30th October saw the third Writers WebTV free-to-watch-live online workshop broadcast from Dublin, and this one was all about writing crime. With Ken Bruen, Jane Casey, Declan Hughes and Nimah O’Connor as expert witnesses, a panel of 5 aspiring crime writers in the jury box and Writing.ie’s Vanessa O’Loughlin bringing it all together, the day was packed full of tips for new and experienced writers.
Working through a series of exercises is a great way to develop your writing voice or find your way into a new story, it gets the creative part of your brain ticking and quick short exercises can, and do, produce some excellent results. As well as quizzing the authors on all the aspects of writing crime, at the Writers Web TV’s Crime Pays workshop, these exercises were given on the day to illustrate several key points and to get the in-studio writers, as well as writers at home, thinking.
Ken Bruen is without doubt one of Ireland’s, and the world’s most successful crime writers. With 35 novels under his belt, six TV movies in the can, a 12-part series just agreed with Swedish TV, and the completion of two big screen movies starring A-listers such as Jason Statham, Colin Farrell and Keira Knighly, there can be few more prolific authors. And certainly not many can boast that their work has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Japanese, Danish, Albanian and Czech. And on top of all that he has a PhD in metaphysics.
Bruen has just released his latest novel – Purgatory – his tenth featuring the enigmatic and utterly compelling guard-turned-private-eye Jack Taylor, who has so far featured in six TV movies (for BBC and RTE) and is returning for a new series on both channels in January 2014. The series is also available on Netflix for anyone on catch-up.
Ken started with day with an exercise all about opening lines. As Vanessa explained, “Stephen King said in a recent article: ‘a book won’t stand or fall on the very first line of prose — the story has got to be there.. And yet a really good first line can do so much to establish that crucial sense of voice…There’s incredible power in it when you say, ‘come in here. You want to know about this’. And someone begins to listen.’
A great opening line get your reader right into the action. The opening line to James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice is ‘They threw me off the hay truck about noon.’ Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol intrigues with “Marley was dead, to begin with.”
Ken Bruen’s Purgatory starts ‘The skateboarders had that peculiar blend of Irish self consciousness, dumb persistence.’ In this line we know where we are, who we’re talking about and the phrase dumb persistence is setting them up for something to happen – although not what you expect.
Your opening line sets the tone, the voice, makes that crucial first impression.
In real terms, polishing your opening line should be the last thing you do when you’ve finished your first draft – if you get caught up worrying about every word you’ll never get your book written! So this is a fun exercise designed to get you thinking and to help you find your story.”
So the first exercise?
Write an opening line that will hook us straight into your story.
Ken had some great advice for writers, explaining how he’d been writing a draft and felt it was flagging, so he’d thought of the worst possible thing that could happen and thrown it in: “Shock the hell out of them. Shock yourself…it was the book I got the most praise for.” Ken also maintains that not a single word is wasted in fiction – he urged writers “Don’t put anything in the bin without showing it to someone else,” emphasising how hard it is to judge your own work.
Joined by Jane Casey, a thriller writer based in London, Exercise 2 focused on Point of View. Known as the T.S. Eliot/John Gardner killer exercise – very appropriate for crime writers – it’s one of the most demanding exercises a writer can do.
T. S. Eliot believed that the ability to describe an object, so that the emotional state of the character from whose point of view we hear the description is revealed, without ever telling the reader what that emotional state is, or what has motivated it, is one of the most important elements in writing.
Renowned American creative writing teacher, the late John Gardner developed this exercise for his students:
A middle-age man is waiting at a bus stop. He has just learned that his son has died violently. Describe the setting from the man’s point of view without telling your reader what has happened.
How will the street look to this man? What are the sounds? Odors? Colors? That this man will notice? What will his clothes feel like?
Write a 250 word description.
Jane Casey advised, “Know where you’re going. But not necessarily how you’re going to get there.” For her a ‘roadmap’ – an approximate idea of the direction the book is taking – is extremely useful, but she doesn’t stick rigidly to it, instead allows the characters space to develop their own thoughts and voices.
Exercise 3 brought the theatrical skills of author Declan Hughes into the mix and was all about using dialogue. Showing the reader what is happening in your story is crucial to involving them, to making them feel like they are part of the action, and using character action and dialogue will ensure that you are showing, not telling. The in-studio writers and writers participating online were asked to do an exercise where actions spoke louder than words – long pauses, nervous gestures are all ‘tells’ that these words may not actually be the truth! Declan said, “Crucial to any character in any story….what do they want? If there’s nothing they want, they’re not in the book.” He also warned that “Writing a novel is like crossing a lake in boat. There’ll be that horrible middle bit when you can’t see a shore, and no waves.” It can be hard work, but the best bit? “When it’s finished, when you’ve written the last word…” Declan says you should “Trick yourself into getting some writing done by doing it early in the morning. yes, even before coffee. Do it before it feels like a chore.”
Declan’s challenge was to write a dramatic scene between two people in which each has a secret and neither of them reveals the secret to the other OR to the reader.
For instance it could be a conversation between a husband has come home from work early because he’s lost his job. His wife’s lover is in the bathroom.
We had some great responses including studio writer Niamh Brennan’s piece, dialogue between a boss and his employee about a local serial killer…”He must have run out of prostitutes.” What was that smell out the back?!
Understanding how to create tension in crime writing is vital – shorter sentences and paragraphs speed the pace up, but sometimes slow is much more scary. Declan asked the writers to:
Write the paragraph before the discovery of a body. It could be a character’s approach to the body he/she will find, including the location, or purely his or her thought process. Make the reader want to skip on, to find out what’s happening, but by virtue of the detail in this paragraph know that they have to stick with it or they will miss something vital.
Before the last exercise of the day, writers met Niamh O’Connor, True Crime Editor of the Sunday World Newspaper and a best selling fiction and non-fiction author. Niamh meets criminals every day and had interviewed many of the country’s most notorious murderers – she shared her thoughts on what makes criminals different from you and me and also revealed details of the situation she found herself in that frightened her the most. Niamh’s tips on how the criminal mind works were fascinating.
Motivation is key to creating plausible characters, and while in real life there appear to be some criminals who are just plain evil, in fiction they need to more complex to be believable.
In criminology, examining why people commit crime is very important in the ongoing debate on how crime should be handled and prevented. Many theories have emerged over the years from Lombrosso’s theory of physiognomy onwards, and they continue to be explored. Whether criminals make a rational choice purely for reward or glory, or if they are a product of society and their physical environment, suffering from mental illness or the side effects of substance abuse, there is always one or more contributing factors to crime.
Writers were asked to try this exercise:
Think of a crime, then tell us a little about who commits it. What reason or excuse do they give themselves, and what is the real reason, if it is different, for committing the crime?
Rounding up, Vanessa revealed, “In the 1930’s the Detection Club was founded by a group of British mystery writers, including Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers – the first president was G.K. Chesterton. The club held regular dinner meetings in London and is still going strong today, with every author joining agreeing to a strict oath:
Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them, and not placing reliance, on nor making use of divine revelation, feminine intuition, mumbo jumbo, jiggery-pokery, coincidence, or act of god?
Think of this as you construct your plots!
And remember too that tension drives fiction, and making a situation worse will build suspense. The higher the stakes the more your reader will be hooked and have to read on to find out what happens next – keep asking yourself how? What if? How could things get worse?”
(c) Vanessa O’Loughlin
If you want to watch the full workshop, check out www.writerswebtv.com
