On The Edge of Your Seat

How to create suspense in crime fiction

Zoë Sharp

 

A few tips for crime fiction, which I was asked to provide for a writing event recently. They were sparked by the question of what you do to keep your reader on the edge of their seat, turning the pages as fast as they can manage.

 

And, having written these tips down, it seemed a shame not to share them here. Your own pearls of wisdom gratefully received!

 

Write the jacket copy first.

When I am putting together the idea for a crime thriller or mystery, the first thing I usually do is write my own jacket copy. Sometimes also called the flap copy, this is the brief outline of the type you’d find on the back of a paperback, or the inside flap of a hardback. (Occasionally, people refer to this as the blurb, but to me those are the quotes on the cover.)

 

Writing your own jacket copy forces you to focus on the theme of the book, and the conflict at its heart. The stronger the idea, generally, the more simply it can be expressed. I try to hone and modify the jacket copy as I go along. It helps to remind me what I set out to achieve in the beginning.

 

It may well not make it onto the finished cover, but it’s more for your own benefit than anyone else’s. It also comes in very handy during the writing process, when somebody asks, “So, what’s your latest book about?” if you have a short, snappy and intriguing bit of copy to quote from. Always leave ’em wanting more.

 

Keep a summary as you go.

Regardless of whether you plot carefully before you begin, or you write by the seat of your pants, I’d always advise keeping a summary as you go along. When I’ve finished a chapter or scene, I jot down the main points and the gist of the dialogue, together with any story threads I’ve laid in that I’ll need to remember to tie up later. After once managing to include a nine-day week in an early book, I also mark time changes—Day 3, late morning, rain, for example. And I keep a note of how closely the opening of this scene follows the end of the last one.

 

Doing all this not only allows me to keep track of the timescale of my book, but also when I need to interweave different things happening in different places at the same time without my head exploding. In the latest book, I have time jumps as well as quick location changes. This leads to lots of opportunities for things to go Horribly Wrong.

 

But the biggest help in having a summary comes at the editing stage. In the case of the last book, the editor and I could work out most of the structural alterations on the 33-page summary, without having to wade through 300 pages of typescript. It made everyone’s life so much easier.

 

What’s in a name?

I have always found names hugely important in establishing character in the shortest time with the least effort. A William is a different person to a Will, or a Billy. Just as an Elizabeth is a different person to a Liz, or a Betty. In my last book, I had two women called Virginia and Pauline. One was the local lady of the manor, while the other was the cleaner at the pub. It probably would have worked to reverse the names, but not without some kind of explanation, I feel.

 

When I start to make notes for a new book, I usually jot an alphabet across the page, with a mark above a letter for a character with a first name beginning with that letter, and a mark below for last names beginning with that letter.

 

This lets me see, at a glance, if I’ve accidentally given characters names that are too similar, and which letters of the alphabet are free to use for new or minor characters. I also keep a cast list in my notes, which I add to as new people arrive. An added bonus is that, when I’m in contact with the producer of the audiobook, I already have a complete character list to hand, which I can go through to make notes for accents, etc.

 

Make every character count.

Unlike writing for TV, where scripted dialogue for minor characters ups the production cost, in the pages of a book everyone has a chance to speak. I try to make every character into a real person rather than a cipher for the plot. Several characters in my latest book have only one scene, but I try to make it count, and to make them memorable—a female truck driver called Big Frankie; a housebound elderly Russian émigré who uses the BBC Radio 3 classical playlist to pinpoint times and dates; an expert witness cheerfully discussing murder over lunch. They all deserve the best I can give them.

 

Dressing and driving.

Likewise, the clothes your character wears can say a lot about them very quickly. Are they cheap or expensive? Are they too tight, or hanging off, and what does that tell you about that person’s recent circumstances? Are they suitable for the occasion, or hopelessly under or over-dressed? Raymond Chandler opened The Big Sleep by describing PI Philip Marlowe down to the motif on his socks. Normally, I don’t feel the urge to go quite that far.

 

Likewise, the kind of car the character drives—and the way they drive it—is indicative of who they are, or who they want to be perceived to be. A particular character in the last book appeared in one scene trying to keep a low profile, so he arrived in a battered old Japanese saloon car. Later, when he was aiming to intimidate, he turned up in a Bentley. This raised immediate questions about how he earned enough money to afford it. (Or, these days, to afford to fill it with fuel.)

 

Use all your senses.

We tend to describe what we can see and hear when we write, but not always what we can feel or smell. I had one of my main protagonists wake sweating in the early hours of the morning because he was plagued by nightmares, for example, not because it’s high summer. Indeed, that book took place in winter, with cold temperatures to match. In another scene, a handful of bay leaves scattered onto a wood-burning stove released the scent of their perfumed oil into a room to create a warm and comforting air.

 

Get into a scene late, get out of it early.

My final tip for writing a crime novel would be to get into a scene as late as you can, and get out of it early. Sometimes it’s tempting to work your way into a scene by showing your characters travelling and arriving. Unless that journey serves a purpose, it’s almost always better to begin with them already in a location, talking to someone they need information from—sometimes even in mid-conversation. I love to hit the ground running with my stories, and grab the reader right from the start.

 

This week’s Word of the Week is bystanderism, which is the phenomenon where we do not help someone we’ve come across who apparently needs help. We may be less likely to help when there are other people present—passive bystanders—who we may feel should do so. We may tell ourselves, If they’re not helping, perhaps we’re mistaken and nothing is wrong. So, the more people around who could help, the less likely that any will help.

 

Events

In March, Zoë Sharp will be one of the Derbyshire authors taking part in Author Assemble. “This is a literary event, showcasing the work of authors who are local to the High Peak or who have supported and worked with the Buxton Crescent Heritage Trust. The aim is to bring writers from a variety of genres together under one roof, to shine a light on the former use of the Assembly Rooms as Buxton’s town library from 1972 to 1992—a time which many local residents remember fondly. We aim to give authors the opportunity to share their work with new audiences, gives talks about their writing and of course sell their products. Attendees will also be introduced to the work of the Buxton Crescent Heritage Trust and enjoy some time inside the splendour of the Crescent’s Assembly Rooms.” Time and date: Friday, March 17 2023, 10:00 – 17:00 at The Assembly Rooms, The Crescent, Buxton, SK17 6BH. Speakers, signing, and stalls. More details to follow.

 

In April, Zoë Sharp will be appearing with Caro Ramsay and Sarah Ward at Ceredigion Museum in Aberystwyth as part of the Gŵyl Crime Cymru Festival. Their panel will be Event 6: Trade Secrets, 10:15 – 11:15 on Saturday, April 22 2023. “Writing a long series, has its own difficulties, as does writing under two names in two different directions. How do you keep track? What are the things you know from your other lives that you bring to your writing? Learn a few trade secrets from three of the best. Panellists: Caro Ramsay, Zoë Sharp. Chair: Sarah Ward. Close Up Reader: Nigel Williams.”

 

The Big Coincidence

Why it Doesn’t Really Work in Fiction

Zoë Sharp

Coincidences happen every day. They’re a fact of life. And while there are a few of us who still firmly believe that instances of déjà vu are nothing more than a glitch in the matrix, they happen, too, often in a way that’s really quite corny. I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that real life is far more badly written than the average novel.

Can you imagine sitting down with your agent or editor, and explaining to them the idea for your next book? A courtroom drama that unfolds after a beautiful eighteen-year-old model is found murdered just yards from her front door after a night out with friends. She’s been stabbed seven times and brutally raped. The police question her boyfriend, but his DNA doesn’t match that found on the body and the case goes cold. Then, nine months later, a man is arrested after a scuffle in a pub. His DNA is taken as a matter of routine and fed into the system. Shortly afterwards, the police arrest him for the young model’s murder and he goes to trial. In court, his defence is that he found the teenager lying on the ground and assumed she was passed out drunk so he, “took advantage of the situation”, not realising she was dead until afterwards. Yes, you say, this is going to be his defence, under oath, in a court of law.

Or, what about a serial killer? There are oodles of them in fiction – far more than in real life. So, you decide to write a serial killer book. Your killer is going to murder five prostitutes in a single mid-sized English town over a forty-day period. One other woman is going to have a lucky escape when the killer is interrupted. But rather than have him totally baffling police with his forensically aware approach and meticulous planning, the crime-scene techs are going to lift a full DNA profile from three of the bodies, which he’s carelessly dumped in a nice dry spot rather than in water. Not only that, but they’re also going to match 177 clothing or textile fibres from the killer’s home to his victims.

The killer’s car is going to be seen kerb crawling the local red-light districts, and blood is found in the back of it. Oh, and naturally the police will already have his DNA on file after a minor robbery he committed five years previously. His defence in court? Our old friend coincidence. Yes, he did indeed frequent the red-light districts, and by amazing chance did indeed have sex with all the women in question, on the very day they disappeared, but everything else was one big fat coincidence. Or fifty of them, I believe it was, during one period of cross-examination by the prosecution.

So, no criminal masterminds at work here, then.

Tragically, both these cases are taken from real life. In 2008, Mark Dixie was convicted of the rape and murder of Sally Anne Bowman in Croydon, South London. He was sentenced to a minimum term of thirty-four years’ imprisonment – at the time, among the longest minimum term sentences for a single murder in the UK.

The same year, Steve Wright had a similar sentence passed for the murders of Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alderton, Annette Nicholls, and Paula Clennell, all working in Ipswich, Suffolk. Both these men may well be very sad, twisted – even downright evil – individuals, but what makes them all the more pathetic is that they couldn’t be bothered to put any effort into planning and carrying out their crimes.

In books, serial killers connect with their victims in some way – even if it’s only inside their sick little minds. They stalk them, photograph them, and create little shrines to them for the detective to uncover – usually illuminated by a single, swinging light bulb. As writers, we simply can’t rely on the same level of random chance, coincidence, and happenstance that seems to occur time and again in real life. We have to make our villains more – I hate to say it – larger than life.

More intelligent.

More human, even.

Some writers have said that whenever they’ve taken an aspect of real life and inserted it into a novel, that is always the part readers pick out as being the most unbelievable bit. I know if I presented either of the two scenarios above to my editor, she’d point out the plot holes and bat them right back at me. Must try harder.

So, my question is this. Are there times when you experience something, or see it on the news and say to yourself, “If I’d written that in a book, nobody would believe it…” And how much coincidence and happenstance will or won’t you accept – both as a reader and a writer – in fiction?

This week’s Word of the Week is Torschlusspanik. A German word that is really without a direct English equivalent. It means, quite literally, gate-closing panic. The feeling that life’s opportunities are diminishing, and that you have failed to grasp them; that you are getting too old.

 

Diving Into The Story

Opening Chapters

Zoë Sharp

 

As I’ve no doubt mentioned here before, I’m a sucker for a good opening line. It’s a question I usually ask a writer about their latest book and their answers are revealing, I think, ranging from a word-for-word quote, to a blasé “oh, I really can’t remember” as if they hadn’t slaved and sweated over it for days—or even weeks—to get it right.

 

When I’ve posted previously about opening lines, a few people dismissed their importance, and I admit I’ve read a few that seemed to have been written purely to be memorable or shocking, rather than serving their true purpose. An opening line should grab you, yes, but then it has to deliver you into the right place in the story and hold you there.

 

So, now we come to the importance of opening chapters.

 

A book rarely, if ever, starts at the beginning of the story itself, and choosing the exact point at which you slide your reader into the tale is a very tricky one to judge.

 

The classic Private Eye

In the classic private eye tale, of course, the book so often starts with the mysterious client walking into the PI’s office. The story has already begun, of course, or the client would not require the services of an investigator. This opening gambit serves several purposes. It allows the client to make telling comments about the hero’s appearance and character. “You look like you’ve been a prize-fighter.” Or “Captain John Doe down at the precinct gave me your name. He told me you were fired for insubordination.” The office may well be shabby, at which point the PI can point out that there isn’t much money in the business if you’re an honest man. All useful devices for getting across the flavour of the story and the character without labouring the point.

 

This also has the advantage of cutting straight to the heart of it. There will, after all, be a certain amount of detail contained on the book jacket, which is another reason why I usually write this bit first. It gives me a good idea of where to pitch the opening of my story. No point in having a big reveal about the identity of the hero’s love interest three-quarters of the way through the book, if the jacket copy declares, ‘He falls for a beautiful Russian double-agent!’ or something similar. And I’ve seen this done recently more than once on books by very well-known authors.

Man of Mystery

Getting across your main protagonist’s character is key in the opening chapter—IF that’s where you introduce them into the story. In Lee Child’s ONE SHOT, for instance, Reacher doesn’t make his entrance until forty-five pages in. Nine books into a highly successful series, this works brilliantly to build up a sense of anticipation before the hero takes centre stage. Other characters mention his name, but have no clue who he is, and the reader feels in on the joke. With another writer, in a debut novel, that would not have worked so well.

 

Robert B Parker, in the opening chapter of NIGHT PASSAGE, introduces his ex-LAPD Homicide detective turned small-town police chief, Jesse Stone, in two simple pages that tell you Stone used to be a cop, and that he has a drink problem, as well as innumerable regrets about leaving behind his life in LA, not least of which involves a woman. 

 

In Raymond Chandler’s classic, THE BIG SLEEP, the opening chapter tells you a lot about private detective Philip Marlowe, by the snappy dialogue and the observations, although I note that in the film the exchange between Marlowe and Carmen Sternwood is altered from, “Tall aren’t you,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be.” to “Not very tall, are you?” “Well, I, uh, try to be.” possibly to take into account the fact that Humphrey Bogart was only 5ft 8ins.

 

Humphrey Bogart as PI Philip Marlowe and

Martha Vickers as Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep (1946)

Reason to Read on

But I digress. The important thing is that the reader is given a real reason to read on, whether it be because of the set-up of the action, or from being hooked by the characters, and wanting to know what happens to them and their lives as the story progresses. Even with a series character, the writer has to bear in mind that people often come to the books out of order, so every time I start a new series book, I have to devise some method in the opening chapter for the reader to be shown the character(s) without boring those who know them well.

 

Of course, what is not included in these opening chapters is a great deal of back story. Trying to cram too much back story about your characters into the opening of the book just gets in the way of the story, bogs it down and slows the overall pace. Plus, you’re giving the reader information about people they haven’t come to care for. One agent I know says he often skips past the first three or four chapters of a new typescript because of this very problem, diving back in after the writer has settled down to just telling the story, rather than the story of how every character got to be here.

 

At the same time, I’m not a big fan of the cryptic prologue. It may work very well for other people to entice them into reading further, but I just find them irritating.

 

Flash-forward vs Foreshadowing

Other people, I know, are against flash-forward opening chapters in a crime novel, but I admit to using this device in several books. The definition of a flash-forward is an interjected scene that takes the narrative forwards from its current point. Although they can be projected, expected, or imagined, I have always tried very carefully to make sure that the opening chapters for both these books could be lifted from the start and slotted in between two later chapters, without alteration, and without cheating the reader at all. And these flash-forward openers are not taken from near the end of the book, either, although you can always spot the reviewers who didn’t read it all by the fact that they still assume this to be the case…

 

A flash-forward opener is different from a foreshadowing opener, which only hints at what might be to come, and is a technique used by writers to provide clues for the reader to be able to predict what might occur later in the story. An example of this is to describe a scene which includes an item later vital to the outcome of the plot, or the identity of the culprit, and often seems to be hidden among the contents of the dead man’s pockets, or the items arrayed across a desk, and is much beloved of Golden Age detective novels.

 

So, in my opening chapter, regardless of the book, I know I need to introduce one or more of the major players in such a way as defines their character(s) and their relationship with those around them, jump into the heart of the story, hook old and new readers alike, and set the pace and tone for the rest of the book.

 

Simple really, isn’t it?

 

Do you have a particular technique you use for opening chapters? Do you have any pet hates or favourites as a writer or a reader? Which opening chapters of the ones you’ve written or read do you like best, and why?

 

This week’s Word of the Week is prolepsis, from the Ancient Greek meaning to anticipate. It’s often a figure of speech in which a future event is referred to in anticipation (as in calling a character ‘the dead man’ before he’s actually dead) or in which objections are anticipated and answered (as in “‘Ah,’ you might say, ‘but that is impossible!’ Not so, because…” although correctly this is called procatalepsis.

Getting Back Out There!

Finally, just a quick thank you to Catherine Mitchell and Trish Kenny at Mickleover Library in Derbyshire, who invited me and fellow crime/mystery/supernatural author, Sarah Ward, who also writes as Rhiannon Ward, to talk to library users last Friday evening. It was one of my first 'In Real Life' events since lockdown, and great fun it was, too.

 

How Are We Going to Write About This?

As we speak, I am in the midst of a Blog Tour for the publication of my new book, the second in the Lakes Crime Thriller trilogy, BONES IN THE RIVER. I should have been talking about the book at Newcastle Noir and CrimeFest as well.

Current circumstances—UK lockdown for Covid-19 coronavirus—have put paid to any physical festivals or conventions. So, everything has moved online, with panels and interviews and readings. I took part in the recent Virtual Noir At The Bar (Episode 5 on April 29, from about 44:00min to 51:00min) instead of actually meeting up, in an actual bar, to do actual readings from our works.

As well as keeping on top of the Blog Tour, I’m also deeply into the planning of the next two books. And that’s where I run into the biggest questions of all.

How are we going to write about the events of 2020 in the future?

If I look at BONES IN THE RIVER, for instance, the events of the story occur at the annual Appleby Horse Fair, held in the Cumbrian market town for hundreds of years and famous as being the largest gathering of Gypsies and Travellers in Europe.

 This year it has been cancelled.

The opening scene, in which a man accidentally runs down and kills a child on a deserted country road at night, could still happen in lockdown—but not after he’d just spent an evening having a meal with friends where they were undoubtedly all sitting around a dinner table—inside—in close proximity.

My CSI, Grace McColl, goes from crime scene to office and out into the field again, mixing with both the public and her colleagues. My detective, Nick Weston, goes to interview suspects and potential witnesses in person rather than by phone or Zoom, because how can you really get a feel for the reactions of the people you’re talking to unless you can see them while you talk.

People are brought in for questioning—their legal representatives sitting alongside them. What will happen in future? Zoom again, or will this cause a major leap forwards in projection hologram technology?

Grace visits her mother, Eleanor, who has moved back from the south coast up to Appleby. Grace’s ex-husband, Max, has been making himself useful around Eleanor’s new house and garden, perhaps as a way of trying to reinsert himself into Grace’s life. Even with the slight easing of lockdown due to take place in the UK from June 1, this is dubious behaviour. They have a barbecue—which as it’s outside would probably be allowed. But Nick also attends and he doesn’t count as family. Not sure he and Grace stay the full six feet apart at all times there, either…

Besides, Nick’s a father with a young daughter, Sophie. Would he risk her health by associating with others more than he absolutely had to for his job? And what about Nick’s partner, Lisa, who has been working suspiciously late at a hair and beauty salon that wouldn’t be open for business yet anyway.

Meanwhile, one of the other CSIs is suspended for a supposed error. He’s staying at home in his scruffs, watching the TV and playing video games—perfectly feasible in these lockdown times! But then he gets a visit from one of his colleagues and, instead of insisting the man stays on the doorstep so they can chat (no garden available in a little terraced house in Workington) he invites the man inside his home—without hand sanitiser, gloves or face mask.

The Travelling community at the Fair live in close proximity inside their vardo and bow-top horse-drawn caravans, and spend their time largely out of doors, but at the Fair they all mix and mingle with no thought to cross-contamination. There’s plenty of washing goes on, but it’s mostly of horses in the River Eden, as fits with tradition rather than to prevent the spread of Covid-19 infection.

And at the stand-off near the end of the book, the police are more concerned with the numbers involved than the risks of getting too close to the saliva of others.

If I’d been writing this book next year, and setting it this year, it might have been a very different story altogether.

So, what do I do about the third instalment? Do I mentally set the story pre-winter 2019, when Corona was still just a beer, and a virus was something more likely to be contracted by your computer than by your elderly relatives?

After all, I didn’t specify that BONES IN THE RIVER was set in any particularly year. It’s contemporary but not tied to any specific, non-transferrable event—the millennium, for instance.

But, in a few years’ time, the obvious setting of a book pre- or post-Covid-19 will undoubtedly date it. I went through my very first book recently, KILLER INSTINCT and UN-dated it. I didn’t change the story but I did take out references to minor things that I felt dated it badly. References to computer floppy disks, video cassette tapes—even public phone boxes, most of which have either disappeared from our streets or been turned into tiny libraries or stations for community defibrillators.

The next book I have planned is a bit more of an experiment, and therefore could be set at any time in the last few years. I don’t intend to make reference to Covid-19 in that story. It still feels too soon. Too raw.

This will give me time to see what’s going to change in societal behaviours in the slightly longer term before I start the next Charlie Fox book. If Charlie’s greatest threat to someone in the future is that if they don’t stop what they’re doing, she’ll cough on them, it’s going to change things in a big way…

What are your feelings, both as writers and readers about the inclusion of Covid-19 in books written right now, to be read in the next year or eighteen months? Do you want them to reflect these strange times in full and horrible detail, or do you read as more of an escape of what’s going on around you, and therefore not want to be reminded?

And will pre-2020 become seen as the new Golden Age—both of crime and of life?

This week’s Word of the Week is petrichor, meaning the smell of rain on dry earth. It comes from the Greek petra, which means stone and ichor, which means the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology. My thanks to EvKa for sending me this among a whole list of wonderful words. A gift to treasure for a logophile like me!

BONES IN THE RIVER, book No2 in the Lakes crime thriller trilogy, was published worldwide on May 26 2020by ZACE Ltd. You can grab a sneak peek at the first three chapters, and buy here from all the usual retailers.

ISBNs:

eBook: 978-1-909344-69-3

Mass-market paperback: 978-1-909344-70-9

Hardcover: 978-1-909344-71-6

Hardcover Large Print: 978-1-909344-72-3

Driving on a country road late at night,

you hit a child.

There are no witnesses.

You have everythingto lose.

What do you do?

The traditional Appleby Horse Fair hosts the largest gathering of Gypsies and Travellers in Europe.

The sudden influx of more than 40,000 visitors into the small Lakeland town has always caused its share of problems, with strained relations between off-comers and locals.

But it’s also known as a good time to settle old scores.

This year, the Fair brings with it with the discovery of two bodies near the River Eden—one very recent and another a long time buried.

As CSI Grace McColl and Detective Nick Weston search for answers, old secrets are revealed, old wounds are reopened, and tensions threaten to erupt into violence.

While someone much closer to home is trying to get away with murder…

The follow-up to DANCING ON THE GRAVE, the first of the Lakes crime thriller series, BONES IN THE RIVER is a self-contained story featuring:

CSI Grace McColl. She is forty, amicably divorced from her husband, Max. Born in the Lakes, she was always a keen photographer, who trained as a crime scene investigator after her photographs were used to help acquit a man who later caused a woman’s death. Grace still feels she has much to make amends for. She hides her emotions behind a calm façade that can make her sometimes appear cold. She lives in Orton village, with a Weimaraner dog called Tallie.

Detective Constable Nick Weston. He is thirty-two, living with his partner, Lisa, a hairdresser, with whom he has a volatile relationship, and a young daughter, Sophie. Nick worked in Firearms in Manchester and then undercover for the Met in London. After he was compromised and almost beaten to death on an undercover op, Lisa persuaded him to transfer up to her native Cumbria, where he is considered an outsider among his colleagues. Nick is still coping with some of the mental and physical after-effects of his experiences.

From The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

Here, for your contemplation and in the hopes of stimulating a discussion, is the best description of creating fiction that I can imagine.  It is the beginning of Chapter Thirteen of Fowles’s masterpiece. *

“I do not know.  This story I am telling is all imagination.  These characters I create never existed outside my own mind.  If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and “voice” of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God.  He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does.  But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Gillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word.

            So perhaps I am writing a transposed autobiography; perhaps I now live in one of the houses I have brought into the fiction; perhaps Charles is myself disguised.  Perhaps is it only a game.  Modern women like Sarah exist, and I have never understood them.  Or perhaps I am trying to pass off a concealed book of essays on you.  Instead of chapter headings, perhaps I should have written “On the Horizontality of Existence,” “The Illusion of Progress,” “The History of the Novel Form,”  “The Aetiology of Freedom,” “Some Forgotten Aspects of the Victorian Age” . . .  what you will.

            Perhaps you suppose that a novelist has only to pull the right strings and his puppets will behave in a lifelike manner; and produce on request a thorough analysis of their motives and intentions.  Certainly I intended at this stage (Chap. Thirteen—unfolding of Sarah’s true state of mind) to tell all—or all that matters.  But I find myself suddenly like man in the sharp spring night, watching from the lawn beneath that dim upper window in Marlborough House; I know in the context of my book’s reality that Sarah would never have brushed away her tears and leaned down and delivered a chapter of revelation.  She would instantly have turned, had she seen me there just as the old moon rose, and disappeared into the interior shadows.

            But I am a novelist, not a man in a garden—I can follow her where I like? But possibility is not permissibility.  Husbands could often murder their wives—and the reverse—and get away with it.  But they don’t.

            You may think that novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen.  But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy’s back.  I could fill a book with the reasons, and they would all be true.  Only one true reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is.  Or was.  This is why we cannot plan.  We know a world is an organism, not a machine.  We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world.  It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.  When Charles left Sarah on her cliff edge, I ordered him to walk straight back to Lyme Regis.  But he did not; he gratuitously turned and went down to the Dairy.

            Oh, but you say, come on—what I really mean is that the idea crossed my mind as I wrote that it might have been more clever to have him stop and drink milk. . .and meet Sarah again.  That is certainly one explanation of what happened; but I can only report—and I am the most reliable witness—that the idea seemed to me to come clearly from Charles, not myself.  It is not only that he has begun to gain an autonomy; I must respect it, and disrespect all my quasi-divine plans for him, if I wish him to be real.

            In other words, to be free myself, I must give him, and Tina, and Sarah, even the abominable Mrs. Poulteney, their freedoms as well.    There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows all other freedoms to exist.  And I must conform to that definition.”

*I have copied this out carefully, word by word.  I consider this a fair use of John Fowles’s sentences.  I type them here out of a sense of admiration and wonder, because having just yesterday read them for the fourth or fifth time, I cannot think of anything better I can say about what it means to write fiction.

Annamaria - Monday