Jayne Chard, the multi-award-winning film and TV drama producer, reveals what you need to know about writing a crime book…
1. Where do ideas come from?
As the renowned screenwriter William Goldman once said, “Writing is easy. You sit in front of your typewriter and wait for blood to come out of your forehead.” Nothing has changed except the technology. Pay attention, observe, and record your thoughts. Look at the world through the eyes of the writer, and your story will find you. It could be a combination of things: a place you visited, a conversation with a friend, something you saw in a newspaper article, a painting, or a poem; the list is endless.
2. How do I work out my plot?
I’ve worked as a theatre director, a TV drama director, and a Film and TV Producer and all the dramas I ever worked on all complete the same basic story arc but not necessarily in the same order. There are already plenty of articles about plotting available on the internet, so I’m not going to discuss this here, but I will give you a tip. You don’t have a story if you can’t describe your story in two sentences and get your listener hooked. This is called the Log Line in TV and Film, and I think this approach can also be applied to any story. It’s not your back cover blurb; it’s a succinct and enticing hook that will get people to want to know more. For example, the logline for my debut novel More Than Murder is Two sisters in their sixties go to a Murder Weekend event. Here they discover a murdered guest in a secret passage, but the body disappears before anyone else can witness it.
3. What about characters?
We keep reading a novel because we want to follow the character’s journey. This doesn’t mean we necessarily have to like them, but we need to want to know how they feel about what’s happening to them, or we may stop reading. The characters don’t always have to be exemplary; we can as easily be attracted to the dark side of a personality. Make your characters interesting, give them a full back story even if it never appears in your novel, make them complex, make them real, and most importantly make them individual. Dialogue shouldn’t be interchangeable between two characters. The type of personalities that you choose for your lead characters will be affected by the genre you are writing in; for example, it wouldn’t be a great idea to have an immoral person as the main character in a cosy crime, but this might work very well for a crime thriller.
4. What about setting?
A sense of place is crucial; it will affect how the characters behave, interact with each other, and develop the plot. The location’s physical and emotional landscape sets the tone. For example, Sarah Pearse’s The Sanitorium takes place in a beautiful but eerie hotel in the Swiss Alps, but it wouldn’t be as impactful if it were set in a remote spa in Cornwall! The setting also needs to support the unravelling of the plot. CJ Tudor’s The Burning Girls gathers its atmosphere from being in a remote and ancient English village, and from a plot point of view, we can believe that this village has a dark five-hundred-year secret because of the location.
5. Who is my audience?
It’s worth considering who your book is aimed at early on as this will inform some of the decisions you make in your plotting, characters, and setting. Are your readers old or young? What kind of things interest them? What books do they would read? Where do they buy their books? And any more questions you can think of that will help you to define exactly who your book is aimed at. The same story can play out in many different ways, and your choices of tone, style, character, and plot should all be created with your primary audience in mind. If you’re clear about this, it will help you immensely when you come to think about marketing your book.
Jayne Chard is an award-winning TV and Film Producer. Her debut novel More Than Murder will be available from all good book retailers from 1st May bit.ly/MoreThanMurderBook. X @JayneChard1 https://jaynechard.com/
