Have you done your background checks?

When writing a series, it’s important to have an established backstory for your main character. Readers are investing their time and money in reading your book and it’s your protagonist that’s going to keep them coming back for more. This is especially important in a police procedural. The very best fictional police officers translate well to TV because of the authors who created them in the first place – DCI Jane Tennison (Lynda LaPlante), DI Vera Stanhope (Ann Cleeves) and DCI Morse (Colin Dexter), to name but a few. In fact, the backstory for Morse was so good that Endeavour came into being. If I’m truly honest, I preferred Endeavour to Morse but that might be because I watched it knowing what Morse would become.

DI Bernadette ‘Bernie’ Noel wasn’t the main character in my first ever book. She was a DS but her backstory was still the same – dual heritage with white mother and black father (both fifteen when she was conceived); raised white by her mother and maternal grandparents and close to her grandfather in particular; no knowledge of who her father was; joined the Met at nineteen but then a terrible event happened that forced her later to move to Wiltshire Police. Her backstory was more developed than the main character in that novel which is probably one of the reasons why she then became my protagonist.

I took all of that into my first ‘Bernie’ novel – Last Seen. Some of it was dealt with in my debut but the ‘terrible event’ has lingered in the background until now. In Rewind, the fourth book in the series, all is revealed and the literal scar that Bernie has on the left side of her abdomen is explained. I knew the story well as I’d been thinking about it for six years. It was there, ready in my head to go. But something held me back. 

When I first started writing Bernie, I was acutely aware I was a white woman writing a dual heritage one. Originally her mother was black and she was raised in a black home and community. But my writing wasn’t authentic so I asked friends who were dual heritage for advice. One said, ‘I’m not sure if I can help you. My mother’s white and I was brought up white.’ It was a lightbulb moment and Bernie’s maternal family became white. But that didn’t help me with Rewind. This time, Bernie (in the past), would be heading onto a Peckham housing estate to take part in an undercover operation that would tackle gangs and drugs in a black community. I was as ill-equipped as Bernie.

Quite by chance, I saw on the London news, a young man talking about his forthcoming memoir – That Peckham Boy. Kenny Imafidon had been both a model student and a small-time drug dealer selling cannabis. When he was falsely accused of murder, his life turned upside down. I knew I had to read this book. As I read it, I underlined parts and then added post-it notes with the headings – how to survive; don’t trust the police; how not to get caught; weapons; how best to earn money; powerful words from mum; church inside and out of prison; don’t snitch; be yourself. As I took this on board, I realised the characters were more important than the situation. We’re so used to a 2-D version being portrayed in the media, especially in the news, but Kenny’s memoir gave a 3-D insight into the realities of poverty, single parent families and gangs. From the headings above, ‘don’t trust the police’ and ‘don’t snitch’ stood out the most and a lot of them sound negative. However, hope weaves like a golden thread throughout Imafidon’s book. I chose redemption and forgiveness as my main themes for Rewind.

I watched YouTube videos about the area but I really needed to visit. Author, Anne Coates, who knows Peckham well, showed me round to get a feel for the place – sights, sounds and smells. Rye Lane was busy and colourful. The graffiti on the walls and shop shutters were more like works of art. We found a housing estate that was part of the inspiration for my fictional one, with its twenty-storey tower rising above the smaller three-storey buildings. Drawing on everything I’d learned, the plot started to come together, the characters connected with Bernie and I was ready to tell her backstory at last. I’d done my background checks.

Rewind by Joy Kluver (Marchant Press) Out Now 

When DI Bernie Noel goes back to work after maternity leave, she doesn’t expect to find a crashed car with a dead driver on her journey in. But a gruesome discovery in the boot of the car turns a road traffic accident into something more sinister and personal for the detective. It isn’t long before Bernie is forced to rewind six years and confront her failed covert operation in London. But as she relives that failure, can she survive the present danger too?

Setting as Character By Ashley Tate

 Although I am a writer (and a soon to be published author!), I consider myself a reader first and foremost; starting as a child when I’d read from sunup to sundown, and whenever I can squeeze a book in now. And as an avid reader and lover of storytelling, I want to be pulled into a book from the outset; I want to become so immersed in the pages that everything else slips away. Reading is my absolute favourite thing to do—imagine! You can fall in love, be horrified, be inspired all from the comfort of your couch or bed—but it also serves as a great escape from reality. Nothing pulls me out of the stresses and anxieties of the real world (of which there are many, especially in the last handful of years) like getting lost in a good book. And I think that one of the best ways to ensure that a reader is hooked (whether that’s me reading or someone reading my book) is with setting. So, it’s probably no surprise then, that creating and crafting setting is my favourite part of the entire writing process.

I treat setting as though it’s just as important as the plot and characters and structure—this is how I ensure my sense of place and world building leaps directly off the page to pull my reader all the way in. In this way setting can become a character in its own right. A city or town or planet or dystopian hell-scape on a far-away star that can live and breathe and be its own multi-dimensional character.

Some authors prefer to write about places and locations that exist in the world, but I prefer fictionalizing them, so that my reader can picture themselves being dropped right there without any preconceived idea of what the place is really like. My debut thriller, Twenty-Seven Minutes, takes place in fictional West Wilmer, a small rural town that could be found anywhere in North America. The kind of town that everyone knows; surrounded by a patchwork of razed fields, a long dusty highway, and rusting water tower. A town where there’s one Main Street and one local bar, in the case of my debut this bar is Flo’s, and where everyone knows everyone else and has for generations; where no one really leaves, where the secrets linger within the town’s borders and gossip can take on an insidious life of its own.

When crafting my setting, I want the reader to feel it and smell it and live in it for the duration of the story. To that end, setting is one of the first parts of my writing process—where do I want this story to take place? When? How? Further: How can this small fictional town of West Wilmer help tell the story of its characters? And as a thriller writer, how can it help add tension for the reader?

Twenty-Seven Minutes is a thriller about the transformative nature of grief and what happens when long-standing secrets become impossible to keep buried. The decision to set this in a small town meant that I could draw on the aspects of one—how close-knit communities can sometimes feel claustrophobic (adding tension to the story), how everyone knows everyone’s business (making it hard to hide from your past) and how those hard-to-hide secrets can weigh so heavily on someone that they begin to unravel (adding more tension and a propulsive sense of a ticking clock) for the reader.

The irony here is that I grew up in the middle of a very large, very busy city. But I spent many childhood summers on the farm where my mother grew up, in a rural town on the East coast of Canada. During those idyllic summers, I learned to swim in the Ocean, hang laundry on a clothes’ line, eat vegetables pulled directly from the garden, borrow books from the Book-Mobile that would rumble by the old farmhouse, and hear nothing at night but crickets, and nothing in the morning but crows. I learned the art of “visiting” neighbours, and the smell of barns and old churches and the joy of pulling into the parking lot of an ice-cream bar on the side of the highway (trust me, nothing tastes as good as when it comes from a bored teenager behind a splintered wooden counter).

As writers, we must be keenly observant and attuned to noticing even the tiniest of details—this is how we add layers of reality to our stories, how our characters come alive, and in terms of setting, how readers can really feel themselves in that place—and it was that incredibly stark contrast of those quiet rural summers spent on the farm, to my loud and busy and boisterous city life, that made such an impression on me during those formative and impressionable years as a wide-eyed young girl, that I fell in love with setting, and especially small towns.

 

Twenty-Seven Minutes by Ashley Tate (Headline, £20)

THE QUESTION- For the last ten years, the small town of West Wilmer has been struggling to answer one question: on the night of the crash that killed his sister, why did it take Grant Dean twenty-seven minutes to call for help? If he'd called sooner, Phoebe might still be alive. THE SECRET - As the anniversary of Phoebe's death approaches, Grant is consumed by his memories and the secret that's been suffocating him for years. But he and Phoebe weren't the only ones in the car that night. Becca was there too - she's the only other person who knows what really happened. Or is she? THE TRUTH - Everyone remembers Phoebe, but local girl June also lost someone that night. Her brother Wyatt has been missing for ten years and, now that her mother is dead, June has no one left - no family, no friends. Until someone appears at her door. Someone who knows what really happened that night. And they are ready to tell the truth?

Ashley Tate can be found on X @tate_ab and on Instagram @ashleytateauthor

Jacqui Rose on The Fun of Recurring Characters

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When I was a little girl whenever I saw a movie or read a book, I always wanted to know what happens next to my favourite character, to the point where I’d spend hours writing the sequels of famous novels, everything from Wuthering Heights to Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. So, I wasn’t surprised to find myself having recurring characters in my own books, though it certainly wasn’t a deliberate plan, I just think that there are certain characters that still have so much more to say. They’re like a friend to me; I continue to be interested to see how they evolve, how they react in certain situations and hopefully my readers feel that too. 

I don’t plan my books, nor do I make notes, it’s all in my head and the story seems to evolve right in front of my eyes. I don’t know what’s going to happen nor do I know what characters will appear, so it was a great surprise to meet Alfie Jennings in my first book Taken. I remember beginning to write him and I also remember not thinking much about him, assuming that he would be a side player but the more I wrote the more Alfie began to take on shape, and before I knew it he was the lead male protagonist. Rather than him being just a Soho gangster, he had a story as well as a back story, he had complicated emotions and relationships which needed to be explored. Now I didn’t know all this when I was writing Taken, that started to evolve as I sat down to write each book. Alfie just wouldn’t go away. He had more to say, and so did the people around him so before I knew it I had an ensemble cast who all became firm favourites of my readers, though on a side note I do I think it’s vital for the recurring character to grow and move on emotionally, for them to react to scenarios and people differently otherwise I think it becomes very stale, they become template characters, ones that you can second guess what he or she does. And there certainly has to be continual surprises in their behaviour and they still have to create that enjoyment with the reader as if they were discovering them for the first time.

That’s the great thing about recurring characters because you have the space and the time to explore them. So yes, as you can see, I do love the recurring character but there also is a flip side to them…. As much as I love following my characters journey like a faithful friend, they can make a novel trickier to write. For example, your book needs to feel like a standalone but still have the recurring characters which come complete with a back story. And that’s sometimes difficult; to explain to the reader who hasn’t read the books in order the back story of the characters without making the regular reader have to go over things they already know. For me this might not be such a problem if I hadn’t made my life even harder by introducing a cliff-hanger in my latest book, Toxic! When I came to write Fatal which will be out early next year, I had to think hard about the balance; still driving the story forward, still holding the readers but still merging the backstory and cliff-hanger by showing not telling. It wasn’t easy, but I loved the challenge as I like to push myself as an author, exploring the whole art of storytelling. I’m certainly a big fan of the recurring character but one day the question, the big dilemma will be, when should I kill them off? 

Happily, I’m not ready to see the last of my characters just yet and I hope that neither are my readers but watch this space. But maybe if I kill them off too soon, like they did in Dallas I can always bring them back in the shower and pretend it was just one big dream! 

    
Toxic by Jacqui Rose published in ebook by Harper Collins on 14 June 2018

Sometimes love is toxic…  Bree Dwyer is desperate to escape her husband, take the children and run. But he’s always watching. And she always gets caught. Until her first love, Alfie Jennings, returns to Essex.  Gangsters Alfie and Vaughn have been out of the game for a while, but a life of crime is one you never forget.  To get back on top they need serious money, because loyalty and power don’t come for free. One dangerous job and they’ll have the payoff they need. And Alfie isn’t going to let anyone get in the way, least of all a pretty face like Bree.  It’s time to show Essex what they’re made of. And this time, Alfie and Vaughn aren’t backing down.