Recently, I was part of the virtual writing workshops sponsored annually by the Eden Mills Writers Festival. My task was to impart what wisdom I’ve managed to gather having written thirty novels, including, most recently five Priscilla Tempest Mysteries. Lots has been written on the subject, but having shared some of my experiences, good and bad, at the Eden Mills Writers workshop, I thought it might be useful to any would-be authors out there to reprint a few of my thoughts beginning with the first two parts. Others will follow shortly.

1.                The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: Writing In Your Imagination

It’s six thirty in the morning. Or maybe it’s seven. But it’s early. You have your coffee. You are settling in at the keyboard. Your fingers are moving on the keys but you are not really at the keyboard. You are being pulled into another world. In my case, this morning, it’s the Savoy Hotel in London in 1968. But you will have another world, it doesn’t matter what it is, it’s yours, you have created it. Unlike real life, you are in control. You are the writer, the director, the cinematographer. You have designed the sets, created the costumes, orchestrated the fate of your characters in this unfolding drama. Now you begin to see that the characters you have created are taking on a life, if not quite on their own, close enough. You know they must encounter drama and conflict, and as soon as you start to move them together, put them at odds, that is exactly what they start to do. There is danger in this world you have created, there is passion and there is mystery, everything heightened and larger than life—the life you would never experience in your real life, but here it is much different. You don’t know what is going to happen next, but you are enthralled you must find out. You must keep moving through this world. You don’t want to miss anything. You don’t want to leave.

Eventually, though, other voices intrude. Your wife wants you to mow the lawn. The kids are home from school. Dinner has to be prepared. The world you have created slips away. For me, it’s the loss of the glamour and excitement of the Savoy, rich people misbehaving, drinks with the legendary playwright Noël Coward in the American Bar, and yes, there is that body in suite 405,  that must be dealt with—but that is for another day. You leave reluctantly, your fingers giving up the keyboard. You are back to reality, a bit depressed at the end of it. Real life will never be able to match the world you have created for yourself…

What I have just described, I would argue, is the essence of the mystery novel—or of any novel. You do not write the mystery, you live through it, recording events as they unfold. You do not write, you imagine, you dream. That is the beauty of what you do, the drug that becomes so addictive you embrace it for a lifetime, like you embrace nothing else. I don’t say to my wife Kathy, I’m going to work. I tell her I’m going to be at the Savoy Hotel in London for a few hours—but not to worry, I’ll be back.

This is the way I escaped as a child, and it is still the way of escape for me. After all the years of writing professionally, I continue to believe that the best place to write is in your imagination. That is, I would argue, the most underrated part of the writing process. Everyone always wants to know what your novel is based on, are you the protagonist in your novel, who are the characters in real life. What no one asks is HOW YOU MADE IT ALL UP. How you dreamed at three o’clock in the morning and came up with the solution to your mystery. John Le Carré who suffered a lifetime of being asked about the reality of what he did as a spy for  British Intelligence, said that we as writers are all frauds, we pretend to know all sorts of things that we don’t know at all—at the end of it, he said, he makes it up. 

Now having said that imagination is your most powerful tool, there are a few rules of the road, tricks of the trade that I have found useful over the years and which you may find helpful. 

Let’s start where you might not expect…at the movies. 

2.               THE DUMBEST GUY IN THE ROOM: LESSONS LEARNED

For years I struggled to write screenplays for producers in Toronto, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, and Montreal. For a writer it was a very uneasy and unsatisfying process. Writing novels, you are ultimately in control. Writing screenplays you are not in control at all. I was always the dumbest guy in the room. Everyone else knew exactly what was wrong with the script, except the write—me.

However, I did come away from those experiences with some great stories and a few valuable lessons that have helped me in the creation of my mystery novels. 

Since time immemorial drama has relied on the three-act structure in order to tell a story. This particularly true in movies. Even today, most films use that tried and true three-act structure. We have become so emersed in film that many commercial novels in fact read like screenplays. A simple formula I find helpful: In act one, you put the hero up a tree. In act two you throw rocks at him. In act three you bring the hero down from the tree. As I say, simple, but effective, and I find it endlessly useful for constructing a novel.

In film, every scene must drive the plot forward. The same is true in a novel. Each chapter should move the plot forward. If it doesn’t, cut it. You can argue about this, site instances where it isn’t true, but in the name of keeping the reader gripped—a major ambition for anyone writing a mystery novel or thriller—it is a good rule to keep in mind, particularly if you are just starting out.

John Braine is a British novelist best known for Room at the Top which was turned into one of the iconic films of the British starring Laurence Harvey and Simone Signoret. Braine is forgotten today but he was very popular and he wrote one of the best books about writing a novel called—Writing A Novel. “Always write as if the action of your novel were taking place before your eyes on a brightly lit stage…it is the most important of my working rules.”

One of mine too—and it places in to the scene setting in that world you are going to be entering when you write a novel.