating tour of Italian crime!

Also by Gordon Lawrie:

Self-Publishing: The Total Beginner’s Guide

The Midnight Visitor

The Discreet Charm Of Mary Maxwell-Hume

Four Old Geezers And A Valkyrie

100 Not Out

and more! All available from Amazon and good book shops.

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First, create your setting

/ Caron Allan / 2 Comments
An Art Deco style house, rather like a ship, I think

When writing any fictional work, the author has to create a setting. Even if all the action takes place in one room, the author needs to make the room appear real and convincing. And usually, a setting is much larger than one single room, whether it is a grand country house, a quaint village, a ship in the middle of the ocean or a space station located in a distant nebula. The physical space ascribed to a story is essential for the characters to exist: without a setting, the story just wouldn’t come alive in the imagination of the reader.

But as authors, we have a dilemma: is it better to use a fictional setting, or to set a story in a ‘real’ place?

Some authors love to set their works in a real place. In times past, when the average person didn’t travel afield very far, books set in foreign lands were exotic and almost as exciting as taking a trip yourself. The author could conjure the sights and smells, slipping in cultural references such as language, mannerisms, behaviours, and traditions, then adding layer upon layer of experience for the reader by including descriptions of places and geographical features they might never see. You could find yourself in a desert, or on a mountain-top, at the bottom of the sea with Jules Verne or travelling by mule to an isolated archeological dig in an Agatha Christie novel.

Not all country gardens include a summer house or gazebo

For the author, there are advantages to using a real location for a book. To begin with, it makes the surroundings easier to describe, if you only have to look out of your door, or bring up images on the Internet. It’s easier to keep track of your characters, especially in a crime story where you have to create alibis and where there is a need to account for a character’s movements or whereabouts at any given time. And because the author is describing a real place, it’s easier for them to keep their details accurate, and therefore they seem all the more convincing, giving the reader a sense of being in a ‘real’ place.

But there are disadvantages to this too.

To begin with, the real geography or setting might not work with your story, and if you include things that don’t exist, your readers will not be happy. And trust me, they will notice! Equally, real towns or country houses are vulnerable to change—once again change might mean that your story no longer works, or is less convincing, or just doesn’t interest the reader as much.

Another problem is the rise of Literary Tourism, or as I call it, the ‘Morse’ effect—this is where readers love a setting so much they want to go there and see it for themselves, and sometimes do this is large numbers, like tourists visiting the city of Oxford to follow in the steps of Colin Dexter’s creation, Inspector Morse. As we all know, a little tourism is a good thing—it boosts local economy and provides jobs, not to mention selling books or TV shows and making everyone happy. But a lot of tourism can breed resentment in a locality if it causes inconvenience, or even environmental damage. Visitors may throng about a particular spot that features in a book and this can be unacceptable for a number of reasons. And what if the author is highly critical or disparaging about a particular real place? I don’t see that book, or its enthusiasts being welcomed with open arms.

Be careful when featuring real inhabitants in fiction

For me, the setting is a useful, nice-to-have but not essential part of my books. The main emphasis is on character and events. So do forgive me if my settings a sometimes a bit ‘samey’. In this way, I sometimes build my fictional country house as an amalgamation of all the other, real-life country houses I’ve visited, not faithful at all to one specific building.

I personally prefer this ‘Midsomer Murders’ approach—have a fictional area within a real part of the country. This is the glorious middle ground, where you loosely build your story on what is actually there, but do the typical author thing of ‘changing the names to protect, etc, etc’. This way you can create the sense of a real place with all the quirks and characteristics of that place, but which is as flexible as the author needs it to be. You can incorporate any number of variations to fit your future works as well as the one you have on the go at the moment. And best of all—no one will ever be able to say, ‘In chapter four, you have the car park at the end of the road by the pier, but in fact it’s actually at the opposite end of the town.’

All you need to do is remember where all the features of your fictional town are. I suggest drawing a map. Otherwise, the same reader will be able to say, ‘In chapter four, the car park is at the end of the road by the pier, but in chapter seven, you’ve put it at the other end of the town.’ And by the time you get to this stage, it probably would have been easier to use a real place, after all.

I definitely need to set a book in Norway–no doubt I’ll have to travel there for research purposes. Sigh. Life’s tough.

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An apology. And (finally) The Killer Speaks

/ Caron Allan

Since this whole covid thing hit, I’ve noticed I’ve become quite–erm–well, doolally is what my mother would have called it. I’ve gone a bit forgetful and dopey. And the most recent example of this is when, two weeks ago, I posted a blog entitled ‘More killer words’, and I actually said:

‘I mentioned a while ago (I’ve already forgotten when it was…) that one of the best parts of a murder mystery is when the killer is ‘on-stage’ and speaks.’

Well it’s taken me until last weekend to figure out where I said that, and it was in my subscriber newsletter – so no, I never did start that conversation here on my blog. On the blog we had the sequel but not the prequel, if you see what I mean. Sorry about that! So now, without further ado, I bring you the original (horribly long, feel free to completely ignore it) The Killer Speaks:

You know how, at the end of a murder mystery, they assemble all the suspects, and the police, and the investigator—whether an official officer of the law or an amateur sleuth, or even a paid private eye—tells everyone how the crime was done? I love that bit.

On the one hand, it bugs me that it’s done at all in fiction, because clearly, in real life the police don’t bring all the suspects to Great Aunt Madge’s house and, when everyone is sitting comfortably, begin to recount the case from the very beginning, filling in each step with a bit of evidence or some superhuman deductive reasoning. And usually I hate it when things in books aren’t done ‘right’.

But I love that big reveal, and the complacency of the investigator, having everyone there to listen to his/her theories. I love the ego of it, the pomp, the ‘you will all listen to me’ arrogance, and so even though I strive to make my own stories more or less believable, I sometimes just give in and go with that wonderful sense of occasion.

I’m not an expert on the Golden Age of murder mystery writing, but I am very familiar with some of the well-known authors of that time, notably Agatha Christie and Patricia Wentworth, and I have read quite a bit by some of their contemporaries: Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Georgette Heyer. And I’m pretty sure it was this bunch who created the concept of this kind of finale. Or perhaps if we go a little further back, we will find Sherlock Holmes setting this up as the ultimate in wrap-ups, or Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff. I’m not clear where it began. I just know I love it.

We so often read of Poirot standing in front of a group of rather irritable, seated suspects whilst he expounds, his manner a cross between hectoring and lecturing. Miss Marple, by dint of her age, is usually seated, sometimes knitting, and has a far more hesitant, apologetic style, and is so self-deprecating. Both Poirot and Marple suffer from moral outrage: a murder is an affront and will not be tolerated mainly on the grounds of moral integrity rather than the unbiased basis of the law.

I enjoy ‘listening’ as they bring their case. But then comes the point I love the most.

The killer speaks.

Because this is the reason we hang onto Poirot’s thoughts for so long. We want to hear (read, I mean really) the killer say in her or his own words, WHY they did it. Yes, we do need to know how. And where, and with what weapon, we want to know about motives and alibis, but oh so often, the abiding desire in us is to know WHY. Why did they do such a terrible, irremediable thing?

We are often told that anyone could kill given the right circumstances and sufficient motive. Many of us doubtless would say, ‘No, I would never, could never kill. I can’t even bring myself to kill a woodlouse or a spider.’

I have asked myself if I could kill. I have killed bugs and beasties, generally by accident or out of sheer clumsiness. But I’ve never—as far as I’m aware—killed anything bigger than a bee. Unless you count calling the rat man. That I suppose is more like being an accessory, or conspiring to kill… From the rat’s point of view, they’d probably say I was a murderer. To me it’s different. I suppose murderers always say that.

But if it was a case of happening upon a person who was deliberately harming someone else, and I saw a way to stop it, what would I do? I’d like to think I’d never turn my back on someone in desperate need. But how far would I go?

So I think that’s why we—all of us avid crime fiction fans—enjoy getting to the pinnacle of a mystery, following the clues, deducing and pondering, and hanging onto every word to find out ‘the who’ and ‘the why’ behind the whole thing. As the killer shifts in his or her seat, the spotlight shifts to them, and this is their big moment. The chance to explain their WHY. We hold our breath, not daring to make a sound in case we miss a word. They lean forward, look us in the eye, they clear their throat, and they speak…

Which book finale have you read which gave you the biggest buzz? Do you prefer your killer to go down denying and fighting, or do you prefer your books to end with a kind of proud and well-bred admission of the truth?

Get in touch! Let me know what you think!

In the meantime, in case you haven’t read it–you won’t need to now you know who the killer is–you can click here to go to one of my own ‘big moments’ when the killer speaks. This is taken from my novel The Last Perfect Summer of Richard Dawlish: Dottie Manderson mysteries book 4. And it absolutely does contain a ton of SPOILERS.

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Hold very tight please, it’s all change once more

/ Caron Allan / 2 Comments
The latest version – surely this can’t upset anyone? (Answers on a post card…)

I don’t like to change my book covers too often. As a reader and book collector, I understand how frustrating and disappointing it can be to have a nice little row of matching books and then, just before you get a full set, ‘someone’ decides to change the covers.

I changed my Dottie Manderson covers about a year ago.

The original Night and Day cover was this one, six years ago when the book was first published:

Remember this one? My first love.

I still love it, but people complained it looked too much like a romance and nothing like a mystery. So eventually, I changed it.

I tried this one:

And this one:

This one:

And finally settled on this one, which has to be my favourite so far.

But when you’re a self-published or Indie author, you have to make business decisions based on cold hard facts and not (as I tend to) on gut instinct or warm fuzzy feelings. So when Amazon announced that following their new policy implementation, they would not now allow me to advertise my book with this cover (the one above) due to the depiction of ‘excessive gore’, I swallowed my pride and my emotional attachment to ‘my baby’ and went off to sulk cry create a new cover. Because you’ve got to advertise, right? How else will readers discover my books?

So sorry, sorry, sorry, but I’ve had to change my covers yet again.

But it’s quite hard to think of a cover image that suits the genre but doesn’t depict blood splatters, weapons, women in the middle of a scream, cadavers, all that kind of thing. I’ve seen loads of covers lately which show a building. that seems to be a new trend, and certainly it’s a safe way to go. In addition, you need an image that looks good as in black and white as it does in colour, is clear and easy for the eye to interpret in a tiny thumbnail size. It’s hard to find the perfect image.

I brooded over images of old-fashioned street lamps dimly lighting a patch of pavement.

I browsed silhouette after silhouette of ‘vintage women’ images. Most of them were either Edwardian era or 1920s flappers. So I freely confess I ran out of ideas.

Then, I thought, ooh what about the chap Dottie finds at the beginning? He was wearing evening dress…

So the new cover idea was born as soon as I set my eyes on this:

Hopefully it’s simple, easy to understand, eye-catching and also makes readers think, if not of the 1930s, then at least ‘not now’. And if not exactly exuding mystery, then hopefully their first thought won’t be, ‘ooh I can’t wait to read this sci-fi or this romance’. In any case, I can’t possibly offend anyone with this, can I? There’s no gore whatsoever, and I’m hoping this cover will live for a while before needing to be updated.

Now I’ve just got to change all my advertising material and social media stuff. This could take a while!

Image by Tani T at Shutterstock: https://www.shutterstock.com/g/tanitk

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