John Dean – Crime Writer

I would suggest that any writer who tells you that the craft behind writing fiction is easy is not being entirely honest with you. Although it relies on the relatively simple process of creativity it’s also incredibly technical, and that’s complicated, embracing everything from the right point of view to judging how much description is required, from starting your story in such a way that the reader is grabbed by the lapel and dragged into the action to writing with the correct pace, from creating characters to triggering a response in your readers. Now best-selling crime novelist John Dean has published On fiction, a book bringing together everything he has learned over more than fifty years as an author. The book is targeted at emerging writers learning their craft and also at giving readers some insight into how the author’s mind works. Here’s a flavour – it’s how he begins his section on beating the dreaded writer’s block.

“I am fortunate in that I don’t really suffer from writer’s block but it does happen on occasion, including while writing a recent DCI John Blizzard novel. The first 16,000 words had actually gone well. I had an idea which intrigued me and a character whose secret gave me plenty of scope to develop the narrative.

Then I hit a brick wall. Every angle I tried came to nothing, characters did not evolve and the story went flat. I found myself struggling to write for several weeks. The catalyst to get going again was the decision to return to another character, one who was supposed to be a fairly minor part of the story”.

The book can be purchased in ebook and paperback format on Amazon.