John Dean – Crime Writer

Best-selling crime writer John Dean has posted another article to help aspiring writers and offer insights for readers, this one focusing on injecting emotions into flat passages.

I, as you may know from recent posts, am in the final weeks of editing the next DCI Blizzard novel to send to my publisher The Book Folks, a Joffe Books company, for consideration for publication and, even at this late stage, the author will find things to do, large and small.

By my estimate, I will have made at least a thousand changes to my final draft. One of the things that I picked up was a very tense, emotional scene which lacked tension and emotion.

What was the solution? Put myself in the characters’ shoes and imagine how they would react. In this case, that meant adding anger and raised voices to some dialogue, putting tears in one character’s eyes and a furious character constantly interrupting Blizzard. The result? Job done, move onto the next chapter.

As a crime writer, I am constantly creating scenes full of raw emotion and human passions. I have not experienced all the situations I depict (thank goodness!) but I have gone through a lot of the scenarios and, for me, the line between real life and fiction can be an indistinct one.

I know some writers argue that fiction should be just that, sheer fiction but, for me, reality begats fiction.

When I was writing my first novels as a teenager, I tended to write about aliens, cowboys and war zones, things I knew absolutely nothing about. My father’s constant mantra was ‘write about what you know’. They were wise words when he uttered them, wise words now, but the problem was that aged fourteen I did not know anything. I was a schoolboy, what could I know?

Now that I am well beyond sixty, I know far too much about what life can throw at you, just as everyone does. To me, it is inevitable that such experiences inform my writing.

Those dark events are part of life. For crime writers, we can get so wrapped up with the technical side of our craft that it’s easy to forget that we are messing about with the reader’s head, maybe forcing them to re-live something that they have experienced or dread ever having to experience.

It’s what keeps authors real.