Staying the course
By signing the contract for Poison Panic, I was promising Pen and Sword, my publisher, that I
would write 60,000 words. I thought back to the longest piece of non-fiction
I’d written up until that point – my undergraduate dissertation on Agatha
Christie (can you see a theme developing?) – and that was 12,000 words. How the
heck was I going to write 60,000? But it didn’t scare me. Although none of my novels have ever been
published, apart from a self-published spy thriller back in the late 1990s
(when self-publishing meant ‘photocopied’), I’d at least managed to complete
them. Some were easily twice as long as 60,000 words, so each time I stared
blankly at my computer and the Doubting Gremlins whispered mean things in my
ears (Imposter Syndrome is very unkind), I would tell myself, “I might not have
completed non-fiction this long before, but I’ve written novels that are much
longer - I can do it!” I had to remind myself that I did have the discipline to
sit down and write the bloody thing.
Imagination
I knew I’d ‘got’ Poison
Panic when I started to dream about it. This is something that happens to
me with fiction, too – in fact, my fiction often comes out of my dreams. But
with Poison Panic, once I’d had a
dream that I was in Mary May’s kitchen, and that a rat had scurried over my
foot, and that I watched Mary put arsenic down to kill the rodents plaguing her
cottage, the book entered the space in my head where my novels germinate and
grow. I’m currently writing Fatal
Evidence, the biography of nineteenth-century forensic scientist Alfred
Swaine Taylor, and I realised I’d ‘got’ him once I had a very odd dream where
he was sitting at my desk!
This doesn’t mean I added anything to my non-fiction – Poison Panic is based entirely on
primary historical sources, such as newspaper reports – but it meant I could
get a feel for the people in the book. They became more rounded in my mind, not
just stock characters – ‘middle-aged farm labourer’s wife’ – but a living,
breathing woman from the nineteenth-century. I could close my eyes and see them
laugh or cry, see them stare stonily ahead as they stood in the dock, or
collapse in terror on the scaffold.
I grew up in north-east Essex, where part of Poison Panic is set, so by adding some
set-dressing to my memories (carriages, bonnets, smoke spiralling up from
chimneys), I was able to create an 1840s version of Essex in my mind that I
could populate with the ‘real’ people I had met in my research.
Being a daydreamer no doubt helps. Stuck in a traffic jam on
the bus? Let’s retreat into Poison Panic
Land and find out if that arsenic has sorted out the rodent problem yet….
Hone your craft
If you’re writing fiction, then there’s workshops, weekend
retreats, residential courses, manuscript critique, and editing services. I’m
sure there must be some for non-fiction, but it’s the fiction ones which seem
to be proliferate.
While I was a student, I was very lucky to have one-to-one
mentoring sessions with novelist William Palmer, courtesy of the Royal Literary
Fund (yes, he has the same name as The Rugeley Poisoner). I took my novel to
him (jazz singer framed for murder… that theme yet again) and he taught me how
to be brave and edit my work. Not just juggle between *this* layout of a
sentence, or *that* tense, but put a big line through that paragraph, tear out
this page, and heck, get rid of this chapter! As
Poison Panic spilled out of my fingertips and into Scrivener, I hammered it about, using the same fearlessness that William had instilled in me as a student. Can you explain this in a sentence, rather than this terrible, waffly paragraph? Yes. Then do it. For heaven’s sake, do it.
Poison Panic spilled out of my fingertips and into Scrivener, I hammered it about, using the same fearlessness that William had instilled in me as a student. Can you explain this in a sentence, rather than this terrible, waffly paragraph? Yes. Then do it. For heaven’s sake, do it.
More recently, I attended Alison May’s ‘Developing YourNovel’ day-long workshop. We learnt about such things as character, the
three-act structure, how to edit, the point-of-no-return, the darkest moment,
and how to write a synopsis. All extremely useful stuff for someone writing a
novel, but how, you might wonder, is this any use for non-fiction?
Whilst I can’t add my own characters to non-fiction (though
some writers do), thinking about characterisation in fiction was a good way to
breathe life into the real people in my book. There’s tricks which
fiction-writers use for presenting characters in particular ways, and, by
collating my facts in a certain manner, I was able to show the reader how I see
these characters – based on my research.
There’s nothing I can do about the point-of-no-return not
appearing in the middle of the book, where you expect it to fall in novels and
films. It’s non-fiction, for heaven’s sake! That said, some true crimes deal
with this by, for instance, having the protagonist’s arrest fall at the halfway
point. Dealing with several different cases, it just wasn’t possible to do this
with Poison Panic. But there’s a
certain sense of doom that hovers over the point-of-no-return, and I tried to
emulate this. Equally, each chapter is about a separate case, so in theory I
could’ve had a point-of-no-return in the middle of each chapter, but I didn’t
consciously set out to do that.
I was commissioned to write Poison Panic a couple of months after I attended Alison’s workshop.
Her advice on synopsis-writing did help – I was asked to pitch an idea, and it
was later that I realised what I’d written was, essentially, a short synopsis.
When I was ready to pitch Fatal Evidence,
I followed the publisher’s submission guidelines to the letter, and bore
Alison’s advice in mind. They commissioned Fatal
Evidence the day after I sent my submission.
A synopsis needs a hook – it’s vital whether it’s fiction or
non-fiction. Why should a publisher or agent be interested in what you’ve
written, or what you propose to write? And as well as the synopsis, there’s the
elevator pitch. Alison forced one out of me for a novel which I initially
couldn’t describe in one paragraph, but by the end of the workshop, I could
explain in a sentence. Being able to distil down tens of thousands of words
into a one-sentence hook is a skill you’ll learn at a novel-writing workshop,
and it’s essential for writing non-fiction too.
Research
As you might imagine, writing a book about real poisoning
cases requires a lot of research, and how you express it is key. Writing
non-fiction, you could get away with flinging all the facts at the page in a
vaguely chronological order, with a bit of commentary here and there. But I’m
very conscious of the fact that I’m writing for the general reader, and if
someone has picked up my book because they think it looks interesting, the
worst thing I can do is present all this information in a way that sends them
to sleep. I’m encroaching on their spare time, even if, by picking up my book,
they’ve invited me in.
I researched my fiction: rifling (the ‘fingerprints’ of a
gun barrel left on a bullet), stagecoach timetables, what music the BBC played
on the radio on New Year’s Eve 1935, on and on it goes. But I don’t chuck these
facts at the reader: one must always avoid the Information Dump! I might be
able to weave the facts in somehow – they might, after all, be crucial to the
plot. But a lot of it might be background information which I need to know in
order to confidently handle the story I’m telling, but I don’t need to bludgeon
my readers over the head with.
This is where reading over your own work is important, that
point where you leave it for a few days – a few weeks, or even longer (if you
have the time… a slight problem if a deadline is bearing down on you). This is
something I learnt from writing fiction. There were some points in Poison Panic where, when I came to read
over it, the narrative slowed down, caught up in an undertow of facts. Yes,
facts are important, but if you think it’s going to annoy your readers, you
need to address it. Can you express these facts in a different way? Maybe the
tone of the passage is too stuffy, or the information isn’t explained clearly.
Is there an angle here which can be amplified to make it interesting and keep
the reader engaged? Maybe there’s something which you think is interesting, but as far as the narrative is concerned,
doesn’t really earn its place in the book. In this situation, non-fiction has
the benefit of footnotes or references, which fiction (apart from The French Lieutenant’s Woman) doesn’t
have.
For instance, it was important in Poison Panic that I explained how many children Mary May had had,
and when. I started off with a bullet-pointed list of their baptisms and
burials, then tried to turn it into a paragraph, but I got annoyed by how
clunky it looked. It was an ugly mass of dates which didn’t really mean much.
So instead, I wrote an overview in a couple of sentences, and put the list of
baptisms and burials in the references at the back. The information is
therefore supplied for the reader, but it’s not clogging up the narrative pace.
I must confess that there is a lot going on in Poison Panic, but writing for a general
reader, I can’t assume anything about people’s prior knowledge on arsenic or
indeed the nineteenth-century. If you’re writing a nineteenth-century police
procedural novel, you don’t need a page explaining the Rural Constabularies
Acts of 1839 and 1840. If you think it’s important, you have the freedom to,
perhaps, invent a conversation, where your character talks about becoming a
policeman following the Acts. Writing non-fiction, I cannot do this, but I can include a photograph of square-jawed
PC Barnard of the Essex Constabulary in his steel-reinforced top hat. You
probably can’t do that in a novel, but you might have Barnard’s photo as your
computer’s wallpaper for inspiration as you write.
And back again…
It follows, of course, that writing non-fiction benefits
writing fiction, but I’ll spare you for now. Back to your work-in-progress –
scram!
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