Venturing into film!

[John Dean]

I am fascinated about the writer’s ideas process. It is something that I include in my online creative writing courses and, as part of the research, I came across a quote from American crime writer Patricia Highsmith, who when asked where her ideas came from said: “Ideas come to a writer, a writer does not search for them. Ideas come to me like birds that I see in the corner of my eye and I may try, or may not, to get a closer fix on those birds”.
All writers have tales to tell of ideas that crept up on them unnoticed. For example, I walk the dog through a wood near my home (currently out of bounds due to the coronavirus lockdown so I have not been there for a month or so).
Before the restrictions were imposed, I walked the dog there once or twice a week and that includes the bottom path which runs along the base of a sheer, wooded rock face. One day, I was doing the walk when I had an image of a young man careering recklessly down the rock face, hurdling fallen tree stumps, grabbing frantically for trailing roots to slow his pace. A young man who was running for his life.
I had met the young man before; he was someone I had dreamed up some time earlier and fancied including in a novel. An animalistic young man, lithe, sinewy, with dextrous fingers and darting eyes. The vision of him I saw on my walk with the dog became a crucial scene in what became my latest DCI Jack Harris novel, The Killing Line (The Book Folks).
You can see me elaborating on the point in a short film I have made as part of the National Crime Reading Month Writers in Residence programme, in which crime writers have made films to compensate for having to cancel May’s events due to the virus restrictions. To see my contribution and those of other crime writers, please go to

https://crimereadingmonth.co.uk/blog/category/crime-writers-in-residence/