Monthly Archives: December 2016

What I learned from…”Daisy in Chains” by Sharon Bolton

Thanks to an army of dedicated book bloggers, there’s never a shortage of reviews for any new book of note. You can find reviewers who share your tastes and function almost like a personal recommendation service. But what I haven’t seen much of is reviews of recent crime novels, geared towards writers who want to improve their craft. Why do I think that’s important? Well, if you want to be a great writer, you need to understand what makes a great book. And if you want to be successful, you need to know what kind of book today’s reader enjoys. So I’ve decided to start a monthly series on recent crime novels and what I’ve learned from them.


This month’s book – the first ever in this series – is “Daisy in Chains” by Sharon Bolton. Why have I chosen it? Well, I’ve just finished reading it. And I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a book this year more than Daisy in Chains.

It’s a mystery (not a thriller – the distinction is important) and tells the story of convicted serial killer Hamish Wolfe, and Maggie Rose, a defence lawyer with a track record of overturning convictions for violent men and writing bestselling books about the cases.

This is not your standard mystery, which is one of the things that makes it a great story. We already have a killer. But has the wrong man been convicted? That’s the mystery. Throw in beautiful writing that is descriptive, but not excessively so, as well as plenty of red herrings and a cast of well-drawn characters, who may or may not be hiding things, and you have a very satisfying and original serial killer story.

I love serial killers. I love no-nonsense female investigators. And I love well-written but pacy crime novels.

I was in heaven.

But what did I learn?

Lesson 1: You can start fast without a body.

There are two standard ways to start stories in this genre: a murder or, introduce your characters, then have a murder. Broadly, you could seperate those into ‘fast’ and ‘slow’.

Daisy in Chains doesn’t start with a murder, but it also doesn’t start slow. In fact, if you haven’t already bought the book (did you not hear what I said about it?!) I suggest you go straight to Amazon and read the first few pages.

The cover of Daisy in Chains actually didn’t do it for me. I thought it would be like a lot of thrillers: interesting plot but written in a ‘workmanlike’ manner.

But then I read the sample pages and realised that I could not have been more wrong.

The opening of Daisy in Chains is a masterclass in using suspense to introduce a character. There is a tense situation in which Maggie reveals what kind of person she is. And the events on the beach segue into a car journey and then the main plot.

Did I use the word masterclass already? But you know exactly what I’m talking about, because you’ve read it. Wait… you still haven’t read it? READ IT.

Lesson 2: Using setting and language to create a feeling of menace

There’s a scene in which Maggie is in a cave. She’s not in immediate danger, she’s just doing a bit of investigative work. But the cave is described like this:

She might almost imagine herself in the belly of some giant creature, that were she to reach out and touch the walls they would be warm, would yield to her fingers, be pulsating with blood.

Figurative language, in general, should be used more sparingly in crime novels, and certainly thrillers, than it would be in literary fiction. Too much description can slow the story down, while you run the risk, when describing something in terms of something else, of pulling the reader out of the story. But used in the right way, a good metaphor or simile can evoke feelings in the reader that heighten tension. In this example, a reference to blood and the belly of a giant creature add a sense of menace. It’s also a great example of showing rather than telling. We’re shown images from Maggie’s imagination and they make us feel what she feels, rather than being told how she feels.

Lesson 3: A new variation on something very old

If I had a dollar for every time a genre writer had written about pounding hearts and racing pulses, I would probably have more money than James Patterson, Lee Child and Harlan Coben combined. But human beings do tend to experience very specific physical responses when confronted with threats. Of course hummingbirds, bumblebees and butterflies have been done to death. So what’s the solution?

In Daisy in Chains, when one of the characters feels anxious, we get this:

The telltale symptoms of excitement are kicking in. Elevated heartbeat? Check. Damp underarms? Check. Tight feeling in his chest? All present and correct.

Sharon Bolton could have just written: “Pete’s heartbeart races, his armpits are sweaty and his chest is tight.” But by taking a little more care and using a rhythmic combination of short sentences, she better conveys a feeling of anxiety. And because Pete is a police officer, the use of “Check. Check. All present and correct.” is a good way to describe these sensations from the perspective of a man who is in the business of following procedures.

Lesson 4: Expand your horizons

Many books, as well as TV programmes and even some films, have a stage-show like quality. They contain small casts of characters in confined, specific locations. The most obvious example of this is soap operas, which can seem very artificial with their multiple linkages between characters, but no linkages with the outside world. (In contrast, TV series Mad Men, which you could argue is an upmarket soap opera, has: external characters, like clients and Don Draper’s girlfriends, drifting in and out; more varied locations, like the trips to California; an occasional focus on historical events like the JFK and Martin Luther King assasinations). Stories can be a bit thin without the added dimension of that outside world. One of the reasons Gone Girl (the film, I haven’t actually read the book) is so enjoyable is that, even though it’s a story about a married couple, the media plays a big part. There may be only two people at its core, but the whole country is watching them and interfering in their lives. So what about Daisy in Chains? This is a story that predominantly takes place in South West England and is told from the points of view of only two characters. But not only do we have the “Wolfe Pack” – a bunch of oddballs campaigning for Hamish’s release – we also have blog posts and news articles about the case. We have multiple external viewpoints and at times quite a novel way of dumping information about the case on to the reader. I actually didn’t like these at first. I’d bought the book because I thought it was going to be a beautifully written story; I liked the way Sharon Bolton’s prose kept the story moving along while also creating plenty of atmosphere. But in the middle of the book, when the news stories and blog posts disappeared, I actually missed them. Acknowledging that there is a world outside the immediate lives of your characters can add a sense of depth and realism to a story.

Lesson 5: Be consistent

However, when the news stories disappeared for a while in the middle of the book, my brain definitely noticed the change. Now, it’s entirely possible that I would have loved Daisy in Chains without them featuring at all. But when I’d had them for a while, then they were taken away, I noticed. It’s something to think about. Readers will pick up on inconsistencies in tone, structure, pace… pretty much anything.

Overall, though, this was a terrific book. An original take on the serial killer murder mystery that was intricately plotted and beautifully written. Definitely a book to enjoy as well as learn from.


Like what you’ve read? Sign up to subscibe to my blog at the top right of this page if you’re on a PC or tablet. Otherwise, come back in a month’s time. I’m currently reading Tall Oaks by Chris Whittaker, with Steph Broadribb’s Deep Down Dead and Little Deaths by Emma Flint on my radar. But I am a flightly little magpie, so I could get distracted and read something else for the next installment…


If you want to see if I can walk the walk as well as talk the talk, and you like serial killer thrillers, you might enjoy my novel PsychoAnalysis. Click HERE to view it on Amazon.

 

What I leaned from writing 50,000 words in one month

In November, I participated in NaNoWriMo, in which people all over the world attempt to write 50,000 words and produce the first draft of a novel. In a month. Yeah, a book in a month.

A MONTH.

I started keeping a diary, but it quickly became clear that the last thing I needed to do was commit to writing even more words. In hindsight, it was a bit like winning a bet that involves eating 20 boiled eggs and celebrating with an omelette.

So, now that it’s all over, and I’ve had some time away from the keyboard, I thought it might be interesting to share what I learned.

Firstly, trying to write fast without a plan is tough. I’m a pantser – that means I don’t plan stories before I start writing them. I write “by the seat of my pants”. In fact, I’m an ultra-panster. I don’t make notes about characters, keep a notebook, anything like that. I keep all my ideas in my head and I believe that if they’re good enough, they’ll survive up there in the old noggin, competing for space with the shopping list of things I’ll buy when I’ve sold fifty million novels and had my work turned into a hugely successful HBO series. There are a lot of cars on that list. And a robot that looks like Christina Aguilera, but enjoys talking about crime novels, crime shows and crime films.

Well, I used to believe all that until I tried to write a book in 30 days, which means cranking out 1,667 words a day, every day.

When you know what you need to write, you can write it. It might not be a good scene, but that doesn’t matter for a first draft – get the words down. Someone’s found a body? Describe where it’s been found, the injuries, what the detective’s feeling. If I said to you “Go and write 1,667 words about a murder scene”, you could do it, right?

But what happens next? And after that?

Now, in the past, this wasn’t a problem for me, for two reasons. One, I didn’t have any deadlines. I could pause and think about my options. And two, I was possessed. Not by demons, or anything like that. But I had one of those stories that occupied my thoughts all day long, so when I arrived at the keyboard, I had a huge amount of material that I wanted to get down on the page.

This time, though, it wasn’t quite like that. I’ve had a few ideas floating around in the story swamp for a while. But at the end of October, a shiny new one surfaced. Now, those old ideas were like relationships. We’d spent some time together and the honeymoon period was over. Plot holes had been identified. They’d farted in bed. This new one had none of that baggage. No farting had occurred. (That was at the beginning of November. Now, a month and 50,000 words later, it’s a Swiss Cheese of plot holes filled with farts).

A man is at a murder scene, cleaning up. But he has no idea how he got there, as though he’s just woken up. “It’s like he was somewhere else, but now he’s here” says the first sentence. And there’s a female psychological profiler. She’s tough (Saga Noren and Stella Gibson are personal favourites – if you don’t know who I’m talking about then you have some serious gaps in your knowledge of fictional female detectives that need to be filled), and she has a mysterious past, which I keep the reader guessing about to create a little suspense. That gave me plenty to work with, but occasionally I would still arrive at the keyboard without knowing what I was going to write. That really matters when time is tight – when I was in the zone, I could get 800 words in 35-40 minutes. When I was struggling, it was more like 300.

Is that important? Well, a lot of people complain that they’d like to write but they just don’t have the time. (A lot of these ‘aspiring’ writers also spend many hours a week watching TV, posting on social media, reading blogs about writing… but let’s not give them too hard a time. Even though I really want to.) Anyway, 800 words in 40 minutes, 5 days a week, 48 weeks a year (so you get weekends and holidays off) is 192,000 words a year!

Who doesn’t have forty minutes to spare five times a week? I start work at 7.30am and finish at 5.30pm. I have two small children who, if I’m being charitable, I will merely call ‘active’. And I have a wife who rather selfishly expects me to spend time with her occasionally as well as contributing to the care of the children. (Yeah, I know. Sometimes I wish it was the 1950s and I could spend the evenings in my study, the children only entering to say “Goodnight father” before going upstairs to cry themselves to sleep.) So I write on the train, I write when I can take a lunch break and I’m writing this on a Saturday night.

I learned something during NaNo though: if you have a limited amount of time to write, make every minute count. And having a plan, even a loose one, will help.

But, some people might ask, won’t planning a story rob it of its energy, won’t it make it more likely that you’ll end up with a drab, formulaic, plot-heavy story?

As a natural pantser, I hear you. During NaNo, I wrote a conversation between my amnesiac main character and a secondary character. It was a bit of a strange scene and didn’t really fit into a thriller. But two days later the lightening bolt struck. I realised that conversation held the key to why the amnesiac was behaving the way he was. It set up a fantastic twist later in the book. Pantser heaven. So I ploughed on.

But as things progressed, problems developed with the plot. My psychological profiler, who was supposed to be really tough, couldn’t discover a way to trace the killer with her skills. She ended up just following the police around, becoming quite passive. And once I had my big revelation for the amnesiac, it raised a lot of questions. So… I just had him trying to escape from the police and the story lapsed into exactly the kind of plot-heavy sequence of chase scenes that my “I’m a unique and beautiful snowflake creative genius pantser” approach was supposed to avoid. Because sometimes, if you’re going fast and you haven’t given enough thought to things, you end up with “this happened and then this and then this”.

It’s possible (and my god, as a despiser of plans and to-do lists and organisation it pains me to say this) that, if I’d spent October writing an outline of my plot, asking questions, connecting dots, well… I might have uncovered some of the problems I would run into in the final days of November. I could have forced myself to come up with alternative scenarios there and then, rather than having to do that in the second draft. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of interesting stuff in “Serial Killer Novel #2”. I’ve spent a month living with my characters, listening to them talk to each other, observing how they react in certain situations. And by living in that story for a month, I’ve discovered the problems that need to be fixed. I can fill in the holes and make the story stronger. But I suspect that, if I return to the novel next year, I’ll be approaching it with a chainsaw rather than a scalpel.

This leads me nicely on to another lesson I learned, though: I would rather write 50,000 bad words than no words. It’s possible that the story I wrote will never become a finished novel. But I’m ok with that. Before NaNo, I’d gotten out of the habit of writing. Now, I know that if I neglect other areas of my life, I can write 50,000 words in a month. So, if I dial things back, I can easily write 20,000 words a month and I will still have time to read, watch TV, see friends, pay overdue bills and actually be a half decent parent. (That last one is important, because I don’t want my kids, who will of course have a genetic predisposition to be great writers, to grow up and write a best-selling memoir all about how much of a dick I am. Although, if they turned into the kind of teenagers who hated their father and would rather die than spend time with him, it would leave me more time to write…)

I’m off topic again. I promise my novels aren’t like this.

So, even though it might seem like a huge waste to write that many words without turning them into a polished story, it absolutely isn’t. A lot of people fall in to the trap of thinking that what they produce early in their writing life is really important and they spend a huge amount of time on a flawed project.

There is an old saying about writing, though: kill your darlings. And that doesn’t just apply to superfluous sentences or beautiful metaphors that don’t fit into the story. It can apply to everything: scenes, chapters, characters and even entire novel-length works. If you feel like you have spent a long time on something so you just have to keep on at it until it’s fixed, then you could well be wasting your time. Let that kitten drown, because there might be an even cuter one just waiting to be discovered. (That is a metaphor. Please don’t ever let a kitten drown.)

I started writing a science fiction story about 15 years ago. I returned to it, throughout my early twenties, re-writing the first 100 or so pages before eventually giving up. Then in my late twenties I wrote a thriller. It was pretty much a copy of John Grisham’s ‘The Firm’, transposed on to the world of hedge funds, with more sex and some Russian gangsters. Neither of those stories will ever be published. So was writing them a waste of time? Hell no! I learned a lot, especially about things that don’t work, so I could avoid them in the future.

How does this fit in to NaNo? Well, there is a tendency for people to focus too much on ‘talent’. They think there have been all these great writers who were simply born great. That Agatha Christie or Charles Dickens or Elmore Leonard just started producing great work from the very first sentence they wrote. But here are some questions for you: How many great composers just sat down at a piano, or with a quill and some paper and started producing concertos and operas? Why do you need to study for five years and then complete two years of professional training to qualify as an architect? If I asked you to play Macbeth in a stage production, with no previous acting experience, do you think you’d win many awards?

Practice. That is what’s required to become competent in any creative pursuit. The first novel or five or twenty that you write might be equivalent to Beethoven’s first piano lessons, or coursework that Frank Gehry completed in the 1950s when studying architecture, or Steve Guttenberg’s first acting lesson. (Actually forget that last one. He probably was born great.)

Maybe that idea you have is fantastic. But here’s the thing: you might not have the writing skills to do it justice. Or you might have a better idea in five years time. And it’s possible that the better idea will come because you’ve spent the previous five years writing stories, getting feedback on them and improving your writing. Your brain in five years will know more about plot, pacing, character development and description. But only if you train it to.

So make time, every week to write stories. Lots of them.

You have to finish some of them, but you also need to develop the ability to decide which ones have potential. Consider doing some planning first. Then switch off your inner critic and let the story pour out of you. And then switch the critic back on to decide whether your story works or not, and what needs changing. In between drafts, it’s probably a good idea to work on other stories. If you have more than one thing on the go, you’re less likely to over-invest in the wrong idea. But you also have to make sure they don’t function as distractions that prevent you from completing anything. Nobody said this was going to be easy.

I’m starting work on another novel this week. Because this happened.

I’m excited, though, because it’s an idea that plays to my strengths, but also has a strong sense of place, which is something that can be missing from my work. At its core, it’s a very simple idea with less potential for plot holes: there’s a killer who has a very good reason for killing and an ingenious way of doing it. I’m as excited as I was the first time I thought about writing a story featuring a female serial killer.

Look out for ‘Sleepers’ in bookstore windows, bestseller charts and book of the year lists some time during 2018.

That’s all for today. Now I shall retire to my study, where I will discuss the latest crime fiction releases with… Christina-Bot! Have you farted?

Damn, I knew it was too good to be true.


COMING SOON: I’ll be starting a regular series of posts called “What I learned”, where I read successful crime novels and er… tell you what I learned from them. It will be a must for any fans and writers of crime fiction. Sign up to subscibe to my blog at the top right of this page if you’re on a PC or tablet. Otherwise, come back and check at the end of the week.


If you want to see if I can walk the walk as well as talk the talk, and you like serial killer thrillers, you might enjoy my novel PsychoAnalysis.