Advice and guidance for writers
Advice and guidance for writers and authors wanting to write crime fiction but don’t know where to start.
Do you want to write a book or short story, but worry about character development?
Are you worried about your spellin or grandmar?
The old adage that there is a ‘book in every one’ is not especially true. Despite several false starts, writing my first novel was difficult. I quickly realised that both spelling and grammar could be the downfall of many self-published writers, and even some established writers have manuscripts (MS) with typos and grammatical errors that should have been found. Yes, I am talking from experience here. I learned the hard way that you need to be fastidious in ensuring that grammatical errors are kept to a minimum. For example, you may need to decide how you will use speech marks. In the UK, we use ‘these.’ But in the US, “these” are more common.
But we are human, and there is little likelihood of any published book, article, blog, etc, being completely devoid of errors. You can only read the same words over and over for so long before you become ‘word blind.’ The closer you are, the more errors you miss.
Therefore, giving your work a fresh pair of eyes is important. He or she will pick up errors that you may have read over many times and missed. I know I do.
As a retired police officer, I have an intimate knowledge of how things work in the service. Police procedures watched on TV, in films and written in books have been about for years. Sometimes, these are farcical and occasionally push the realms of reality. In fiction, though, you can do anything, can’t you? Well, you can. But in crime fiction, there needs to be at least a modicum of authenticity.
Crime fiction predominantly features a detective in a variety of emotional states, dark backstories, and an adversarial boss. However, there has been a growing trend of mixing up the various departments.
My time in the Traffic Division involved all sorts of banter from the detectives. Even in fiction, predominantly Morse, Rebus, and Barnaby threatened detectives with ‘demotion’ to traffic or saw traffic cops as wooden tops, which could not be further from the truth.
In the real world, roads policing officers (Traffic to us old uns) make more criminal arrests than detectives on average. Usually, when they’re stopped in a car, they think they can drive around without insurance or draw attention to themselves in some other way.