Earlier today, my creative writing students had the privilege of hearing from @valmcdermid. I thought I’d create a wee thread of excerpts from Prof McDermid’s talk...
‘35 yrs ago, I was where I suspect most of you are now, an aspiring writer. And although almost everything in the world has changed since then, one thing that hasn’t changed is stories.’
‘We still tell stories in the same way that we told them when we all sat around the fire.’
‘For any writer, the first two or three books are about figuring out how *you particularly* need to work.’
Planning the Kate Brannigan novels: ‘Those were multi-stranded plots. I started using coloured file-cards for each strand, shuffling them round. When it made a sort of narrative sense it was like a Fair Isle sweater.’
‘Some people say that planning in advance takes the fun out of writing. I never found that. I found it a useful structure. Because I had the road map, I could go off on a diversion because I knew where I had to come back to.’
‘Sometimes it can take a long time to go from having a story in your head to being able to put it on the page, because stories have their own demands. They can only be told in certain ways.’
‘Some stories begin at the beginning: “John came round this morning and said, Let’s go fishing.” Some start in the middle: “We were in the middle of the lake when John realized he’d left the back door open.” And some start at the end: “You’re probably
...wondering why I’m sitting here soaking wet and covered in fish scales.”
‘I wrote the first 15,000 words of one book five times and binned them every time because structurally it was wrong. If it had been a bridge, it would have fallen down and everybody would have died.’
‘I have always written books that I am passionate about. A lot of writers get trapped into having to write another Detective Inspector Grumpy because that’s what the publisher wants.’
On changing the murderer once the book was finished: ‘I looked through the MS & realized that my subconscious had known better than me that I was going down the wrong track. The only change needed was to intro “new” killer 50pp earlier...’
‘You find yourself going down one avenue and then you think, “Yes, but what if this, what if that?” I think the “What if?” words are two really important tools in the writer’s toolbox.’
Best piece of writing advice: ‘To figure out what time of day you’re at your most productive and to ring-fence some of that time.’
