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Intensity in Crime Writing

       Natasha Cooper

      The one thing – and the only thing – that a crime novel must not do is bore the reader. The old rules about what you may and may not include have gone. You can identify the villain in the first chapter if you want; you can have lots of blood or no blood; you can have any number of identical twins or secret passages; you don’t even have to have a killer. But you must keep your reader interested.

      As you plan your novel, you may find the following ten points helpful.

       1. Know your characters

      You will find it easier to write engaging fiction if your characters feel real to you. Get to know them before you start writing. Who are they? What do they like? What do they fear? What do they want? Who do they piss off? What do they look like? What do they eat? What music do they listen to? What films do they watch? Are they snowflakes? Are they bullies? What are their weaknesses? What are their private tragedies? For what would they kill?

      You don’t need to tell the reader everything, but you need to know it all. Some writers find that it helps to chat to their characters as they potter about, and no one looks weirdly at anyone talking in the street now because they assume everyone’s on the phone.

       2. Write in scenes

      To keep your novel vivid, you need to set the scene for each piece of action or dialogue or introspection. So think, before you write a word, about where your character is, who else is there, what can they see, what can they hear and smell and taste and feel. Once again, you don’t have to tell the reader everything, but you need to know it all so that you can select the most telling details to share with the reader.

       3. Don’t waste time

      It is all too easy when writing a novel to prattle on without much point, especially if you’ve given yourself a daily word-count target. Don’t. Think about why you are including the scene you’re writing. Is it to establish a character? Is it to advance the plot? Is it to heighten the tension? Is it to give the reader necessary information?

      If your scene does not do at least two of these things, consider binning it.

      Giving information is one of the hardest aspects of crime writing. Some readers love innumerable details about weapons, or the stripping of bones by pathologists, or the operation of complex financial frauds. Others don’t. They can, of course, skip anything that bores them, but you need to be judicious about the amount of information you give and the way in which you give it. Explanatory dialogue can be dangerous, and it often sounds impossibly artificial to the reader’s internal ear. If you need your reader to know about the speed at which a Kalashnikov pumps out bullets, it is probably best to announce it straightforwardly rather than to have characters sitting over a beer in a pub, with one saying, ‘I’ve always wondered how many bullets a Kalashnikov fires every second’, the second replying, ‘Well, it rather depends on the year it was made; some Kalashnikovs fire at …’

       4. Realistic dialogue

      If your characters sound like cyborgs, or DIY manuals, or pompous sermonizers, you will lose the reader. It is well worth speaking each piece of your dialogue aloud and possibly even recording some of it so that you can hear how it sounds.

      Make sure that each character’s idiom is distinct from the others. Ideally the reader should be able to work out who is speaking without your adding ‘John joked jaggedly’ or ‘Maggie muttered murderously’.

      Consider confining the relevant verbs to ‘said’ or possibly ‘shouted’ or ‘whispered’. Synonyms for ‘said’ can seem absurd. One historical novel published in the 1950s included, ‘“Honeycakes,” Jenny ejaculated as she sat among the gillyflowers.’ A more modern infelicity is: ‘“I don’t care,” she deadpanned.’ ‘I don’t care’ is quite enough on its own.

      Every group, whether social or professional, has its own private language, and using the relevant ones will add authenticity to your novel. If you have the time and resources to hang around your target group and listen, you will pick up the right words and phrases; but you may not have time and so it’s worth finding a single individual – police officer, firefighter, lawyer, gang member – and asking how he or she would describe something specific. You don’t have to write your whole scene in the relevant language, but adding a few unexpected but accurate words and phrases will always help to convince your readers that they are reading something real. If your novel is historical, it’s well worth looking up letters and diaries of the period so that you can add an accurate sound to the dialogue.

       5. Research

      Don’t do too much research too soon. The risk is that you will include much too much detail in your novel. Read around your subject and then write, leaving space within square brackets labelled something like [add scientific detail here]. Experts are remarkably helpful and will give just enough information in reply to a specific question to add authenticity to a novel without overloading it. You are more likely to be able to ask the right question once you have finished your first draft.

       6. Tension

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