A first person account of crime fiction class
Sit down and write, at least 200 words every day, says Billingham
Session: Mark Billingham Masterclass
Murder by the book: How to write crime fiction
Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2011
They were all there - the grandmother with murderous instincts, the mysterious young woman with an indistinct accent, the ageing talent waiting for a break.
It was scary a room - full of people with published works, all with completely justifiable reasons to be there.
What was I doing? I felt like an intruder, a pretender.
Mercifully, a spike of reason poked through. It was a crime writing masterclass. It was about learning the process - the de-mystification (if that is a word) of being a novelist in a genre that probably sells the most number of books worldwide. Everybody likes a cracking good story, and the genre that seems to cover a “multitude of sins” seems to do that rather well.
The session was by Mark Billingham, considered to be one of the best crime writers in the UK.
He started by saying: “Writers do something about ideas... writing is not mystical.”
Easy when you have published a series of books, I thought. Almost in response he said: “Sit down and do it.”
He thinks writer’s block is nonsense. “There is no magic bullet for crime writing,” he added. I sighed, there are no quick keys and here I was hoping that there just might be that Grail in sight.
Discipline is the only answer - sit down and write, at least 200 words every day. You can delete it, rewrite it, tune it, thump it and make sure it no longer “rattles”. But just do it. Might sound like a Nike ad but that was essentially the most important lesson from the class.
A former stand-up comic, Billingham’s ability to connect with the participants was very good, especially as this was tricky business - discussing people’s writing, a highly sensitive matter with all writers, the fear of exposing yourself. Can be therapeutic, can be encouraging but can also be crushing. Ask anybody with a manuscript idling in the back of bottom drawer.
The two and quarter hour segment was, at turns enlightening, funny and educative. Perhaps tad short by about an hour (hope EAIFL is listening) it did show that there are a number of brilliant crime writers in the UAE, all just waiting to break through the genre.
- Some great tips from the class:
- Try and not use too many verbs to carry a dialogue - preferably stick with ‘said’. Something most Home News Editors would scream at you as you stood trembling with your magnum opus on the local garden show.
- If your writing sounds like writing, rewrite it.
- Try to leave out the parts that readers are going to skip - put a red line through stuff. Less is always more. Nudge your readers’ imagination into the shadows.
- Hook the reader within the first 30 pages, could be a great authorial voice and not necessarily need be a blood-splattered crime scene.
- Make readers care about characters, most important - having said that, the honest depiction of violence is necessary, should not be gratuitous.
- Writers need to remember that murder is terribly brutal and banal. It is more about the after effects and how it reverberates through society.
- If you have a killer in your story, he should be in plain sight. Get the reader into their head, and figure out along the way, not just let him or her appear out of nowhere in the final chapter.
