‘A piece of music with dark water running through it’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Timothy Hallinan

Sometimes I find there’s an inexplicable moment when the tune in my ears tells the story back to me and from then on is part of its world. My guest this week became wedded to a Ravel piano concerto when it started at exactly the moment he began a long, brooding sequence with a killer. He likes to write in public places and his playlist is forever topped up by suggestions from his wide fanbase. Indeed his musical roots run deep; in the 1970s he was in a band that recorded an album for Universal and which ultimately, minus him, became the gazillion-selling group Bread. How cool is that? As cool as this – songs he’s written have been recorded by a number of top artistes in several genres. Now he’s an Edgar- and Macavity-nominated author of thrillers and mysteries. Could it get any cooler? His name is Timothy Hallinan and I’m thrilled to have him on the Red Blog with his Undercover Soundtrack.

How to write what you don’t know – research tips for writers

Ideally we’d all write from personal experience, but most of us have much bigger imaginations than our pockets, lives, bravery levels or the laws of the land can accommodate. So we have to wing it from research.

Ghostwriting is the ultimate rebuke to the idea that you write what you know. We pretend all the way, even down to our identity, outlook and heart. When I was ghosting I became a dab hand at travel by mouse – there was no way the publisher paid enough for me to jet to my book’s location. Or would spring me out of jail.

So here are my tips for bridging the experience gap.

Good first-hand accounts

Obviously the web is full of blogs about just about anything. They’ll give you up-close, spit-and-sweat details from those who are living the life. But look further afield. Good memoirs and novels will not only provide raw material, they’ll show how to bring a place alive on the page.

Guides for writers

There are scores of books published for writers who want to bone up on unfamiliar areas – whether crime, ways to kill or die, historical periods and what might be possible in steampunk. Or how to write a vampire novel. Some of you may know I’m an obsessive equestrian, and Dave’s roleplaying fraternity used to ask me constant questions about what you could do with horses until I wrote this piece for them.

What everybody else may already know

If there are famous books or movies that tackle your subject or feature your key location, get acquainted with them. Some readers hunt down every story that features their favourite keywords. They will not be impressed if you miss an obvious location for a murderer to hide a body, or an annual festival that should muck up your hero’s plans.

Photographs

Flickr is wonderful for finding travellers’ snaps. But don’t discount professional photography. The best captures the emotional essence of a place, not just the visual details. I wrote one novel set in India and found a book of photographs of the monsoon. Those exquisite images of deluge gave me powerful, dramatic scenes.

Before the days of broadband, my go-to was National Geographic on searchable CD-ROM. I bought it as a Christmas present for Dave many years ago and probably you can now get the same thing on line. Sublime photography and descriptive writing that will get your fingers tapping.

Befriend an expert

Misapprehensions are inevitable if you’re appropriating others’ experiences. If possible, tame an expert you can bounce ideas off – especially if you’ve hung a major plot point on your theoretical understanding. When ghosting, I could ring my ‘authors’ for advice, but they weren’t always available so I found other sources to get my facts straight.

You’ll be surprised where these experts could be hiding. I never noticed my neighbourhood had a diving shop until I needed to write scenes featuring scuba. They were flattered and excited when I asked if I could pick their brains for a novel. When I was working on My Memories of a Future Life, a friend mentioned her family knew one of the BBC Young Musicians of the Year. Voila – I had an introduction to a concert pianist. Right now, I’m recruiting high-altitude climbers and pop musicians. Say hi in the comments if you know any.

Thanks for the travel pic moyan_brenn

What do you use to write what you don’t know? Share your tips in the comments! And do you have any research needs at the moment? Appeal for help here and you may find your perfect partner!

How to add jeopardy to your story before the main conflict starts

Jeopardy is a sense of instability – and a powerful way to hook the reader.

Often, writers are gearing up to reveal a big threat in the meat of the story, but fail to give us enough in the early chapters. Instead they show the characters living their lives, surrounded by their important folk. They may show us back story, and what the characters don’t want to lose. This is all useful groundwork – but they are in a state of stability.

What’s missing is the sense that the character is venturing onto a tightrope. The unknown knocking at the door. The trampoline on the balcony.

Genre and generalisations

How obvious you make this instability depends on your readership. Children’s and YA novels have to be pretty literal, while literary novels for adults might create pressures of agonising subtlety. Passages that would be aimless cogitation in a thriller might be enthralling dissonance in another genre.

But whatever you are writing, you still need jeopardy. So if your characters are looking too comfortable, what can you do?

Cut the throat-clearing
The simplest answer is to ditch the throat-clearing and get to the main threat sooner, then generate some complications to spin out afterwards.

Foreshadow with mysterious symptoms

But you might be better to keep your main conflict where it is. In that case, you need a build-up – but one that isn’t aimless.

Start from your main conflict and spin it out backwards, creating less severe problems that will lead to the flashpoint. Like mysterious symptoms that warn of a medical catastrophe, these can give that tingling sense that the character’s world is becoming irretrievably unstable.

Is there any normal activity that they start to find more difficult? Is there a tricky choice they might have to make early on? And could the character handle these in a way that makes everything more precarious? Could they think they’ve sorted it out but find they’ve made it worse?

Beware of timebombs

Sometimes writers try to add jeopardy with a deadline. The gangsters are coming. Or the bomb will detonate. That can be effective if introduced late, but plot timebombs have a short shelf life. If you start them ticking too early and never escalate the problems in another way, the reader can get numbed.

Other characters
Other characters are a terrific source of instability. Is there something your main character has to do that puts them at odds with other people who are important to them?

When I fixed Life Form 3, I looked closely at the other characters. I found:

• relationships where there was tension, and I made more of it
• ways for characters to spoil things for each other
• a way to give an early warning of the main threat, by making a diluted version afflict another character

I also looked for where this new, more desperate situation might lead to alliances. This gave one character a much stronger role, and became a catalyst for other tensions that richocheted through the story. He emerged with some strong beliefs that made him a far bigger player than he was originally designed to be.

Stories need a sense of instability to tweak the reader’s curiosity. If you need to add more, you can often find the roots in your main conflict and characters.

Thanks for the canned unease pic Ministryofstories.

Have you had to add jeopardy to a story – and how did you do it? Let’s talk in the comments!

If you found this post useful, you might like the follow-up to my book Nail Your Novel. It’s currently in edits and I’m still debating the title, but it will be stuffed with craft advice. If you’d like updates about this and Life Form 3, sign up to my newsletter

 

‘Music to depict lunatics in love’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Ruby Barnes

Murder ballads and psychological thrillers? Surely it was only a matter of time before a writer put themselves under the influence of Nick Cave. My guest this week used music as his portable aural office, banishing the sounds of his fellow rail passengers on his daily commute to immerse in shady characters. Sometimes he scared the real-world folks in the carriage too. He is Ruby Barnes and he’s on the Red Blog talking about his novel The Baptist and its Undercover Soundtrack.

‘I love to play with grey areas in my fiction’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Niki Valentine

My guest this week set her psychological thriller in a music conservatoire. Two pieces of music brought the book to life for her – a Schubert song with a beguilingly vulnerable female vocal, and a Rachmaninov sonata that turned out to have an illuminating link with Goethe’s Faust. She is Niki Valentine and she’s on the Red Blog today talking about the Undercover Soundtrack to her novel Possessed.

‘Music enables me to reach a deeper understanding of myself’ – Dina Santorelli, The Undercover Soundtrack

What does a thriller writer put in her headphones when she wants to drum up the characters of her childhood Brooklyn? Sinatra, Dean Martin, Coldplay, Bonnie Tyler… My guest this week needs silence for the actual writing, but reaches for music when she’s choreographing a scene or rekindling her creative momentum. Most of all, her soundtrack earths her story in the people and environs of her childhood. She is Dina Santorelli and today she’s on the Red Blog talking about the soundtrack to her thriller Baby Grand

‘It’s all about capturing the emotion’ – The Undercover Soundtrack, Laura Pauling

Living with a teenage daughter is a bonus when you’re putting together a writing soundtrack for a teen spy trilogy, but my guest this week compiled her playlist as much for tone and sound as for lyrics. She is Laura Pauling, and she’s over at the red blog talking about the Undercover Soundtrack to A Spy Like Me.

Too much information – be gentlemanly with your research

As it's their wedding they can be forgiven

I just read The Fear Index by Robert Harris. Much of the derring-do is in the world of hedge funds. Hedge funds make me feel baffled and not a little cross. Mercifully, Harris is a great storyteller – which means he knows that already.

Instead of baffling us, Harris starts with characters in a situation we can relate to – a man with a mysterious intruder in his house. A good half of the book passes before the reader ever has to grapple with how a hedge fund actually works. When we do it’s a terrific scene – a flashback to how the main characters met, so we want to read it. It’s full of entertaining characterisation – a racy rogue explains to an introverted scientist that it’s like betting on whether the girl at the fridge is wearing black underwear.

If you know about hedge funds, it’s charming enough that you forgive it being explained so basically. If you don’t, you see a bit of character interaction and emerge smugger and wiser.

Setting overload

So many novels derive much of their atmosphere and story from the setting. Whether it’s historical, sci-fi, fantasy, mountaineering, SAS thrillers (or even the world of classical music like My Memories of a Future Life). A lot of the fun of a book like this is the feeling you’ve had an insider view. But it’s easy to overdo the details. Especially if some of your story hinges around something as intricate as how hedge funds work.

I see a lot of novels that judge this wrong. Research-dumps, screeds of stodgy exposition that the writer mistakes for scene-setting. It’s clear that the writer has done admirable amounts of legwork – but they then frogmarch the reader through it too.

This not only holds up the story, it puts the reader on the outside while things are explained to them. In fact, you want them on the inside, immersed in the world as though the distinctive details were a natural part of life.

Wear it lightly

Harris clearly understands that however heavily he has to research, the novel should wear it lightly.

His other thrillers tackle ancient Rome (Imperium, Pompeii, Lustrum), the 1940s wartime code-breaking centre Bletchley Park (Enigma) an alternate 1960s (Fatherland) – to name but a few. They are full of intricate world-building – but he translates them into pressures on characters that generate stories. At the same time, you never feel you’re struggling to understand, or patronised because he’s gone too simple. It’s as if when he sat down to write he tried to say as little as possible about what he knew – and put the story and character first.

In your handling of research you have to be like the definition of a gentleman – a man who knows how to play the banjo but refrains from doing so.

Which authors do you think are gentlemanly with research?

How to write a novel – in-depth webinar series with Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn, starting November.  Find more details and sign up here.

Nail Your Novel – my short book about how to write a long one – is available from Amazon. Not too late to nab a Kindle copy if you’re aiming to be a Wrimo!

My Memories of a Future Life is now available in full. You can also listen to or download a free audio of the first 4 chapters over on the red blog.

 

Are you writing the wrong genre?

We all have strengths and weaknesses in our writing, but are yours telling you something about the kind of novel you should write?

I was critiquing a manuscript recently and as with all drafts, there were areas that sang beautifully and others that needed more work. Some types of scene came to life in a three-dimensional, gut-pummelling experience. Others trotted through at a distance as though the writer was including them dutifully but wasn’t interested in them. (And this distance wasn’t deliberate; sometimes we use these techniques for specific effects but that wasn’t what was going on here.)

Of course you know what I’m going to say. If you’re not interested in writing a scene, the reader won’t be interested in reading it. Either don’t bother or find something in the scene to engage you.

How to pep yourself up

Perhaps you don’t feel very sure of the content. Ask yourself – what are you not sure of? Do you need to do more research to bring it to life – for instance, if it’s a new location you don’t know well? Or do the characters need more to do beyond the main goal of the scene?

Or maybe you know full well what’s going to happen but you’d rather get to the next interesting bit. In which case, you either need to generate something in the scene that excites you (for instance, add conflict, twist events an unusual way) – or do something else entirely, no matter how inconvenient that seems.

But listen to the voice that tells you you’re unengaged. It’s telling you for your own good.

However…

But this client’s manuscript was different. It was a thriller, but the author wasn’t engaged by his chases, backstabbing, skulking and close shaves with assassins. All of these were competent and well planned, but told at a summarised distance. I showed him how to make them ping off the page, of course. But he came to life, all by himself, in spectacular fashion in an extraordinary near-drowning scene, where the character has a haunting, hallucinatory encounter with the people stalking his psyche from his past. It was as though another book was trying to fight its way out of the one he thought he was writing. And one that was much more real to him.

This is, I suppose, one of the mysteries of writing. Just as parents have to let children be who they are rather than who they can be moulded into, writers sometimes have to let their true genre bust out by itself. Inconvenient though that might be if you think you’re writing a straightforward, saleable genre novel.

Is your book telling you you haven’t yet found the right genre?

Thank you, Iko, for the picture. Coming August 30: My Memories of a Future Life.

I’m fascinated to know if anyone else has done this. Have you tried to write one sort of novel and found you naturally wrote another?