Did I write that?

[John Dean]

As an author, I have always been the most interested by the technical side of the craft of writing rather than the creative element of the process; it may sound odd, but I love editing more than I do creating.

However, the older I become, I have found myself more and more interested in the creative process and particularly in examining the way stories assume a life of their own.

It was the main focus when I recently spent an enjoyable day working with young authors at Jack Hunt Secondary School in Peterborough, having been invited to help the staff and students mark National Crime Reading Month.

Within minutes of listening to the students producing brilliant idea after brilliant idea, I was forcibly reminded that young writers do not need much in the way of encouragement to unleash their incredible  imaginations.

However, I find that some of us ‘old ‘uns’ do need assistance and, for me, the strongest theme that is emerging in my writing is the ‘jigsaw effect’, where the author comes up with small pieces of the story – a memory, an image, a coincidence – which do not seem to fit in with the narrative and certainly were not planned but which assume great importance further down the road.

An example; a few years back, a legacy meant we could take a family holiday to Singapore and I have always thought that it would a great place to feature in one of my crime novels, maybe sending a couple of my detectives out there.

The idea had long appeared to be forgotten (or so I thought) until two crooked businessmen from Singapore forced themselves into the crime novel I am writing at the moment. I don’t know how it happened, it was certainly not planned, but they insisted on being there.

At the same time, I was also becoming increasingly aware that there is a lack of diversity in my fictional police force in the northern city of Hafton and that, although I have been introducing more strong women, the same could not be said of people from foreign climes.

To address that shortcoming, I set out to introduce such a character, initially choosing someone from India before I realised that it made more sense to select Asia because there was a ready-made link with Singapore, which made much more sense.

The idea soon emerged that the new character could be the force’s first Asian officer, small pieces of the jigsaw finding each other and snapping together to make something much larger, a central part of the evolving plot, indeed – and it looks like my new character could get a few days in Singapore for his efforts!

This kind of thing happens all the time in my writing, and I imagine in that of other authors, the arrival on the page of fragments of information which do not seem to be relevant to the plot but later reveal why they insisted on being there. As a writer, you wonder why you did not think of them earlier – and ‘wonder’ is the word because they illustrate the amazing capacity of stories to write themselves.

So, my advice to aspiring writers (including brilliantly creative young authors?) Before you start writing, by all means, prepare a synopsis for your novel – in fact, I would insist on it as  it focuses the mind;  just be prepared to discard elements of the story that you once thought were important but which later on find themselves edged out by pieces of the jigsaw.

After all, just about every novelist who has ever lived knows that the synopsis rarely survives contact with the storytelling process.

Picture Dmitry Demidov, used courtesy of www.pexels.com