This may sound a little pretentious but bear with me I promise it is no such thing. Let’s go back to the painting analogy for the third point. You should listen to them whenever that happens. If you’ve developed your characters with sufficient care, they will eventually be able to direct their own way through the story. When you’re driving, it’s sometimes fun to turn the sat-nav off and see where the road takes you. You should always have a clear idea of the start and the end point and a general plan of how you are going to get from A to B but if you try to plan the entire route in detail, you’ll drain the thing of spontaneity and those unexpected diversions that make a journey interesting. It is, of course, important to have some sort of plan of what is going to happen, but not prescriptively so. I can think of no better way of describing it than that.
It is the unspoken things that bring the whole to life. It is like music in that regard: composers will tell you the silences are equally as important as the notes themselves. This is particularly true for a mystery novel. Light and shade are also critical it is not just about what you say in words, but what you don’t say. The writer need only apply enough paint to plant the suggestion of an image into the reader’s mind the rest should be left to his/her own imagination. If it were a painting, it should be thought of as an impressionist’s canvas. A novel is not an exercise in realism or still-life you do not have to depict everything precisely or in detail. It’s probably time, therefore, to talk a little bit about the technique of writing most specifically, some of the mistakes, lessons and tricks I worked out for myself along the way.īy far the most important one took me quite a while to arrive at because it might appear counter-intuitive at first: don’t try to describe everything. So far, I have discussed how I came about writing a book and the task of finding a publisher. It is a process of trial, error and self-education. Sure, you can sign up for a creative-writing course, but I very much doubt any successful book was born out of a formula taught at one of those. Writing a mystery novel is a difficult thing to do and nobody can really teach you how to go about it.
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