‘Write what you know’. It’s the writing advice that most people have heard, and it’s advice I’ve never followed. In fifteen books, including the Maeve Kerrigan series and my latest stand-alone novel, The Killing Kind, I’ve always chosen to write about worlds I don’t know from personal experience. It’s not just wilful disregard for the rules of writing – I have good reasons for ignoring the received wisdom on this front! First and foremost, it’s limiting. What if what you …
Month: May 2021
I began writing The Seven Sisters series in 2013, and 1.2 million words later, I suddenly found myself about to write Book 7. The characters have been with me for …
This year marks my tenth anniversary as a full-time writer. And I’ve been reflecting on how much my writing life has changed over the years. One of these changes is …
I was conducting some background research for my novel Stranger when I came across an old article in The New Yorker about diagnosing mental illness. At one point, it referred …
How could it possibly be that a book which starts with a brutal murder in Arizona in 1915, before settling into an account of three more killings that took place …
My new novel The Beauty of Impossible Things is set in a small seaside town during a heatwave – a place of “novelties and souvenirs” to quote one of the …
I have always been interested in forgotten pieces of history, particularly where lives have been barely recorded, distorted by mis-telling, or eroded over time. It is the fragment that excites …
I Want to Know That I Will Be Okay was written over a decade, in between books. But it really took shape over the last year. I was remote working, …
There is an urban myth I heard as a child that has always fascinated me. It goes along the lines of: Only two people know the recipe to the world’s …
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