The sun is shining, it’s the start of a beautiful day here in England. I’m sitting in my office preparing for a new day with a mug of Gold Blend in front of me. It’s all very mundane.
That’s got me thinking about dramatic effect. After all, what could be more ordinary these days than sitting […]

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A difficult problem for the crime writers of New York it would seem.
Read about it in the New York Times
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IT’S time to let your imagination run wild again in the fourth annual Short Crime Story competition.
The Harrogate Advertiser series has once again teamed up with the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival to offer budding writers the chance to flex their creative muscles.

Harrogate Advertiser Short Story Competition
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Did you see Gone in 60 Seconds? today I’m going to talk about one of the hardest things when writing a crime fiction novel. We see it in the movies all the time and we feel we have to have it in our novel to give us the ultimate action and drama.
What am I talking […]

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Well, I’ve had a few days off and I am now back to full time plotting and writing crime fiction.
If yopu’ve been following, you’ll know that I’ve written two excerpts, one of which went down well on mywriterscircle, the other sounded like Terry Pratchett. Fine, I always accept criticism when its constructive.
So am I going […]

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Tension is the most important part of your crime novel. Without tension, our crime novel is boring and goes nowhere.
When we are writing our second act, we need to increase the tension as we approach the final cliffhanger before the finak unveiling of the plot. One technique is that of grading.
When we grade a scenem […]

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There I was, writing a scene called after the robbery. It is a follow up to the piece about the safe-breaking. I stuck it on MyWritersCircle to let the guys there have a look.
The comments were interesting.
I was trying to emphasise the tiredness of my protagonist Frank Carr as his strange dream about men dressed […]

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As you can see, if you’ve been and had a look at the comments, I got a bit lost with the dialogue and the readers couldn’t keep track of who was speaking.
Also they wanted a little more information as to whether Jimmy was any good acting as lookout. i will add more detail on this. […]

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Wrote the piece about cracking the safe and I have submitted it to my favourite writing group for some constructive crticism.
We shall see.
I value the comments of some of the very experienced writers on this particular forum as published or not, they give honest feedback on your work.
Here’s the link so you can see the […]

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Every chapter in a crime novel is made up of one or more scenes.
What is a scene?
A scene is where something happens before moving on to something else. For example in Chapter 1 of a ficticious crime novel, the scenes could go like this.
Opening Scene.
The peterman and his two lackeys are robbing a safe. They […]

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