Who inspires your characters?

When I was writing How Kirsty Got Her Kicks, I wanted my main character to be gutsy; the kind of woman every women wants to be - who doesn't take any nonsense from anyone.

There are women on TV who I looked to for inspiration. Women like Nikita from La Femme Nikita and Sydney Bristow from Alias, and believe it or not, Janice Soprano. Yes right. Who can possibly resist someone whose response from her brutal boyfriend who says 'what ya gonna do now, cry,' is to reach for her gun?

Relive her proudest moment on YouTube

In celebration of this I wrote an piece for Shadowlocked.com on Kick Ass Angels. Who have I missed?

Dealing with backstory

It can be so easy to fall into the trap of writing too much backstory. Aren't we all a product of what has gone on before in our lives? Therefore, it would follow that our characters are the same.

Liz Roberts who whittled down the Debut Dagger entries – ‘Many entries started off very well – and then ran the reader into the literary equivalent of a brick wall around page 3 or 4, because they couldn’t resist putting in a lot of backstory.’

The best piece of advice I have read came from literary agent Carole Blake in From pitch to publication -
'In order to illustrate a character trait, or a backstory element, demonstrate it with a scene, a snippet of dialogue, but don’t have the narrative address the reader like a newsreader reading facts.'

Editing that novel

I’m now at that scary stage of writing where the story is all done and the plots have come to a conclusion. Now it’s for the scary part – the final edit. 

I say scary because after this it will be time to actually submit the thing. That means contacting agents and publishers.

Here are some of the things I have learnt about editing –

• DON’T over edit. It can be easy to fall into that trap and lose the power of what you have written.
• ALWAYS keep your work before the edit. That way if you want to change it back to how it was, you have your original and don’t end up having to resurrect it from memory.
• LIMIT the use of words like well like, only, just, had, seem, seemed, seems (better to say something is) and adjectives with ly at the end (trust me, they get monotonous).
• If you keep on having to say who is speaking when it’s a regular character, then you need to work on your characterisation. People should know who is speaking by how they say what they say.
• Take time out from editing to read. Good writers need to read.
• ALWAYS print out for the final edit and edit by hand the old fashioned way, with a pan. You will be amazed at what you miss when you do it on a computer screen. Very amazed.
• READ OUT what you have written to yourself to make sure it reads right. You can spot things that way. I try a bit of method acting as well reading it as though as though I am that character and try and act as they do (in my head). Weird and I may be nuts, but it works for me.

What an agent does

At the moment, I am obsessed with looking at agents - mianly because I want to get one.

I came across this excellent piece in Mslexia - http://www.mslexia.co.uk/getpublished/getpublished_agents.php

Not only does it tell you whether you need an agent (not enough money in poetry and short stories apparently), but it tells you what an agent does. And, no, they do much more than take a cut of your earnings.

And, there's interviews with six very different agents who offer advice on how best to approch them.

The blurb for Vile City

I'm working on the final edit now and trying to figure out where to send it. But, here's the blurb (here's hoping you'll see something similar on the back of a book soon) -

The women of Glasgow have real reason to be afraid.  A man dubbed ‘the Glasgow Grabber’ is on the loose and they are his prey. 

DI Waddell is the detective called in to save the day.  But, he has problems of his own. 

The paperwork on his desk is piling up faster than the knickers at a porn shoot, he’s a borderline diabetic addicted to Irn Bru, and to top it all, he’s been lumbered with a Hen Broon look-alike with glasses because his finest detective and friend Stevie is languishing in a psychiatric hospital.  And don’t even get him started on his pompous, ex-Army boss and the pain in the bahookie hack who comes round every time she smells the scent of human suffering. 

The last thing Waddell needs is the country’s biggest case to land on his lap. 

Driven by the belief that third victim, the plucky Shelley Craig is still alive Waddell is in a desperate race against time to uncover the truth behind the abductions and to save her.  To do that, he and his team must delve into the seedy underbelly of Scotland’s swingers’ scene and a sick world where women are tricked into the sex trade and traded like cattle.    

Along the way Waddell will discover one thing is true: the female of the species is more deadly than the male.    

Vile City is a tale of criminal skulduggery, set in a city Waddell once loved, but is fast growing to despise because of all the darkness he sees. 

It finally arrived...the Pitlochry Quaich

Yesterday it arrived, an oddly shaped package and I thought 'what on earth is this?' Then I opened it and out popped the Pitlochry Quaich. Until I held it in my hands I didn't believe I had actually won the Scottish Association of Writers award for a crime novel.

Thanks go to the wonderful Barbara Hammond at Writers' Umbrella for ensuring the trophy got to me as I was unable to attend because of personal reasons.

Why you don't need/want and agent

To balance out the last post on why you need an agent, I thought I would include a link to a piece top-selling author Stephen Leather wrote on his website about agents. Well, I think calling them 'scum-sucking parasites' is hardly a recommendation.

To visit his list of books, click on this book

To read more, just go to his website page at http://www.stephenleather.com/howto.html and go down to the blue box that says 'If you want an agent click here' and a word doc called 'Agents' will appear. It lists dozens of them.

Happy hunting.