Top five writing tips

I'm appearing at the excellent Bute Noir lit fest this weekend - come and say hello if you're on the island!

In the meantime, here's a summer repeats. A while ago the excellent tartan noir author Michael J. Malone asked me to contribute my top 5 tips on being a writer to his blog. Head over there to check out some of the other great advice, and see below for what I said:

1. There’s no secret formula

The best preparation for being a writer is to read a lot and write a lot. Everyone says this, but that’s because it’s true. Like all writers, I started out as a reader. I always enjoyed creative writing at school, but reading widely helps you to work out what sort of stories you want to tell.  The other biggie is to take it seriously. If you want to write for a living, you have to treat it like a real job and show up for work, even on the days you don’t particularly feel like it.

2. You need a system, but everyone has a different one

I used to work in fits and burst, writing loads one day and then not doing anything for weeks at a time while I pondered all of the wonderful books I wasn’t writing. I had been told that a serious writer needs to write 1,000 or 2,000 words a day, and that seemed like an impossible task to fit in amongst all of the other responsibilities and distractions of everyday life.

My breakthrough came when one of my friends suggested just writing 500 words a day. That let me focus on a manageable goal, but at the same time, the words started to build up fast: 500 words a day, six days a week is 3,000 words. In four weeks you have 12,000 words. In six months, you have a first draft of a novel.

Everyone’s different when it comes to laying the groundwork. You don’t necessarily need to painstakingly craft your 3 act structure or write detailed biographies of every major and minor character. Stephen King doesn’t plot at all. James Ellroy constructs elaborate 300-page plot outlines.

They both write great books. Me? I try to plot in advance as far as possible, knowing that I’ll improvise a lot on the journey.

3. You need to put yourself out there

If you want to maximise your chances of somebody publishing your work, you need to let people know about it. Submit stories to magazines and competitions. Blog and tweet. Go to literary festivals and chat to authors and publishers in the bar. Do everything you can, because you never know what’s going to help.

The breakthrough for me was one of the things that took the least effort: I posted a few of my short stories on the HarperCollins Authonomy website (now sadly departed), and against the odds, it resulted in a contact from the agent who now represents me.

Even now I’m published, I think it’s important to make sure I’m as visible as possible, which means doing festivals, library events, guest blogs, interviews and basically never saying no to anything that gives me an opportunity to reach new readers.

4. You can learn from every writer

I’ve been inspired and motivated by so many writers. Not just crime writers, either: SF, historical, graphic novels, literary, horror, non-fiction. Listen to established writers and work out how their suggestions chime with your own methods and experience.

And you don’t just learn from the nuggets of actual writing advice like…

“Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” (Elmore Leonard)

“Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.” (Neil Gaiman)

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” (Stephen King)

…but you learn just as much by reading authors in the genre you aspire to work in and beyond. If you read enough, you’ll start to notice things you can learn from, like a clever plot twist, or the way dialogue can do the heavy-lifting on character development, or a really amazing opening line.

And you can also learn from not-so-good books, from the flat-out terrible, to the ones that almost work but don’t quite. You start to see the pitfalls to avoid. And even if you think a book just plain sucks, you can still learn from it by working out what made it suck, and then not doing that.

One of the best pieces of advice I got came from comic book writer Mark Millar. At one of his events he spoke about knowing a lot of people who said they were writing a novel or a screenplay, but what they were actually doing was sitting around in coffee shops with a laptop talking about writing a novel or a screenplay. It reminded me of the sign Harry Bosch keeps on his desk: Get off your ass and knock on doors. The writer’s memo should be the opposite: Sit your ass down and write some words, something like that.

5. It’s the best job in the world

The most pleasant surprise is that my dream job really doesn’t disappoint. You have to love writing, of course, because there’s a lot of that to do. But all of the other stuff is so much fun too: events, signings, working with publishers on making the book better than you thought it could be, seeing early proofs of the cover, walking into an bookshop or library and seeing a real-live book with actual words you made up inside it.

I’ve done a lot of different jobs: some which I’ve enjoyed, some I’ve hated. All in all, I would have to say being a writer is substantially more fun than real life.

Top tens and articles and the continuing coolness of seeing one's book in a shop

Hello, hope 2016 has been treating you nicely so far!

I'm taking a short break from writing Carter Blake book 4 and listening to David Bowie songs to do a quick blog update.

Things have been pretty busy over the past couple of weeks with The Samaritan paperback coming out. Of course, on publication day I made sure to head out to bookshops and supermarkets to see the book on shelves, particularly as part of the Richard & Judy Book Club in WHSmith...
..

I still love seeing my book in a real bookshop. I think some of the Smiths staff may have assumed I was a mystery shopper when I was busily taking pictures of their shelves.

Anyway, to coincide with publication, I've been asked to do some interviews and articles in various places. If you're interested, click on the links to check 'em out:

Susan Lobban interviews me for eReader1 as the featured author for January, grilling me on my inspirations, my typical writing day, how I deal with writers' block, advice for aspiring writers and lots of other things.

A couple of 'Top 10' blogs for two great booksellers - Foyles asked me for my top 10 locations to set an action thriller, while over at the Waterstones blog they have my top 10 thriller heroes and heroines.

Tartan Noir maestro Michael J. Malone kindly hosts me on his MJM Ink blog to give my top 5 tips on being a writer. There are 5, as the title suggests, but if you're in a rush it can all be boiled down to "write stuff", really.

Scottish Book Trust includes Winterlong in its 27 Scottish novels to look forward to in 2016. It's not really a Scottish book if we're being strict, being set in Siberia, Seattle, Kandahar, Minnesota and New York, but I'll gladly accept a place on any list that includes Chris Brookmyre, James Oswald, Irvine Welsh and Helen Fitzgerald.

And that's about it for now. I'm hoping to announce some events soon, but in the meantime, I've updated the buy page on my website to make sure you can get Richard & Judy Book Club selection The Samaritan (I'll never get tired of saying that) and The Killing Season in all formats.

If you've already bought them, a million thank yous, and please tell a friend!

What works for me

This is my first attempt at joining in a Blog Tour, and first of all I'd like to say thanks to my fellow Orion author R.S. Pateman for asking me to join in. You can visit his blog to find out more about his writing process, and you can also pick up the paperback edition of his debut psychological suspense novel The Second Life of Amy Archer from Thursday - it comes highly recommended.

The idea is, I answer four questions about writing, and then ask another couple of writers to join in next week. Reading over a few of the offerings so far, it's fascinating and strangely comforting that everyone's techniques are so different from one another. I guess the only correct way to be a writer is the one that works for you.

So bearing that in mind, here's my answers:

What am I working on? 

I'm currently putting the finishing touches to the second Carter Blake novel, The Samaritan, and also starting to think about what's going to happen in the third instalment.

I wrote the first draft of The Samaritan in around five months, which is much, much faster than I wrote The Killing Season, so it was nice to get a few weeks away from it before turning in a rewrite at the end of January. I've since made a few more edits after discussion with my editor, and I think there'll be a few more tweaks before we lock it down.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

In a lot of ways, it doesn't.

That might seem a strange thing for an author to say about the beautiful and unique snowflake he's created, but it's true. I love crime fiction and thrillers, and when I started to write The Killing Season, I consciously incorporated a lot of the classic tropes of the genre: the driven serial killer, the mysterious outsider brought in to break the case, the professional law enforcement agent caught between playing by the rules and doing what's right. I wanted to use all of these conventions but still create a story that felt fresh and contained a few surprises and made the reader want to keep turning the pages. The reviews seem to bear this out: some of them say they were expecting a solid, run-of-the-mill thriller and got more than they expected.

On reflection, I think The Killing Season contains a lot of the same elements as other books in its genre, but there's nothing exactly like it, and that seems to be its secret weapon.

Why do I write what I do? 

Short answer: because I've always loved reading crime, mystery and thrillers, and it's what I seem to be good at.

When I started out writing my own stories, I did what everyone else does and tried to write in the style of my heroes. I tried a lot of genres on for size: horror, noir, adventure, mystery, psychological thriller, even science fiction. Over time, I developed my own style and, almost to my surprise, I found that what I was best at was at the thriller end of the spectrum.

I think all of the influences from other writers and genres inevitably feed into what I do, though. I'm often told my writing is very cinematic, and I take that as a big compliment. I guess that comes from my love of cinema, and perhaps also the fact that I'm a lifelong comic book geek. Certainly, when I'm coming up with my stories, I tend to imagine them in quite a visual way, coming up with a scene or setting that looks exciting and dramatic in my mind's eye.

How does your writing process work?

I always feel a twinge of guilt when I say I plot my books in advance, because I know Stephen King wouldn't approve. I write a fairly detailed synopsis before I begin, because it's important for me to have a plan in place, even if I don't follow it to the letter. One of my favourite quotes is from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who said that when preparing for battle, "plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." In fact, I like that quote so much I used it in my book.

As long as I know roughly where I'm going, I'm free to improvise and come up with better ideas as I go. The end of a book is often quite different from what I sketched out in the synopsis, because I need the weight of the book behind me to know exactly how it should end.

I have a full-time day job and three young children, so absolute adherence to a set writing regime isn't an option, unfortunately. My one rule is that I have to write at least 500 words a day. Often (particularly once I'm deep into a book) I'll aim for 500 and end up doing 1,000 or 2,000 words instead, but I find it's vital to have a modest target to make sure I fit in some writing every day.

Luckily for me, I can write almost anywhere: in pubs, in cafés, in bed, on park benches, on the train, in hotel rooms... even occasionally at my desk at home.

I prefer to type because I'm one of those writers who likes to tweak as he goes, and that's so much easier when using a computer. If I'm out and about without a laptop, however, I'll happily get the words down on a notebook and type them up later that night. I have to make sure I'm quick, though, because my handwriting is borderline-illegible even to me.

Most days, I settle down to writing in the evening, once the kids are in bed. If I've managed to squeeze in some extra writing earlier on in the day, so much the better. If not, I make sure I get some words down in a more or less coherent order before I can turn in for the night.

And that's pretty much it: I try not to look back too much and keep bashing out the words until I have a first draft. After that, I put it aside for a few weeks, and then I spend a lot of time rewriting and polishing and plugging in the necessary research. For that part, I print the whole manuscript out and go through it with a pencil and different colours of highlighter to help me work out exactly what to change, get rid of, or flesh out. That part is just like Stephen King tells you to do it.

And that's it from me. As I said earlier on, part of the deal is I have to infect two more unsuspecting authors with this blog chain, like some sort of blogging zombie, and here are my chosen victims:

Michael J. Malone's debut novel Blood Tears won the Pitlochry Prize from the Scottish Association of Writers, and his most recent book is The Guillotine Choice. Check out his blog, May Contain Nuts, for his instalment of the blog tour and lots more great stuff.

Douglas Skelton has published 11 books on true crime and history. His first thriller Blood City was published by Luath Press in 2013, the first in a series set on the tough streets of Glasgow from 1980 onwards. The second, Crow Bait, will be published in 2014. You can find his blog here.