Read Online How to Write Fiction by The Guardian - Free Book Online Page A

live and breathe on the page. As I read, I realised I had come to know some of these people so well that the idea that something bad was going to happen to them had become almost unbearable. I was turning each page with a sense of dread and it dawned on me that here was the most satisfying way to create suspense.
    These are crime novels, after all. The reader has seen the jacket, read the blurb and knows very well what they are in for. Yes, there may be redemption and resolution of a sort, but there will also be suffering and pain, grief and dreadful loss. You know it’s coming, but not when or to whom. The tension is real and terrible, because you care.
    So, by all means throw in a thrilling twist every now and again, but not so often that they lose their power to shock. Time those “reveals” to perfection so as to give your reader a punch line they will remember for a long time. But above all, give your readers characters they genuinely care about, that have the power to move them, and you will have suspense from page one.
    Mark Billingham is the author of 11 crime novels. Winner of the Theakston’s Old Peculier crime novel of the year award, he has tutored creative writing courses for both Faber and Arvon. His latest novel, Good As Dead, is published by Sphere

Writer’s workshop 7
    How to transform a trivial list of events into a deliberate, focused plot
    T he first step in designing a story is to get together a collection of events.
    1 Take 10 minutes to write an account of something you did yesterday. Include as many different events, no matter how trivial, as you can, to give yourself plenty of material to work on.
    Look at what you’ve got and how your piece works on the level of event.
Did you tell your events in strict chronological order or is there a point where you’ve darted backwards or forwards?
Is there something in these events that you might call a “climax”? Is there some event that all the others led up to? Or are all your events of equal weight?
Do you just have one string of events, or do you have more than one?
Have you told another story in miniature, perhaps to explain something in yesterday’s events? Have you referred to some past action, or some future hope?
Is there a second character who creates a second mini-story?
    2 Now rearrange all the elements that you have.
If you have a strictly chronological piece, try putting the end at the beginning, or telling it backwards.
If you have a climax, try streamlining everything else to make the climax more forceful.
If you have several kinds of events, several characters or any references to past or future, arrange the piece in a flashback structure, a story-within-a-story or as two parallel stories.
Where your piece ends, ask the question “and then what happened?” See if you can give the plot another twist.
Invent new events and discard real ones as it suits your purposes. Try to rearrange the piece as differently as you can, even if the original structure seems the best.
    3 Next, look at your piece from the point of view of secrets. Rewrite it with the following questions in mind:
Is there something the narrator knows but isn’t telling the reader?
Is the narrator deliberately trying to mislead the reader?
Is there something the reader knows that the narrator doesn’t?
Is there something that a character knows that they’re not telling?
At what point should information be given: should it all be laid out at the beginning or should information be withheld until the end?
Is there something that should never be made quite clear, something that should stay obscure?

    4 Lastly, let’s look at the focus of the piece.
Give the piece a title, or several titles.
Write a one-line summary of the piece.
If you can, give the piece to someone else and ask them to think of a title for the piece, or summarise it. Their way of seeing it may lead to new insights.
Is there some unifying thread through all