John Dean – Crime Writer

Writing is all about learning, and re-learning, lessons, however experienced the author is, and yesterday’s lesson was the importance of listening to your characters.

I knew what I wanted to achieve with the scene I had just started to write – it was part of the synopsis – but I needed a way of making it happen and was struggling, so I put my characters, the detectives John Blizzard and David Colley,s in a bar with a beer in their hand and let them talk.

The result was the emergence of new themes and the revisiting of old ones. It really did feel like the guys did all the work and I just did the typing = and that’s the sign that your writing is working and working well.