FINDING YOUR VOICE

 

Writing isn’t about words. Writing is about rhythm.

 

When I first started writing, I had a particular song in my head. It’s not one that’s a favourite of mine. I had the album when I was fifteen, but that’s about it. The song is Kings of the Wild Frontier by Adam and the Ants. Not a classic, but it has a particular drumbeat that drives the song forward, and I tried to match the rhythm of that drumbeat as the pattern for every sentence.

Of course, I’m not saying that you should go off looking for a song, but it was just my own little way of finding the rhythm in my words, because in crime fiction the words should just flow and drive you forward.

I took inspiration from others. Everyone is influenced by those who have come before them, so listen to the rhythms of the writers you like.

At the time I started writing, I was a big fan of W.P. Kinsella, who was an American writer who wrote stories about Iowa, often about baseball. He wrote the book Shoeless Joe, which became the Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams. There was something about his prose style that I liked, whimsical and gentle, a narration, and it was the prose style I first tried to mimic.

Here is a paragraph from Shoeless Joe:

Three years ago at dusk on a fine spring evening, when the sky was a robin’s-egg blue and the wind was as soft as a day-old chick, I was sitting on the verandah of my farmhouse in eastern Iowa when a voice very clearly said to me, “If you build it, he will come.”

 

Here is a paragraph from my second book, Lost Souls:

She was standing by an open-plan lawn in a neat suburban cul-de-sac, with the hills of the West Pennine Moors as a backdrop, painted silver as the rising sun caught the dew-coated grass, just the snap of the crime-scene tape to break her concentration.

 

I hope you can see how the rhythms are the same.

 

As I stressed at the start of this page, writing isn’t about words. Writing is about rhythm. I hope you find yours.

But there are pitfalls. On to the next page.