I'm not a plotter.
I've said this before. I start a book with only the most basic of ideas about where it will be going and some key scenes. I also write out of sequence, typing scenes as they come to me, before stitching everything together in a logical order at the end.
Because of this, I don't start a book with a detailed timeline - how could I? I have no idea what's going to happen, let alone when!
But the keyword here is start I don't start a book with a timeline, but I invariably have several by the time I have finished.
Why are timelines essential for police procedurals?
My books are split into sections with a day and date for each section. This is my personal stylistic choice and it works very well for me. Other writers may not mention the date at all; you have to start reading that next chapter for clues that a new day has dawned. Again, it works absolutely fine. However, even though that author has not explicitly written the date or the time, they probably have a pretty good idea when that chapter takes place. They may even have a detailed timeline.
Timelines serve multiple purposes.
They help you keep track of what different characters are doing.
Is DC Blogs doing three things simultaneously, whilst DC Doe hasn't been seen or heard from for two days - an absence apparently unnoticed by all of the other characters (but most certainly noticed by Amazon reviewers)?
They maintain the story's internal continuity.
One of the most useful things about timelines, is that they help you see at a glance logical inconsistencies. For example, your SIO can't receive detailed forensic results for a crucial piece of evidence before they've found it and submitted it to the lab...
They make timings realistic.
I've written before about the custody clock (TuesdayTips#63) and alluded repeatedly to the time taken for results to come back from the lab. If you want to write an accurate police procedural, you need to keep timings in mind. Custody clocks start ticking the moment someone is arrested and they are inviolable, so make certain that your story takes this limitation into account. You can fudge the time taken for forensic results to come back from the lab to a degree - authorisation to 'fast-track' them as a priority, or a backlog at the lab can help you time your revelations to make the story dramatic, but there are limits. These days, with quick access to a modern crime lab, a simple crime scene and the budget and clout to push them through the system you may get DNA results overnight - a timeline helps you avoid stretching the limits of credibility. On a more basic level, if you need a character to be in Edinburgh in one scene and Cornwall in the next, leave enough time for them to travel there!
They help control pace.
Even the most blood-pounding thriller needs to give the readers (and the characters) time to catch their breath. Similarly, those beautifully written pieces that give vital character information, or fill-in crucial backstory, may be essential to the book, but tiresome to readers if they pick up a so-called crime thriller and the first fifty pages are all about the character's missing pet.
I've heard of thriller writers colour coding scenes in their timeline according to the action and pace. From there, they can easily tell at a glance if they need to adjust things to keep readers hooked.
They help you spot redundancy/missing scenes.
A good timeline will have a descriptive title for each section; it will be almost like a table of contents. This means that you can see quite quickly if there is anything missing, or anything you can get rid of because it's repetitious.
For example, in a serial killer book, things can become a little formulaic if you aren't careful.
Person Killed --> Police Called --> SIO calls Forensics --> SIO attends autopsy --> Forensics find a clue --> etc etc etc.
A timeline can help you identify this and also highlight areas where there is redundancy. An autopsy would be an essential part of any investigation, but if there are five deaths, do you need to drag your reader to the morgue five times? Can later visits by the SIO be summarised or mentioned in passing?
They help you rearrange your book.
See all of the above! It's also a Godsend for those of us who don't plot, and write out of sequence. You can rearrange your timeline before you start cutting and pasting your chapters into a new draft of your document.


What sort of timelines might you use?
I have a number of different timelines for my books. The most common one is a day-by-day listing of the key events. This starts off pretty blank. For convenience, I tend to work out a starting date, so that I can pin events to this. To this timeline I add in some important dates, eg bank holidays, birthdays, clock changes, school holidays etc.
As I write the book, I find that I also build more detailed timelines for individual days. My current work in progress has several, ranging from the night of the murder and how it was planned, to the police's investigation of a suspect's alibi.
I also have a series timeline that places the books chronologically and notes key events. This helps me be consistent - for example I have a significant birthday that can't be ignored during an upcoming book.

Tools for constructing a timeline using common Office programmes.
There are a plethora of programmes and writers aids available these days, many of which are highly recommended. I have yet to bite the bullet and install Scrivener (although I will be doing so in a few months). So instead I am going to make some suggestions based on my own experience using MS Office. Most of these functions are also available in comparable office suites, such as Google Docs.
The simplest way to do it is an Excel Spreadsheet: a column of dates, with a second column containing a description of events.
Excel has a lot of formatting options, so you can easily colour code your timeline. You can even add additional columns, such as which characters are in a scene.
A glaring limitation of Excel is that it won't easily tell you the day of the week for a given date.
If you are confident coding in Excel, this link details how to have it calculate the day for you.
https://exceljet.net/excel-functions/excel-weekday-function
Of course, typing in all that data is a bit of a chore.
I have previously spoken about how useful a descriptive section heading is for navigating your Word document.
These descriptive headings will appear in the Navigation Pane if you have formatted them with one of the heading styles from the Style Gallery. If you go to the end of the document and insert a Table of Contents (found on the Reference Tab), these headers will be listed.
You can then copy and paste the TOC into Excel. Voila! All your section headings are in your spreadsheet, with each section heading on its own row.


Excel is great, but it has its limitations. Most irritating is the fact that reorganising your timeline requires you to cut and paste and insert or delete empty rows, rather than dragging and dropping.
A different method that I heard about recently involves MS PowerPoint. You give each new scene its own slide. If you switch to Slide Sorter View, you can easily rearrange slides into whatever order you want. By using large enough fonts and colours etc, you can encode a lot of information into each slide. You can even write a summary of what happens, which will be a readable size if you double-click the slide to make it full screen.
A limitation is that you can't easily export a table of contents from Word, so that each slide is a new row from the table of contents. However, if you are detailed planner, this might be the method for you.
What information would you include in a timeline?
Do you have any recommendations for simple methods for generating one?
Until next time,
Paul.

On a recent visit to a museum, an information sign proclaimed that the castle that originally stood on that site had been "raised to the ground" in the 16th century. This seemed rather odd; unless it was originally subterranean and had been dragged to the surface. In which case, where was it now?
Of course the correct phrase should have been "razed to the ground".
Before we start, let's just make it clear that this blog post is not going to be poking fun at people for making incorrect word choices, or struggling with misheard common phrases. Indeed it would be very hypocritical.
Like many people, I struggle with homonyms. Homonyms (and homophones) are words with the same spelling but different meanings, or words that sound the same, but are spelt differently and have distinct meanings. The classic example is Their, There and They're.
I am fortunate in that I actually know the differences between most common homonyms and can easily spot them when proof reading my writing or marking students' work. However, when I am writing, I almost always pick the wrong word first time. Over the years, I've learned to immediately go back over sentences and check the usage and correct as necessary and final versions rarely have errors. I liken it to choosing words blindly from a high shelf. I get to the word and pick one of the choices from the shelf at random. When I finish the sentence, I have to go back and double-check I picked the correct one.
The second problem that many people have is related to phrases. This is often because they are so commonly misused in every day life that we just blindly say or write them without thinking. Or the phrase was slightly misheard - "raised to the ground" is a good example.
An especially tricky subset of this problem is knowing when to use the verb form or noun form of a word (and knowing what that even means! I am a product of the Tory government's disastrous decision in the 80s to not explicitly teach grammar, so I really struggle with this).
Examples of this would be when to use "Licence" or "License".
"Practice" or "practise"?
The problem with all these examples, is that a basic spell checker wouldn't pick up these as errors. All these words are correctly spelled. The latest versions of MS Word now have intelligent grammar checkers, that will place a blue squiggly line under these words, and flag a possible "incorrect word choice", but it's far from perfect and doesn't actually correct it for you.
So how can you minimise these errors in your writing?
Fortunately, there are a lot of resources out there that can help.
The simplest thing to do is simply ask Google.
After reading the sign at the museum and thinking it didn't look right, I simply Googled.
'raised to the ground' OR 'razed to the ground'
I received lots of hits and was able to confirm that my instinct was correct.
Similarly, 'Licence' OR 'License' will produce dozens of pages that seek to explain the difference, or even furnish you with helpful mnemonics to remember the correct usage.
A real gem of a website is
https://writingexplained.org/confusing-words
This lists in alphabetical order thousands of commonly confused words.
Public Health Warning:
It's important to remember that US English and UK English can often be different. A great example is
Tyre vs Tire
(https://writingexplained.org/tyre-vs-tire-difference)
As the website helpfully highlights further down the article, tyre is the traditional UK spelling for the rubber surround on a wheel.
Both UK and US writers use tire for fatigue - e.g. I am beginning to tire.
Americans use tire for both meanings.
​
If it's unclear from the website if it is US or UK English, try typing one of the variants into Google - perhaps in a very simple sentence fragment - and seeing if it returns hits from trusted UK websites such as the BBC or The Guardian or even gov.uk. As always, try and find a couple of examples to be certain.


What words do you find especially tricky?
Have you any suggestions for how to choose the correct word or phrase?
As always, feel free to comment here or on social media.
Until next time,
Paul

A few weeks ago, I typed 'The End' on next summer's DCI Warren Jones. As any published author will tell you, that's only the first step in a long journey between your Word document and the bookshelf.
I knew as I wrote it, that this would be a big first draft. The nature of the story was such that it had many individual components. Because I write out of sequence, I find it easier to write each component individually, and then stitch them all together at the end.
For that reason, I wasn't overly concerned when the word count surpassed 160,000. For comparison, my full-length novels are probably in the upper half of the genre's typical length, and their word count is between 120 and 130,000.
Getting rid of 25,000 words wasn't that hard. Writing each component separately meant there was a lot of easy to identify overlap, for example, scenes common to each part. I only need to describe them in detail once. Subsequent retellings can be pared down to a paragraph, or even just a mention that it took place. As previously described [TuesdayTips 27, 28, 29 & 30], some darlings needed to be killed. Other scenes that weren't strictly necessary for the plot, but gave good character development, were cut and saved for a later book.
But I still needed to trim at least 5,000 words. My beta-readers were really helpful here. They identified some repetitive phrases, found some more scenes that could be lost without impacting the story, and highlighted some overly verbose sentences.
I was now down to 133k.
Time to roll up my sleeves, save a new copy of the document, and start editing every sentence. But before I did that, I could easily remove some excess baggage.
Excising invisible words.
All writers have their own unique style. But within that, there are inevitably some bad habits. I will state with great confidence that even the world's greatest authors, famed for their beautiful prose, have at least some bad and sloppy writing habits that had to be fished out in the edits.
One of those habits is the over-use of certain words and phrases. We're all different, but we all do it. In these days of Find and Replace, it's not hard to find the eight uses of "misconception" scattered through the document and swap a few of them for other synonyms. But how do you know which words you over-use? Often these words are invisible to you; verbal ticks if you like. A good editor will probably notice some of them and tell you before your readers see the finished product, but why not get rid of them now? You may even trim the word count a little more!
There are a number of online tools that can help with this. All you do is copy your manuscript into a text box and the program will churn through and count every instance of a word. Some of the more sophisticated ones are capable of identifying phrases. I like https://countwordsfree.com/. For ease of use, I copied the output table into a spreadsheet, so I could play with it a little more.
The first couple of dozen words listed contain few surprises. In my books, "Warren" appears rather a lot (1154 times). But so do others, such as "have" (897), "with" (888), "they" (808), "from" (506) etc. There's not a lot you can do here.
But after that, there are other words that are less common and more likely to be a quirk of your own writing style.
For me, they would include "nonetheless" or "interjected".
I can find these easily and replace or delete them.
Then there are the really invisible words, and you'd be amazed how many are unnecessary. The word that shocked me most was "that".
It appeared a whopping 2,430 times in my document!
Of course, it's a very useful word. But it can also be a superfluous word.

"What happened when you told her that she was under arrest?"
"What happened when you told her she was under arrest?"

Would you notice the difference when reading, especially since it is in dialogue? You can't do a blanket edit and delete them all, but you'd be amazed how many you can excise.
I removed over 800 - that's one in three!
Even better, I found that revisiting those sentences to remove that, without screwing it up, identified other opportunities to tighten the prose. It took a couple of hours, but by the time I finished, the wordcount was reduced by about a 1,000.
A similar trick with "just" removed another 60.

There are other invisible words that can also disappear. For example the word "a". Now I'm not going to suggest that you identify every instance of "a" in your manuscript - there's a reason these tools have a filter for smaller words! But as you tighten a sentence, ask if it's necessary.
Here's one I tweaked recently.

"There were a lot of gaps that needed filling"
"There were lots of gaps that needed filling."

Swap the "a" as a standalone word, for an "s" on the end of lot, and you've lost another word!

What about "and"?
Can you replace it with commas? Can you join two sentences with a semicolon?
Although a chore, reducing word count is sometimes necessary to keep your publisher happy. It also has the added bonus that it can make the narrative more punchy, which is especially useful for fast-paced, thrilling scenes.
Caveat.
It's easy to get carried away (not too carried away, that's a tautology, so you don't need the word "too" 🤣). I go by the rule that my narrator can be as concise and efficient as needed, but that for dialogue, you need to consider how people would speak in real life.

Do you have any tricks or tips that you use to reduce your word count?
Feel free to comment below, or on social media.
All the best, Paul.

One of the fun things about writing a series is revisiting characters that you've written about before.
It's also one of the reasons that readers will return to an author (and why publishers love a series!). I have a number of favourite authors whose latest novels will always find their way into my shopping cart. In part, it's because they've proven to me in the past that they can tell a good story, but I am also keen to check in and see how my 'friends' are doing in their latest outing.
It's natural for a writer of a named series to assume that the person the series are named after is the one that readers will connect with the most and to expend the most creative effort in crafting this character. But that isn't always the case. I've written before about M.W. Craven's Washington Poe series - Poe is a terrific character, but there are a large number of readers for whom the most enjoyable parts of the books are those featuring his sidekick Tilly Bradshaw.
So for that reason, it's worth putting some thought into secondary characters beyond the main protagonist(s).

These recurring characters can be broadly divided into two groups.
Those that appear in each book and those that appear infrequently, when I need them.
Characters in every book.
For my DCI Warren Jones series, I have a regular cast of characters that appear in pretty much every book. Warren and his team at Middlesbury CID and his immediate family are series staples. Therefore, it's worth putting some time into these characters. Don't simply make them a foil for your lead, give them personalities and a life of their own.
It is normal for a lead character to evolve and change over time. The events in one book may have lasting repercussions for example. But don't forget to consider others. I've written before (Tuesday Tip 39) about how keeping notes on regular characters is important. They will age, they will go through life changes and given that they are probably working alongside the lead during the crises that they face, they too will be impacted by traumatic events. 
Infrequent characters.
As my series has progressed, I also have a few regulars that crop up periodically. For example, I have a civilian Digital Forensics specialist who pops up whenever they need a laptop or a phone unlocking. Pete Robertson typically only has a few lines, and in some books is sometimes only referenced, but over the series we learn nuggets about him. For example, he is extremely tall and thin - almost as though he has been stretched - yet he somehow squeezes into a tiny office without ever knocking equipment flying. We find out in passing that he is gay. It's not really part of a story, but it makes him a little more rounded; maybe it will be important one day, maybe it won't.
In one of the novellas, At First Glance, I needed an officer of similar rank to Warren working on the drugs squad. Lo and behold, I suddenly found I needed him again a couple of books later. He'll be crucial in my two next books, so I now know his family background.
In next summer's book (number eight), I bring back a character that hasn't been seen since book two, about seven years previously. It wasn't a conscious plan, I just realised as I was writing a scene that the as-yet-unnamed officer delivering a briefing played a similar role to a junior officer that worked with the team in the earlier book. I went back to the original manuscript and found their name. Given the number of years that had passed, I decided she was due a promotion and was now a specialist with additional expertise. As a bonus, I didn't have to think up another new name!
The pitfalls of regular characters.
Something that writers need to think about when bringing somebody back is how much space to devote to reminding readers who they are, or introducing them to new readers. It can be a bit of a balancing act.
Similarly, will their appearance potentially spoil earlier books in the series? A few posts back (Tuesday Tip 52) I wrote about how there is always the risk that big plot developments in earlier books can lose their impact if their resolution is referenced in later books. Many readers new to a series read them out of sequence, so if PC Blogs is very clearly alive in book seven, they obviously survived being stabbed in book five. Consequently, you may wish to reconsider if you want to bring back an infrequently used character if it robs that earlier story of its tension.
Bringing back a villain or previous suspect might be even more dangerous. If character X is a key murder suspect throughout book four, then having them out and about in next year's book indicates that they were probably a red herring in book 4!  

Do you have any favourite recurring series characters?
As always, feel free to comment here or on social media.
Until we meet again,
best wishes, Paul.

"I'm playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order."
The comedian Eric Morecombe's famous retort to the conductor Andre Previn, when his attempts at playing a concert piano fail dismally during the 1971 Morecombe and Wise Christmas special, have passed into TV legend.
Unfortunately, I often find myself wincing when reading the attempts of a writer without a scientific background to convey complex scientific ideas to their readers. I paraphrase Morecombe's famous catch-phrase thus:
"I'm using all the right scientific vocabulary, but not necessarily in the right order."
Now, first of all, I want to make it clear that this is not going to be a cheap shot at writers who get it wrong. I'm a science teacher - I spend my professional life helping others understand science, so it would be deeply hypocritical of me to laugh at another's expense. Besides which, I'm sure there are plenty of police officers and other specialists who read my books and shake their heads.
From what I have observed, there are two ways in which the science in books can fall down.
Knowledge and Understanding. Leaving aside the complexities of modern forensics, a story that requires scientific concepts for the plot to work can suffer if the writer is unsure of the basics. This is equally true whether the story is grounded in reality, or whether it is an 'extrapolation' of existing science. A tale about future applications of genetics might be largely fantasy, but it will still fall apart if the author muddles up how DNA works with how proteins are formed. The pseudoscience rattled off in Star Trek always worked best when the writer had a basic grounding in physics, even if the warp drive or the transporter don't really exist.
Comfortably writing the science. Whether it is in dialogue or prose, all too often a writer will "Use all the right scientific vocabulary, but not necessarily in the right order." The result feels and sounds clunky. It's a bit like writing a scene set in a foreign land using Google Translate and an out-of-date guidebook. The moment anyone with any knowledge at all of the place reads it, it will come across as fake.
The key to avoiding this trap is research and expert help. Both of these sound scary, and difficult, but they don't have to be.
First of all, knowledge and understanding:
You don't have to become an expert on a subject to make your characters sound realistic. The first thing to do is make sure you understand the basics.
For example, lets assume you are writing about DNA. It could be because your plot centres on a DNA match in a police procedural, or because your lead character is a genetically enhanced super-soldier two hundred years in the future. Understanding the basic principles of what DNA is (and isn't) to the level expected of a secondary school pupil will usually give you a sufficient grounding before you delve a bit deeper for your book.
I am going to recommend one of the best resources on the web - BBC Bitesize. We use it all the time in school and I regularly recommend pupils peruse it.
Simply Google "BBC Bitesize" and the broad topic that you are writing about (eg genetics) and the top hits are likely to be what you are looking for.
For a bit more in-depth knowledge, there are lots of webpages that cater for writers wanting to know something about a topic - again, try using Google and appending "for writers" or "the basics" or "for beginners" to the search.
If you want a handy go-to guide, then there are lots of books. A series that I particularly like is the "XXXXXX: A Very Short Introduction", where XXXXXX is the topic. These are pocket-sized books written by experts in the field and very digestible. I have several, including the Forensic Science edition by Jim Fraser.
YouTube is also a useful source of educational videos. Try putting "KS4" or "GCSE" or "Grade School" (the term used in the United States) into the search terms to limit the results to those pitched at school pupils. Again, I use these when teaching.
The next hurdle is making the science sound comfortable.
This is where you should try and enlist an 'expert'. You can certainly try emailing a leader in the field - they will often reply; they typically love their subject and want it to be portrayed correctly. If they do reply, you could see if they would be willing to proof read some of your text to see if it sounds right to their ears. BUT DON'T SEND THEM THE WHOLE MANUSCRIPT. They aren't going to thank you if a 100,000 word tome lands in their inbox. Instead, be choosy. Send them short extracts - perhaps a conversation, or a couple of paragraphs of explanation. Be sure to tell them what to expect - if they don't realise that your book is set fifty years from now, or is speculative, they are just going to tell you it's fantasy and dismiss it out of hand.
If that all sounds a bit daunting, then do you know any science teachers? We are used to reading complex text and making it accessible to learners, as well as spotting common errors and misconceptions.
Finally, there is social media. There are plenty of forums on Facebook with experts happy to answer questions. But again, don't expect them to proof-read your book. Send them the premise or selected passages.


Finally, don't despair if you get something wrong. Most readers aren't experts, and if the book is well-written then they almost certainly won't spot it. Two books that I have read in the past twelve months involved DNA/Genetics. One dealt with the subject extremely well, the other had a couple of dodgy sentences where the author had used the wrong words. My enjoyment of the latter wasn't ruined, and I still happily recommend it to others.
Do you find writing science daunting? Are there any good guides that you use?
As always, feel free to comment here or on social media.
Until next time,
Paul.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an important interview scene for my current work in progress.
It came in at about 2,500 words. I was very pleased with it. There were key revelations that moved the story forwards. The dialogue between the interviewee and their interrogators flowed nicely. The suspect was emotional and, under pressure, finally revealed the truth that the police needed.
In the final book, the entire scene takes up little more than a paragraph, and is reported second-hand.
Now I know what you are thinking: we've all been there. The wordcount for the book has exploded out of control; tough decisions need to be made and this scene had to be cut. All that is true. But here's the thing.
I started writing that scene, knowing that it was never going to be more than a paragraph.
On the face of it, that seems mad! The original scene took me over a day to write. I can knock out a paragraph in less than an hour. So why would I waste a whole day writing something that I knew would never make the final cut?
Because that resulting paragraph is better than anything I could have written if I'd set out to write a scene of two hundred words or fewer from scratch.

I am not a big planner. When I set out to write an interview scene, I start with just a few lines to guide me. Essentially, what information needs to be imparted during the interrogation and a rough idea of whether the suspect is going to be honest from the outset or if the truth will need to be prised out of them. Will they have a solicitor present? Will they heed their solicitor's advice to no comment or will they be unable to keep their mouth shut?  
From then on, I write the scene as it comes to me and just allow the story to lead me where it wants to. In the process of writing it, unexpected revelations are made and new ideas come to mind that I jot down for later in the book.
Perhaps the characters say something that I hadn't considered? On more than one occasion, I've gone back and made changes to earlier scenes, because if the suspect claims that X happened, then I need to change the crime scene to match that admission. Perhaps they swear that they were at home that night? In which case, I need my investigators to verify their alibi - do I need to  have someone speak to their neighbours or get DS Mags Richardson to check CCTV or Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras to determine if their car was parked outside their house all night? Can Rachel Pymm look at the movements of their mobile phone to see if it was somewhere it shouldn't be?
It is the actual process of writing the scene that is more important than what eventually finds its way onto the page.
I refer to this as writing backwards: taking a lengthy scene and watching as the number of words actually shrinks, rather than expands (our usual goal!). It is a process of distillation.
Many authors do similar things. I know writers who will spend a day making a LEGO model of a key location. Doubtless this is a fun procrastination activity, but more importantly it allows them to visualise exactly where the event took place, so that when they describe what happens there in the story, they can see it clearly in their mind's eye. They place LEGO figurines around the model and then move them as the scene progresses. At any given point in time, they know who was doing what and where. Then it becomes akin to reportage, rather than having to make it up from scratch. The writer is omniscient and they simply choose what to share with the reader. It also allows them to avoid simple errors such as having a character in two places at the same time, and perhaps reminds them that character Y is still present and the reader will want to know what they were doing whilst the drama unfolded.   


Do you "Write Backwards"? Or do you spend large amounts of time doing things that, on the surface seem to be a waste of time, but are actually crucial to your writing process?
As always, feel free to comment here or on social media.
Until next time, best wishes.
Paul

Click here for more details about DCI Warren Jones 7, Out of Sight.
 Out in eBook on June 4th 2021 and paperback and audiobook on August 5th.
Amazon Link.
Consider buying paperbacks from Bookshop.org to support independent sellers.

Hello, and welcome to the latest #TuesdayTip.
This Friday sees the publication in eBook of the seventh full-length DCI Warren Jones, Out of Sight. And so I thought it would be interesting to relate the journey of this, the eleventh book in the series - a book created largely during one of the strangest years in my, or anyone's life.
It all started so well...
Officially, I started writing what would become Out of Sight during the first week of September 2019. I had just submitted the first complete draft of book six in the series, A Price to Pay, to my editor at HQ Digital, the imprint of HarperCollins that currently publishes my series. That book marked the completion of my latest contract - three novels and three shorter novellas published over the previous three years. I had pitched my latest ideas for another six books a couple of months previously and although I had not yet received confirmation that I would get another contract, I was keen to start work on the next instalment, which I intended to be a novella.
The basic premise, as is normal for me, was little more than a collection of loosely-linked ideas. I'm not a great plotter, and tend to write out of sequence, so the final product usually bears only a passing resemblance to the initial outline. However, HQ have always been generous enough to let me crack on and see where the book leads.
I had also started a new job, teaching science three days a week at a new school, so I had quite a lot on my plate!
By October, I had written about 15,000 words - and then my editor phoned to discuss my next contract and the future direction of the series. The upshot was, that for a number of (very good) reasons, it had been decided to stop publishing my novellas. Rather they wanted to concentrate on full-length novels.
My first thought was "what the hell am I going to do with this partially written novella?" Ditching 15k words and starting again seemed like a cruel blow.
But then a nagging worry that had been keeping me awake at night suddenly had a solution.
As stated earlier, I am not a plotter. And for the first time, this was proving to be a potential problem. You see, I kept on having really good ideas, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that they weren't all going to fit into a short novella. But suddenly, I had 120k words to play with. Ideas that I had reluctantly concluded wouldn't fit into the book could now be used.
It was as if a great weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
Immediately, I set about rewriting what I had already completed.
For the next few months, I happily juggled writing book seven with completing the edits for book six and the forthcoming novella, At First Glance.
Then March happened!
Suddenly I found myself installed on the kitchen table, our lovely office given over to my partner who needed its privacy more than I did. On top of that I, and thousands of teachers around the country, found themselves remote teaching with little notice. It's hard to overstate the size of that shift. My school was better equipped than many, with all learners having devices to use at home, and already versed in Google Classroom, nevertheless writing and rewriting resources for a practical-based subject such as science for students to use independently was a huge undertaking.
Experienced teachers such as myself may take 30-60 minutes to plan a typical lesson. Suddenly, each lesson was taking up to two hours to prepare. The need to track our learners' progress - normally done by walking around the classroom and interacting with students - became ever more important and time-consuming. I resigned myself to the fact that my jealously-guarded, two-day-a-week writing time was going to have to take a back seat. No longer needing to produce two books that year became an even bigger blessing. Then there was the small matter of having to reorganise a wedding (repeatedly)…
A faint glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.
By June, I had found a new rhythm. Lessons that I and my colleagues had written in April could be tweaked and delivered again to a different class. Both of 2020's books had been published, and by the end of the summer term I had largely regained my two writing days. Now the challenge was to hit my September 1st deadline!
One of the biggest jobs at this stage, is to start putting my book into the correct order. I write out of sequence, and so, by the time I hit 90 to 100,000 words, I have scores of short sections that need placing in a logical order.
In July I moved all these fragments into 'working draft 2.0' and started identifying what sections needed rewriting, what chunks of text needed moving again (for example references to the forensic analysis of a piece of evidence needs to take place after the evidence been discovered!) and what needed writing from scratch.
At the end of July, school ended and I could become a full-time writer again. 2020 was the summer without a holiday, so there were no excuses there and I ploughed on, taking advantage of the nice weather to do some red-penning in the garden.
By the beginning of August, the book was ready for its next stage. It had been through several drafts and it was time for a fresh set of eyes. By now, Public Health England were inviting people at random to take home tests for Covid-19 to monitor its prevalence in the community. My partner and I were fortunate enough to be selected; the timing couldn't have been better. Since the very first book, The Last Straw, was completed, my father has been a beta reader, alongside my partner. And so, armed with our recent negative tests, we took advantage of the relaxation in the rules to surprise my Mum for her birthday (they were shielding, as were we, so our negative tests meant that we could be confident that it was safe to do so). Alongside her gift, I also presented them with a bulging lever-arch file...
Some new eyeballs.
Now it's time to wait! What would they and my partner think? I emailed my editor to explain that the book was completed, but that pandemic logistics meant that I might not quite hit my September deadline. My editor values the input of my beta readers almost as much as I do and so was more than happy to give me a bit of leeway.
A few days later, my partner finished her read-through. Lots of red pen, but she liked it! And importantly, hadn't spotted any significant errors that would necessitate a big rewrite. I worked my way through her edits, then had my first ever editorial meeting by video, with my Dad! He had spotted many of the same errors as my partner, plus some others, and had some interesting ideas which he read out, and I either corrected there and then on my laptop or noted for later. He then suggested that as Mum (a former teacher) was at a loose end, she could have another go at it. Needless to say, the following week's meeting had even more corrections!
Barely a fortnight after my initial deadline, I emailed my editor the most polished submission of my career!
The waiting game.
Of course that's only the first stage, but I could now start writing book eight, summer 2022's novel. At the end of October, my editor sent her initial feedback. It was positive! She liked it. But I needed to lose about 8,000 words and make some changes. She suggested a deadline of December and so I placed book eight on hold, printed out a copy of the manuscript and her editorial letter, and wielded the red pen again. I've written before about the editorial process (#Tip 48), so won't go over it again, suffice to say, some darlings were killed, some new ideas incorporated, and what emerged was meaner, 4,000 words leaner, and all the better for it.
Then some wonderful news - my editor was leaving to have a baby! I was disappointed that we wouldn't be working together for the next book, but she handed me over to Dushi, who had worked on the series previously so was familiar with the characters. I knew I was in good hands.
Christmas came and went, and mid-January, Dushi sent back her thoughts. This is the first time that I have had two editors go through a manuscript and it was a fantastic experience. Dushi did a brilliant job, and so I printed it again and spent the next week or so incorporating her suggestions. It was now even tighter, with a further 2,000 odd words ditched. We also finally settled on Out of Sight as the title.
Mid-February, the manuscript came back from Dushi with her line edits.
This time, there was no need to print. These are done on Word, using the 'track changes' feature. Dushi had corrected my spelling and grammar, rigorously applied the HarperCollins style guide, tightened some sentences and used the comment function to suggest some more tweaks and request clarifications. That took two full days, largely consisting of me clicking the 'accept change' button, adding or removing a few sentences, as per Dushi's suggestions, and writing my own response to some of her comments. Remarkably, it was now three hundred words shorter!
Amusingly, despite dozens of passes by me, three beta readers and two editors, it was only then that I noticed a character picked his daughter up from school on a Sunday... A hasty correction fixed that problem before I received emails from bemused readers, and snarky comments from Amazon reviewers - bullet dodged!
The final push.
I submitted this draft on February 23rd, along with my acknowledgments and dedication. I always leave this to the very end. Last year I was nearly caught out when I referenced events that should have taken place in May but were cancelled, so had to rewrite my acknowledgements just before publication. Lesson learned!
A final set of edits came back from the copy editor, with some more tweaks and then it was off to the proof reader. By now we had a fantastic cover, and the team at HQ had written a nice, punchy jacket blurb.
April the 8th was set for my cover reveal, neatly coinciding with my self-declared 'DCI Warren Jones Day' a few days later. The book became available for pre-order on all the major eBook sites, and the paperback and audio release dates set for August the 5th. I am going to write a separate post detailing my interactions with my long-standing audio narrator, so keep an eye out for that later this summer.
Marketing a book is always interesting. My publisher does a lot of work behind the scenes of course, but I'm no Richard Osman so much of the hard work falls to me. I actually quite enjoy making my own graphics and videos, it's a creative process that I never realised was so much fun. You may have seen some of my posts on social media. There will be plenty more to come, particularly in the run up to the audio and paperback releases.
Now it's just a case of sitting back and waiting for the glowing reviews and multi-million dollar royalty cheques to come rolling in... And finishing book eight.
I hope you enjoyed this insight into the creation of a book, particularly in a year that threw up unique challenges.
As always, feel free to comment here or on social media.
Until next time,
Best wishes.
Paul

Aaaah, research! I have written previously about the issue of accuracy (#Tip 60) - when pedantry becomes procrastination, and the compromises that we sometimes need to make to balance the need for absolute accuracy with our duty to tell a compelling story.
So let's talk about research.
Writers starting out on their career are often told "write what you know". This is perfectly sound advice. But the chances are, that as you progress in your career, you will eventually exhaust the topics on which you can write authoritatively based purely on your own knowledge and will need to do research. And this is where it is all too easy to fall into a trap.
It has been said that a good writer can sound like an expert on a subject that they know very little about. This is a little uncharitable. Many writers can become something of a genuine expert on a particular topic. They spend hours reading books and articles, watching documentaries, speaking to people and even going on research trips (sometimes joking referred to as tax-deductible holidays - there are definitely times I regret setting my DCI warren Jones series in an area within fifty miles or so of where live! Sending a DCI from Hertfordshire to Venice to solve a baffling murder, and thus requiring me to go and scout out locations in person, would be a hard sell if I am ever inspected by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs!). I have friends who write historical fiction and they love perusing the archives of the British Library, or tramping around graveyards.
The problem is that having worked so hard to become an expert, you really want to share all that knowledge with your readers!
But do you run the risk of turning a crime caper that your readers picked-up for entertainment into a text book with a story bolted on? Where is the line between an entertaining story that a reader will finish and say "that was a cracking read and I also learnt something" and "It was all very interesting, but not a lot happened."
When I wrote Forgive Me Father, I set the story in a fictional ruined abbey. I had been planning the book for ages, so my partner and I used it as an excuse to go and visit old cathedrals and abbeys, (which we thoroughly enjoyed and I DID NOT claim on expenses, in case HMRC are reading). I bought guidebooks and spent many hours online reading about the dissolution of the monasteries and other history that I never learned at school. I made detailed plans of the abbey as it would have been in its heyday and then modified them to account for centuries of neglect.
Almost none of this research made it into the book.
And that is as it should be. A good rule of thumb with research is that the author should know far more than appears on the page! Or to paraphrase another common piece of advice "wear your research lightly." Aim to leave your readers feeling that you know your stuff, and if they felt so-inclined, they could ask you to expand at length - good writers are good bluffers!
The same is true of characters.
I've spoken previously (#Tip 39) about the need to plan characters - to keep a biography of key events to stop you contradicting yourself in later books; sometimes this can even act as a stimulus. Have a middle-aged character who's getting a bit stale, and you're not sure what to do about them?  Ooh look, they turn fifty in a few months - give them a mid-life crisis! Buy them a motorbike! Embroil then in a messy affair!
But again, just because you know that about them, doesn't mean you have to tell the reader about it.

​What's the best way to accomplish this balance?
The key is in the editing.
Stick everything in the first draft.
Do it! You've worked for that knowledge, and you never know what might be important. Get it out of your system. The first draft of Forgive Me Father was full of rambling diversions about medieval monastery life. And I dare say that taken in isolation, some of that stuff was pretty well-written. But it didn't add to the story. So it gradually disappeared over subsequent drafts.
Then kill your darlings.
Some of my earliest blog posts (#Tips 27, 28, 29, 30) were about editing out stuff that you might love, but which the book doesn't need. Remember, to justify its place, something has to either advance the story, set up future stories or add essential details. Look at your book with a critical - even brutal - eye. Keeping something in a book just because it took a lot of effort to write, because you like it or because you spent ages finding it out, is not justification enough to keep it in. Console yourself with the fact that a decent editor will tell you to chop it anyway, you've just saved everyone time and effort by wielding the scissors yourself!
Know your audience.
Tom Clancy was (in)famous for his meticulous attention to detail. His thrillers are sprawling, geopolitical behemoths with sometimes eye-watering amounts of detail about weapons and submarines etc. Since he died, a series of writers have continued his series, and have maintained this exacting style. Why? Because his loyal readership expect it. I have read almost all of the recent books, and will happily set aside a couple of weeks to work my way through one. They even come with maps and appendices... but these are the only books I would tolerate that from these days. Give the same story to most modern thriller writers and they'd tell it in half the space. But that's fine, for Tom Clancy. He is the exception to the rule.
Beware the information dump.
Sometimes, the need to impart a lot of information to the reader is unavoidable. One of my favourite recent reads was Rachel Lynch's Blood Rites.  The story centres around poorly understood ancient religions and cults. She could not assume any prior knowledge on behalf of her readers. The skill she demonstrated was the way that the information was trickled out in easy to digest chunks, as and when it was needed. I came away from the book having learned a lot of new information, in an enjoyable fashion, but never felt bludgeoned by it. It will come as no surprise that Rachel is a former teacher.
Avoid too much exposition.
This is related to the previous point, and I am going to write a separate article about it. Suffice to say that the old maxim "show don't tell" is worth repeating and just because you impart the knowledge through dialogue, doesn't mean you can ignore all of the above!
A final thought.
As with anything to do with writing, you can't please everyone. I've had reviews where readers have criticised my books for too much detail, and others that feel my procedural accuracy is a strength of the series.
All I can recommend is to read other books similar in style to the one you want to write to get a feel for the balance. Ask readers experienced in the genre to look your manuscript over and have an honest dialogue with them. Ask them to tell you if they think some of the research is overdone, or even if they feel a bit more is needed.
And as always, remember it is YOUR story.
Where do you stand on research? Do you like to come away feeling that you could write a short essay on a new topic, or would you rather the author just got on with the story?
As always, feel free to comment here or on social media.
Until next time, all the best,
Paul

Last week it was the elephant in the room, this week it's opening a can of worms - yes, May is cliché month!
Like it or not, we live in a society where racism still exists, and if we as writers wish to reflect reality then it is something we need to consider. This was something that I was forced to grapple with when writing my 2018 DCI Warren Jones novel, The Common Enemy.
The book centres around the murder of the leader of a far-right extremist party, during a march against the opening of a so-called 'super-mosque' in my fictional town of Middlesbury.
By necessity, the book was populated with extreme racists, as well as members of Middlesbury's Muslim and Sikh communities.
The simple fact is that if I wanted the book to feel authentic, I had to realistically portray the attitudes of these characters and that included the offensive language used by them.
I'm not going to lie; writing this book took me well outside my comfort zone.
I am a white man of English heritage. I was brought up in an ethnically diverse city and was taught from an early age that certain words and phrases are deeply offensive; they simply aren't part of my normal vocabulary.
Writing them was hard for me, and I was extremely conscious that reading them would be deeply uncomfortable for many of my readers. My series is far from cosy, but this was an aspect of society that I had not previously explored.
When does it switch from authentic to gratuitous?     
It was a given that my white supremacists were going to use the N-word, the P-word and other pejorative terms. But I was keen not to have the manuscript dripping with these words and so I had to think about ways of finding a balance between minimising their use and writing an authentic story.
How can you tread this line?
Use the terms occasionally - to give a 'flavour' of the language they would use, but in other instances, simply allude to them.
For example, report dialogue 'second hand' rather than deliver it.
"Joe Blog's account of the incident, delivered in typically offensive fashion, matched that of other witnesses."
If the incident in question involved non-whites, and the character Joe Blogs has been previously established as a foul-mouthed racist, then your reader can fill in the gaps for themselves without you needing to spell the words out explicitly.
Actually use the terms 'N-word' or 'P-word'.
If a person is reporting dialogue second-hand, and is themselves not racist, then they often won't say those terms in full. It can look clunky, but then it feels that way in real-life. The person is already rewording the language to make it more comfortable for them to say, so it probably will feel unnatural.
For example.
"He's a real bully, officer," the man looked uncomfortable, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, "A couple of times I heard him call the old lady next door a 'lazy N-word', if you know what I mean."
or
"He's always wiping graffiti off the wall." He blushed. "'Go Home P-word', that sort of thing."
Interrupt their speech.
Modern police officers simply won't tolerate a foul-mouthed racist rant, they can and will insist that witnesses and those they are interviewing moderate their language. Something that isn't always appreciated, is that the law in England & Wales regarding hate speech doesn't necessitate it being directed at the protected group that it concerns. In other words, a white person over-hearing racist language about Asians can report it as a racist incident, even if there are no Asian people within earshot.
The language needs to be specific to the era, the society and the character.
Language evolves at an incredible pace, and terms that were acceptable just a few years ago are now no longer appropriate today.
The term 'coloured' was once seen as a relatively inoffensive way to refer to black or Asian people (at least by white people). That is no longer the case. In recent years, the term 'People Of Colour' (POC) has become a more favoured term. Similarly, 'half-caste' is now no longer acceptable, with 'mixed race' or sometimes 'bi-racial' more appropriate.
But as a writer, you have to consider if the newest terminology is the most appropriate language for your book. Characters in a novel set thirty years ago wouldn't realistically use the term POC. Similarly, older characters in a modern setting may still be using terms that have gone out of fashion. Is it realistic that an elderly white woman refers to her bi-racial neighbour that way, or is she more likely to describe them in an interview as 'half-caste'? It doesn't necessarily mean she's an overt racist, just somewhat out of touch with the latest trends in language.
An extreme example of this involves a former flatmate of mine from (very) rural Ireland, who in the year 2000 asked me if I wanted anything from the P-shop when he popped round there. He was absolutely mortified when I explained to him how that word was simply not acceptable in England and told him a little about how the word's usage had mutated from a simple abbreviation of Pakistani to something far more offensive and sinister.  
Used correctly, their use of language can inform the reader about a character.
For example.
"Look, DCI Jones. You're not racist and neither am I, but we both know that since they started letting the Asians move in, the area has gone down hill. Of course two white blokes like us could never say it out loud, we'd be crucified."
Think about what we've just learned about this character.
First of all, he clearly is a racist - just putting the word 'the' in front of Asians telegraphs this. However, he has enough self-awareness to realise that he doesn't want to be perceived as such, hence the 'I'm not racist but...' caveat. He is also aware that his views are increasingly unpopular and so he is seeking approval from someone he hopes is a kindred spirit.  
Is it the writer speaking or the character?
One of the inescapable problems that all writers face is that some readers can be so drawn into a novel that they find it hard to separate the views expressed in the book from those held by the author. This is especially true of the narrator. For those writing first person - in other words '"I did this", "I thought that" - it can make the reader feel as if the writer is sitting down and telling them a story about events that happened to them and sharing their innermost emotions and feelings. Obviously that is what a good writer strives for, so it seems a cruel irony that readers who don't know the author personally can subconsciously imbue them with character traits and attitudes that bear no resemblance to them in real life.
I am fortunate enough to write in the third person, and my narration is most closely associated with DCI Warren Jones, who I have openly admitted shares many of my personal views. This means that I can disassociate myself somewhat from the more unpleasant individuals that I write about through Warren's thoughts. To reinforce this in The Common Enemy, I made certain to draw the reader's attention to Warren's personal revulsion at the views expressed by some of the racist characters in the book. 
Avoid the temptation to write a 'pantomime villain'.
When writing about characters that you find personally offensive, it is all too easy to fall into the trap of giving them no redeeming features whatsoever.
In The Common Enemy, my far-right extremists are violent, offensive thugs. Yet they still have loved-ones, they perform acts of kindness and they have a sense of humour: in other words, they are human!
One of the reviewers of the book stated that they expected it to "tar anyone right of centre as an extremist" but were pleasantly surprised that it was more balanced. Although it should be said that they then gave away their true feelings on the subject by objecting to my use of the 'meaningless term' islamophobia (it isn't) and refusing to accept that the police would waste resources on a hate crime unit (these exist in real-life, and the police do monitor online race-hate groups), and criticising my apparent lack of research.
Whilst I'm never going to lie awake at night worrying that I may have offended some thin-skinned racist, I found the review rather satisfying, as I felt it showed that I had done my job as a writer.
Draw your own red lines.
We all have our own views on this subject and there are lines that we don't personally feel comfortable crossing. For example, I don't feel I am able to write dialogue between black people, where they refer to themselves using the N-word.
There is a belief by some in the black community that it is possible to 'reclaim' the word. It, and an alternate spelling, are used in some forms of black music, and dialogue between (usually) young people. However, its use is nuanced and like a lot of language it evolves rapidly. As a white person who is not part of that community, there is a strong risk that any attempts by me to use it will be clumsy and unintentionally offensive. Furthermore, it is likely to age the book - something I might get away with in 2018 may make me cringe with embarrassment five years later.
I am also conscious of that fact that there are many who don't agree that the word can or should be 'reclaimed'. Some years ago, I saw a documentary interviewing some of the people who lived through the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, and experienced horrific racism in the decades before. I was especially struck by an old lady whose first-hand experience of that word meant that she found it deeply upsetting when she heard young black people using it. For her, it will forever evoke memories of violence and fear.
So for those reasons, I will steer well clear of doing it.   
Final thoughts.
Racially-charged language will always be a potential minefield. I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to dip my toes into this particular paddling pool. However, the desire to write The Common Enemy had been nagging me for several years and with racism and extremism always close to the top of the news agenda, it was something that I felt I could no longer ignore.
Ultimately, all that any writer can do is try to write the best story that they can. Crime fiction provides the opportunity to explore the most topical of issues and we should not shy away from them.
My advice would be to do your research (watch documentaries, and read articles from all sides of the issue) and then run it past trusted readers.
Doubtless there are things that I have got wrong, and I'll listen and take on board any valid criticism, but touch wood, in the three years since the book was published, it has been generally well-received, with no serious objections that I am aware of, and I found it a rewarding experience.


What are your thoughts about using racist language in books? Is it a complete taboo, or do writers have a duty to reflect the uglier side of human nature?
As always, please share your thoughts here or on social media.
Until next time,
best wishes,
Paul.