I've just got back from a Crime Writing Workshop as part of my hometown's Literature Festival. It was a small event with only 5 of us in attendance, but I'm very glad I paid my money and went along!
I was worried that the event was going to be run an old and stuffy writer who would witter on about plans and plot lines and character development. In fact it was run by a really nice young girl about my age (late 20s/early 30s...is that still a girl?). She was nice and down to earth with a good approach to life. She talked about what she did, interspersed with other ways of doing things that her friends had tried.
My favourite part was when she said that she didn't plan out her books. She knows what her crime is going to be, who the victim and the guilty party are and then she just writes and sees what happens. I quite like the idea of that. The idea of painstakingly mapping out a whole novel and how the characters will act/behave etc seemed quite daunting, but her way of doing it seemed achievable. She also said that she writes it out long hand as she gets easily distracted on a laptop - which sounds vaguely familiar.
So I'm thinking of giving it a go. I just need to come up with the bare bones. I quite like the idea of doing an old fashioned "sleuth" type of crime novel along the lines of a Marple or a Poirot. So I need to have my Sleuth character, maybe a sidekick, the setting and the problem/crime I want them to solve before I start. Then I'm just going to kick off!
Ummmmm....this is harder than it sounds!
So I'm going to turn off the computer and get away from the distractions now!
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