John Dean – Crime Writer

Meet the author’s secret weapon. These are our dogs and they play a crucial role in helping me keep my stories moving, particularly if I’m stuck for the next stage in the plot.

If an author sets out to have an idea, I can pretty much guarantee that it will not happen. The author’s mind tends to come up with the best ideas when it is least expecting it, and particularly when it’s not occupied, as happens when you are walking the dogs.

I suspect that many ideas find their authors (it’s never the other way round, ideas just about always find their author) when they are walking the dog (s). We have two dogs (since you ask, Ivy, a Cocker Cross Flatcoat, the black one, and Merlin, an English Setter, the white one, who was rescued from a life of harsh treatment) and I have lost count of how many times ideas have come to me while walking them and thinking about nothing in particular.

That was certainly the case today. My latest novel had been slowing down for the best part of a week and by this morning had stopped altogether. I have some big ideas for the end of the story but the problem was that I had nothing to bridge the gap.

Walking the dogs have helped on many such occasions. Examples include looking at the hills near our home in Dumfries and Galloway and being presented by my mind with the unexpected image of a passenger airliner clipping the highest summit and crashing (which became An Error of Judgement), and an undercover officer being shot in the kitchen of our hillside cottage by an assassin who waited in a copse near our home, which became Death List  (my wife Frances was not entirely enamoured by the thought of attempted murder most foul in our newly-decorated kitchen!).

The ideas rarely, if ever, come perfectly formed but the crucial job they do is to get the mind working and. once that process is under way, more ideas will emerge. Today, we were walking round a local wetland nature reserve when my mind strayed to thoughts of the mystery surrounding a man whose body was found in a lake. The key thing the author’s mind does in such circumstances is provide the space and opportunity to let the ideas in and by the time we arrived home, I had enough to get the story moving again.