Fancy a stab at crime writing? The Crime Writers Association have just announced that this years Debut Dagger Competition has now been launched. Check out their site for further details.

http://www.thecwa.co.uk/daggers/debut/index.html

Our Top Writing Reference Books


Below are our top writing reference books that you can refer to if you're hoping to learn a bit more about the craft or how to submit work, or just to find some inspiration.

It would be great if you had any books to recommend yourselves, in the comments section!

ROD: How Fiction Works by James Wood isn't a manual for writers, so you won't find all the stock appeals to "show don't tell" or "avoid adverbs". Instead it's a searching anatomy of literature by one of the most insightful critics in the business. It follows the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, but I found it more readable and more fun and more insightful than either of those. The discussion of the case for and against realism was the part that struck me most. Let James Wood guide you towards a deeper understanding of what you are trying to do when you sit down to write.


CAROLINE R: On Writing by Stephen King. Although I've read and enjoyed a few of King's books, I wouldn't consider myself a big fan. On Writing, however, is a hugely enjoyable read for which you don't need any prior knowledge of King's work. The book's autobiographical sections are very funny, and the writing advice is given in an amusingly no-nonsense tone. The advice itself is nothing earth-shattering – it's the kind of stuff you can easily find on the internet – but King is not out to boss anyone around. He says what works for him and the reader can take it or leave it – a refreshingly non-patronising book.

GERALDINE: Becoming A Writer. Way back in 1934 Dorothea Brande showed us the way. Brande realised the importance of psychology in the writer's make up and taught me, for one, the importance of separating my sensitive writerly self from my editing self which would sooner tell me I'm rubbish than praise me. She also came up with the idea of morning pages way before any other author of "How-To-Write" manuals. DB is the Elizabeth David of creative writing. Everyone else is just an imitator.



Read Full Post

More from Casper’s Handbook of the Practice of Forensic Medicine (3rd Edition, 1861). This is from a section dealing with infanticide. One of the interesting things that reading these old books throws to light is how changes in vocabulary reflect changes in attitudes. The political incorrectness of former times (judged by our own standards) is sometimes breathtaking, though I must admit it is one of the things I find fascinating about writing historical fiction.

Read Full Post

Lovely news to start November! My flash, Dig the Dead, is the inaugural story at Left Hand Waving, a brand new sister site to Right Hand Pointing, who published my story, After a Long Illness, Quietly at Home, last month. The editors, Dale and John, emailed about the new site yesterday. It celebrates 'first person stories of approximate truth'. Dig the Dead is just that, about my experience of losing my father to Motor Neurone Disease and the strange funeral service that followed. It seemed to fit the bill for Left Hand Waving, so I subbed it and received an almost immediate acceptance. The fastest turnaround for publication ever, I think, and a welcome way to start a new month when I shall be trying hard to fit writing into my new working life.

Exciting developments with regard to local publishing connections are afoot, and I hope to be able to update here soon. It's all happening and my feet haven't touched the ground much in the last six weeks, nor have my fingers been at the keyboard.

Read Full Post

'Asthma never goes away,' I told him, 'Not if you don't use the medication to fight it - fresh air isn't going to do it Musician.'

I switched off from his ideas, not wanting to hear the feeble answers for neglect. Thank God the doctor gave him a bollicking, and kept him in; that was a first, along with the canula in his hand; that little tap on his blood. He complained about it, and the time we'd had to wait. I shouldn't still have to be this mother, to a thirty year old man. Why don't I have a son who can cope with his own small space in the world? Another fault of mine, I supposed.

Read Full Post

I’ve been dipping into another old handbook on forensic medicine. This one is by Johann Ludwig Casper. It’s called A Handbook of the Practice of Forensic Medicine, and it was translated into English by George William Balfour. The third edition, which is the one I’ve been referring to, dates from 1861 and is freely available on google books.

Now and then, I’m asked about the developments in forensic science, and whether my decision to write historical crime fiction had anything to do with an antipathy towards modern crime solving technology. When a crime can be solved by a DNA sample, what role is there left for the old-fashioned detective to play?

Read Full Post

Trust a drummer to know about silence. Over on Radio 3's Private Passions last Sunday, Stewart Copeland, late of The Police and more recently not unknown to opera houses, was talking to his fellow composer Michael Berkeley. I'm saving his comment, about how the beauty went out of modern music when it became an algorithm rather than a sentiment, for my official rant about what might happen to academic creative writing as it finally follows music into universities. But he said so much else which made sense to me as a writer.

The thing about drummers (I've a feeling he'd refuse to be called a percussionist) is that although all music exists in time, percussion has no sustaining pedal, no lungful of air, no length of a bow, to hold the note. Neither, of course, do words: once a word is said or read, it's over. Poets get closest, because they can assume that we'll hear the sounds as well as the sense, and with both we'll try to do the overlapping, the chords, the echoes, the harmony and the counterpoint, for ourselves, if only by re-reading the poem. But we prose writers have to assume that our readers' experience is nothing else but reading one word after another to the end: we have to earn our re-reading.

And so, Copeland said, just as visual artists work with negative space, the arts which work by putting one beat/word/foot in front of the other work also work with silence and stillness.

Read Full Post

I finished Heaven Can Wait by Cally Taylor last night. It isn't the usual thing I'd read in that it's a romantic comedy, but blimey, I'm glad I did.

Lucy Brown dies the day before her wedding to her soulmate. In limbo she's given the opportunity to either head on up to heaven and be reunited with the parents she lost while still very young, or head back down to earth as a wannabe ghost to complete a task which, if completed, would allow her to become an actual ghost and be reunited with her beloved fella.

I'm glad Lucy Brown chose option 2. The task she's set is to find love for a geek.

I've just nipped over to The Book Depository for the above picture of the cover. They say, about Heaven Can Wait, that it's a 'fabulously warm, funny and romantic novel, that will have you laughing and crying in equal measure'. and I couldn't agree more.

Read Full Post

While I waited I looked at the programme, with its alluring question on the cover:'Have you heard the Angels sing?'. Inside there was summary in Spanish of the lives of Purcell and Vivaldi, and the words in Spanish and English to the five settings of psalms by Purcell and then a Latin text for the Vivaldi ‘Dixit ….’ There was a short ‘sonata de trompeta’ between Purcell psalms. It was a hollow-sounding instrument of a dull copper colour, like an over-sized Victorian child’s toy.


Read Full Post

Apparently, over eight million viewers tuned in to watch this week’s Question Time and the appearance of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party. This is an unprecedented number, particularly at a time when the public’s appetite to hear politicians say anything about anything is at an all time low.

I watched it eagerly myself, though I’m not sure why. Griffin sat like an over ripe Brie, all round, sweaty and unpalatable, while the politicians around him postured with a worthiness of a student union debate circa 1985. Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, out, out, out...





Read Full Post