{"id":6027,"date":"2019-09-13T11:24:35","date_gmt":"2019-09-13T10:24:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/townhouse\/articles\/a-head-in-a-bag\/"},"modified":"2019-09-13T11:24:35","modified_gmt":"2019-09-13T10:24:35","slug":"a-head-in-a-bag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jerichowriters.com\/a-head-in-a-bag\/","title":{"rendered":"A head in a bag"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twas the Festival of Writing last weekend, with a hey and ho and a hey nonny nonny.<\/p>\n

My highlights? Everything, really. It\u2019s just like a great big bale of fun and passion and intensity squished down into a weekend-sized pellet and washed down with a bottle of wine. (Or two, if you write crime thrillers. Or three, if you\u2019re an agent.)<\/p>\n

If you came, then it was lovely to see you. If you didn\u2019t, pshaw! Come next year, and we can be friends anyway.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll probably have a few Festival-related missives to send, but I\u2019ll start with the one about the head in the bag.<\/p>\n

So:<\/p>\n

I was giving a workshop on how to build a crime novel, using my own This Thing of Darkness<\/em> as an exemplar. The basic thrust of the class was how to build your novel up, bone by bone, and how you don\u2019t always begin that process from the most logical starting point. In my TToD, for example, I knew I wanted a denouement at sea \u2013 Fiona Griffiths on a fishing trawler in a storm \u2013 but that\u2019s all I knew. I didn\u2019t know the crime. I didn\u2019t know anything about the solution. I didn\u2019t have anything else really nailed down.<\/p>\n

And then: I built from there. I hauled my big structural milestones into place until I was confident I had a layout that could sustain a crime novel. (The twist in that little tale of triumph? Simply that at one point I had a 130,000 word novel that felt long and boring. Whoops. I talked a bit about how I solved that issue too.)<\/p>\n

But then I threw the crime-novel problem over to the class. I wanted us to build a novel then and there, to get some sense of what could and couldn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

To start with, I asked for an opening crime to launch our novel – the inciting incident<\/a>, in effect. One person suggested a dead student. Apparent suicide. Whisky and pill bottle. Yadda, yadda.<\/p>\n

Now that\u2019s a perfectly fine opening thought. And, to be clear, this was suggested ad lib, on the basis of precisely zero planning. The student setting was suggested by our own university surroundings. And, OK, we all know books that start much like that.<\/p>\n

But?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing there to suggest an angle. Nothing unique. Nothing pressing. Nothing to make an agent (or an editor or a supermarket book browser) say, \u201cOh wow. Want to know more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that can be OK. My first Fiona Griffiths novel had a crime so boring I can hardly remember it myself. (People trafficking. A couple of people bumped off as possible informers. All very 1.01 in terms of crime premise.)<\/p>\n

But that first book of mine had something extravagantly memorable \u2013 it just wasn\u2019t the crime. It had to do with Fiona herself; her past, her illness, her family background. And that\u2019s fine. You need one golden line for an elevator pitch<\/a>. That\u2019s all. The element you care to emphasise can be anything at all.<\/p>\n

But still. Because we were building a crime novel in class, I drew attention to the basic dullness of that setup crime. A dead student? Looks like a suicide but we all know it wasn\u2019t? I wanted to do better.<\/p>\n

And boom! I was running the class with an agent, Tom Witcomb at Blake Friedman, and he piped up with an alternative crime:<\/p>\n