Adam Croft's Blog, page 31

One of the most difficult things about plotting crime fiction is the fact that you often have to take yourself to some rather dark places in the process. People who write crime novels are not murderers (well, I hope not), yet have to deal with the idea of people who are as a matter of course.

And when you’re dealing with something you’re not – especially something that is likely to be so far removed from who you are – it can be hard to go to those places you need to go to in order to make the work compelling and believable.

It’s undoubtedly a challenge, but it isn’t one we should shy away from. Unpicking the ‘why’ of crime thrillers is one of the great things about the genre; as readers, we don’t just want to know what and who and how, we also want to know why things happen. Why did that guy kill that guy? What happened to make that character the victim and that one the criminal? Are they really all they seem?

There is no end of potential material for novels that deal with questions such as this, and while it can be difficult, as crime writers we have one big advantage when it comes to answering questions about why and what makes someone become a criminal: morality.

With any luck, as a crime writer, you’ll be coming from the point of view of a good, upstanding citizen with a fairly settled, good view of what’s right and what’s wrong. This dichotomy of right and wrong is one of the key drama points in crime novels, and our own views of things can be a great way to examine the actions of characters, making them believable and interesting to read about.

Of course, there is far more to plotting fantastic crime fiction that just ‘who we are’, but it seems to me that this as good a place as any to start. But what do you think?

When it comes to independent publishing, there will always be certain costs involved. We can’t get away from that, but there are plenty of ways of making sure you keep those costs to a minimum.

One thing you might be tempted to do to reduce your self-publishing costs is to make do with your computer spellcheck instead of using a proofreader to give your work a proper going over. On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with that.

After all, that’s sort of what the spellcheck is there for, right? It makes sure you’ve spelt everything correctly and flags up major grammar clangers. And anyway, with any luck, as a writer you’ll also have a pretty good grasp of grammar and so your work should be pretty solid to begin with.

All this is true (hopefully), but it also serves to highlight exactly why it’s worth using a proofreader before you self-publish your work. As a writer, you’ll probably be good a spotting the bigger errors, and many of the smaller ones. However, there will always be minor issues that you just don’t spot. This is entirely understandable; when you’ve spent so long with a piece of work, you can veer between questioning absolutely everything about it and missing things that are hiding in plain sight.

This is where your proofreader comes in. They can offer a view from one step removed, making sure all of those smaller issues have been dealt with and picking things up that your spellcheck won’t notice – such as bits of grammar that aren’t necessarily wrong, but aren’t really doing what they should be doing, or words that are spelt correctly but have been accidentally used in the wrong context (see there/their and you/you’re for just a couple of common mistakes – sometimes you don’t even make them yourself; autocorrect can do it for you and they can be all too easy to miss).

Plus, even though the role of the proofreader is generally to check the text for flow and accuracy of grammar rather than editing the story, they can also spot major flaws in the way a computer never could. Even if you have hired your proofreader solely to check your grammar, no professional worth their salt will let huge disasters in the plot slip through uncommented on – after all, the end result of your work will reflect on them as well as you.

So it’s definitely worth getting yourself a proofreader, even if to begin with, it’s just a willing friend or family member. It’s definitely worth making the time and effort – as great as computers are, there are some mistakes the spellcheck tool will never be able to fix.

So you’ve just self-published your novel. Maybe you’ve had a little bit of success already through your existing promotion methods, or maybe you’re just starting to promote your book in an effort to boost sales. Either way, what can you do to help promote your self-published novel? Here are four ideas to give you food for thought.

Make a book trailer

The internet can be hugely useful when it comes to promotions, and one option for promoting your work is to combine some of the most popular things of the moment: social media and online videos. A book trailer can be a very nifty way to give people a flavour of your work, and social media is a very handy way of promoting that trailer.

Just make sure your trailer is properly good; there’s a lot of competition out there, and your video needs to be high quality and professional to make sure it stands out for the right reasons.

Free stuff

It’s a well-known fact that people love free stuff, so why not try and build this into your self-publishing promotion plan? For example, if you’re selling print copies of your book, offer a free gift for a limited number of customers. The free gift doesn’t usually have to be that big to entice people – just something small that makes them feel they’re getting a little something extra.

And when it comes to e-books, one good promotion option is to include a free chapter from your next book at the back of your current book. Hopefully, it will make people want to read more by giving them a taste of what’s to come.

Christmas gifts

We’re rapidly heading towards that stage of the year where people start to panic about what to get their loved ones for Christmas. Lucky that you have a book out, all ready and waiting for them to buy as a reasonably priced, high quality Christmas gift, eh?

The added bonus is that this makes your own Christmas gifts easier to sort out. Copies of your book for all the family!

Offer readers incentives for ideas

Finally, when it comes to promoting books, there are lots of people out there all trying to do the same thing. If you want to be successful, you might have to get a bit creative – and a bit sneaky by going straight to the source of success. Ask your readers what they think, and offer them incentives in exchange for giving you promotion ideas. After all, they’re the people you’re hoping to entice in the first place, so it makes sense to ask them what would attract them to a book.

What are your top promotion tips?

Opinions on writer’s block vary wildly. There are those who say it’s all in the mind and not really a thing, and those who confess to being afflicted with it on a regular basis. There are all sorts of tricks and ideas for getting over it and getting back into the groove of writing. But most of the time when we talk about writer’s block, we tend to talk about it as though it is a passing illness – a minor winter cold or similar.

What, though, if your case of writer’s block seems to be more serious than that? What if you’re completely blocked for a significant period of time and are just completely unable to make any progress at all, on anything? What if you’ll happily spend hours debating with yourself whether it should be “writer’s block” or “writers’ block”, just to put off the inevitable moment when you sit down to write and still don’t manage to do anything?

Look at the rest of your life

A bit reflective this, but it can sometimes be worth having a look at the rest of your life to see if there’s anything that might be stopping you from getting on with your writing. Stress at work, for instance, can leave us finding it hard to relax in our personal lives, which can lead to writer’s block. Similarly, stress in our personal lives can take up so much space in our heads that there simply isn’t any left for writing. Dealing with any other problems might not always be easy, but if you’re keen to get on with your writing, it’s likely to be easier to do it once you’ve got a clear head.

Don’t panic

It might sound counterproductive, especially when clearly all you’ll want to do is get over your dreaded case of the Block and start writing again, but there’s probably not much point in panicking about it. In the same way that panicking during a school exam can make us forget completely everything, even when we knew it all just two minutes before we sat down for the test, so worrying about not being able to write can make it almost impossible to write.

Look at this way: the energy you spend worrying about not writing is energy that you could be using for something else. Like actually doing some writing. Or making a calming cup of tea. Or going for a walk or reading a book or anything else that helps to clear your mind. Of course, there’s no guarantee that you’ll find yourself able to write once you stop worrying, but at least you’ll be less stressed about it, and hopefully it will only be a matter of time until writing seems fun again.

What do you think? Have you ever been hit so hard by writer’s block it’s stopped you writing for months on end? And if so, how did you overcome it?

No matter where you live or what you do for a living, there will undoubtedly be things in your life that get your back up. We all have to deal with life’s little (and big) annoyances and, while on the surface that’s all they seem to be – annoyances – they could actually be more helpful than they first seem.

After all, everything can be food for thought for a writer. We can find inspiration in the most unlikely of places, and daily annoyances are one of them. Even better is the fact that different things tend to annoy different people, so we can all add our own spin and view on the things that bug us.

For example, let’s say your next door neighbour has a dog that barks all the time, well into the night and seemingly for no reason at all. While the cause of the barking is likely to be something pretty mundane – boredom or noises setting it off – that doesn’t stop you from coming up with other, more interesting scenarios that could inspire you in your writing.

Just imagine all of the different situations that could cause a dog to bark its head off. Try writing a list. There are probably dozens of examples, and while many of them might not seem that interesting or inspiring, there might be one or two that spark something in you and inspire an idea that you can use in creative projects.

It’s an exercise you can do with anything – the mad situations thrown up by crowded public transport, the many and varied ways the sound of a ticking clock makes you crazy, the small yet infinitely frustrating habits of your other half. Things like this might not inspire an entire novel or provide the basis of a large project, but they can be great for adding human touches and moments or intriguing plot threads to your work.

So the next time you want to scream when your personal bugbear once again rears its ugly head, try taking a step back to see if there’s any useful material there. You might be surprised.

There seems to be a general consensus among writers that it is a good idea to write all your ideas down when you get them. Despite this consensus, many writers still don’t write down their ideas, preferring to take their chances with that fickle thing we call memory. So, should we really write all of our writing ideas down?

On the one hand, yes, we really should. We are humans, and no matter how much we tell ourselves otherwise, humans forget things. We might think at the time of having an idea that it’s so good, we’ll never forget it, but the chances are that we probably will.

We can also misremember things. We might remember part of an idea we had yesterday, but other parts of it might be a little bit hazy. So we do our best to recall and eventually decide that we’ve remembered it all – but really we haven’t. The original brilliant idea is no longer intact.

Plus, when we’re working on other writing projects, there isn’t always time to develop a new idea straight away. Keeping a record of them written down somewhere can be hugely helpful when we eventually go back to all those half-formed thoughts and things we want to write about next.

However, we also need to consider how we write down those ideas. After all, writing ideas down only really helps if it all still makes sense when we go back to them later. At the time of writing it down ‘angel in the stars’ or ‘dog rules household’ might make perfect sense, but coming back to it six months later might be a different story. If you never remember why you wrote things or what you meant when you wrote them, it could be that writing down ideas doesn’t do you much good.

There is also a chance that, once written down in basic note form, those ideas don’t seem as good as they did in your head. It might in some ways be counterproductive and could lead to forgetfulness, but in some cases, keeping an idea in your head and simply letting in percolate for a while could be the best thing you could do for it.

So, in most cases it seems that writing down ideas when you have them probably is the best course of action. However, we shouldn’t always assume that this is the case, and the most important thing is to make sure you give each individual idea the justice and treatment you feel it deserves.

What do you think?

Some stories or ideas simply lend themselves well to one form over writing. Often it’s obvious that that particular idea should be a novel, while that other idea should be a short story and the other one a poem. However, it can sometimes take a bit of time and a few false starts before an idea really starts to gel with a particular form.

I think one of the reasons for this is that sometimes, we have a tendency to start to write something before it’s really ready to be written. We assume that because we usually write in a particular form, this new idea should fit into that same form – and on we plough, only to realise sometime later it’s not working as well as we might have hoped.

This is why planning is so important in writing. Even if you are not a fastidious planner in general, it’s worth taking the time to think carefully over what form your story should take. The best idea can be rendered incomprehensible by being written in the wrong way. We need to make sure we are doing our ideas justice.

One of the reasons writers can get stuck with a particular form, no matter what the idea, is because they get comfortable with writing in a certain way, or think that they aren’t as good at different ways of writing. For instance, if you’re used to writing novels, the thought of packing a punch in a 1000-word short story or writing a beautiful sonnet can be somewhat daunting.

But we shouldn’t be afraid of things like this. We should embrace different forms of writing. Maybe we won’t always be very good at all of them, and maybe we’ll think one form would be perfect for an idea only for it to fall flat, but we won’t know unless we try different things and take the odd risk. Trying a different form could be what your idea needs to make it really come to life.

What do you think? How do you decide what form your story should take?

The nights are getting longer and the weather is getting colder (and, it seems, gustier). Winter is on the way. While many of our thoughts will turn to such things as Christmas and central heating bills and spending as much time as possible on the sofa under a warm blanket, we shouldn’t forget that this can be a really inspiring time of year for writing.

Here are 5 ways winter can inspire our writing.

The weather

It’s a season of many weathers, from icy rain to blustery wind to crisp, cold, sunny mornings where the air is fresh and clear. All can act as great backdrops to stories, and the excuse of staying indoors because the weather is bad gives us more opportunities than usual to get on and write those stories down.

The holidays

There are plenty of special occasions throughout winter that can be great for inspiration. From bonfire night to Christmas to New Year, as well as other, smaller yet still interesting events such as the office Christmas party and festive markets and concerts, there are lots of brilliant occasions that can form the basis for a story.

The sense of shutting down for the year

There’s something interesting about the tail end of the year, especially once we get to mid-December. It’s as though normal service has been suspended, not to be resumed until January.  It leads to an odd dynamic, which can be interesting to explore in our writing – and, with normal service suspended, we should have more time than usual to write about it.

The potential for contrast

Winter can also be a good time for setting yourself writing challenges. For example, on a cold day, challenge yourself to write a story set in the middle of summer. The contrast and the slight challenge it brings can be a good way to develop your skills of writing under a variety of conditions.

The time off work

As suggested above, with any luck you’ll have a bit of time off work over the festive season, which can be wonderful for writers. The extra time to shut ourselves away and work on stories and other creative endeavours is certainly welcome, especially after a long, hard year’s work. It’s time to indulge our passions, and with any luck, we’ll manage to get some good writing out of it.

Yesterday I looked at the issue of originality in writing – how we can develop our originality as writers and how tricky the issue can be. Today we turn our attention to the slightly more specific issue of originality within crime fiction. How do you go about developing interesting and compelling crime fiction that is also original?

A lot of it has to come down to those things I mentioned yesterday – reading widely to understand what works and what doesn’t, and taking the time to develop your own writing style that singles you out, hopefully for all the right reasons.

But there is something else that we definitely can’t ignore with regards to crime fiction: plot. It is a genre that is highly plot driven, and creating stories that are interesting and new is one of the biggest challenges for any writer of crime novels.

The good news, however, is that there is always something new to write about. Every single crime is different. No murder is the same, and even if one murder is very like another, the people involved will always be different, or will at least bring new, additional people into the mix. The same applies to every other crime that gets written about in crime fiction. No two crimes are ever entirely the same.

That doesn’t mean crime fiction never rehashes anything. I’m sure we’ve all read crime novels in the past that have felt like rip-offs of something else; a bit too similar to another book or author to be truly classed as original. But this is often down to the difference between good and bad writing. A good writer could write practically the same basic story as another and yet it would be just as compelling and unique as the original, whereas a bad writer would write basically the same story and it would be basically the same.

So originality in crime fiction – in any fiction, really – is partly down to the quality of the writing in question. If it is written well, it doesn’t really matter that we’ve read a similar plot arc a dozen times before. Murder, investigation, crime solved isn’t, after all, something with which crime fiction is unfamiliar. Yet it still manages to reinvent itself over and over again, proving that good storytelling and different interpretations of age-old issues are vital when it comes to originality in writing thrillers.

With so many books out there already, how do you make sure what you write is original? When there are already so many different versions of the same or similar stories, how do you make sure you give yours a unique twist that sets it apart from the rest?

This is one of those issues that I think many writers spend a lot of time thinking about. After all, most writers want to be original and to write new things that no one else has thought of, or to look at things in ways no one has done before. We all want to be original, and yet to be truly original is a genuinely difficult thing to do.

I think one of the important things with regards to originality is to give your writing time to develop. It’s natural to emulate – consciously or not – other writers when you’re first finding your voice and developing your own style. Finding that vein of writing that is distinctively you can take time. Not always, of course, but often.

Something else that can contribute to originality is reading as much as possible. It might sound a little counter-productive, to fill your head with the ideas of other people before settling down to write your own stories, but reading as much as you can gives you an insight into what works and what doesn’t, what’s already been done and how, and how ideas are put together. Other people’s creativity can be food for our own originality.

And probably one of the most important factors is to focus on your own writing voice, style, or whatever you want to call it. Often, that’s where your originality will come in. It isn’t always possible to be unique or radical in terms of what you’re saying – it’s how you say it that makes an impact. That’s not to say that there isn’t still plenty of new stuff to be said – there is – but the way you write is where much of your originality is found.

It’s a tricky issue, and one that can lead to writers spending a lot of time being quirky or deliberately kooky when really, all they need to be unique is to be themselves.

What do you think? How do you ensure your work is as original and interesting as possible?