Val McDermid is the author of The Wire in the Blood and other exciting crime novels
Interviewed by the Compulsive Creative, July 2004
Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community, then studied English at Oxford. She was a journalist for sixteen years, spending the last three as Northern Bureau Chief of a national Sunday tabloid newspaper. She is now a full-time writer and lives outside Manchester, England, and contributes weekly crime fiction reviews to the Manchester Evening News.
Val won the 1995 Gold Dagger Award given by the British Crime Writers' Association for Best Crime Novel of the Year for The Mermaids Singing, a Tony Hill thriller. A Place of Execution: A Novel (St. Martin's/Minotaur, 2000), also a Tony Hill book, was recently named by the New York Times Book Review as one of the "notable books" of 2000. It won the Los Angeles Times 2000 Book Prize in their new murder/mystery category and was also shortlisted in 2001 for the Edgar Award, was awarded the 2001 Bouchercon Anthony Award, and was a Dilys Award Winner.
She has also written six crime novels featuring Manchester private eye Kate Brannigan and six more with sleuth-journalist Lindsay Gordon, as well as a non-fiction book on real-life female private eyes, A Suitable Job for a Woman.
Her Lindsay Gordon novel, Booked for Murder, was nominated for the Best Lesbian Mystery by the Lambda Literary Foundation, 2000, and has been chosen by Bookspan's Insight/Out book-of-the-month club.
CC: Your characters are among the richest in literature, even the minor ones. For example, who can forget the first appearance of DC Joanne Gibb in Killing the Shadows? She is looking in the mirror of the women’s toilet at the Metropolitan police building where she works, ruing her job-induced physical deterioration and concluding wryly that it’s cosmetic surgery she needs, not cosmetics. Boom--image cemented! In a paragraph or two we get a vivid sense of this interesting woman who’s sacrificed her physical well-being for intellectual challenge. How do you create such well-drawn, believable characters, and how do you make the transition from the characters you see in your head to the ones we meet on paper?
VM: I've always tried to write the books I would want to read, and the books I've most enjoyed as a reader have been those with a rich texture, packed with characters who feel real. I'm always disappointed by novels where the author has concentrated on the central protagonists and not bothered to draw the minor characters as anything other than ciphers. So when I'm getting ready to write, I always spend time figuring out who these people are and why they do the things they do. Often, it's a sort of backward reasoning -- I need a character to perform a particular function within the book. So I have to work out what their motivation would be, and what it is about them that would make them react in a particular way. That's when I access the mental database of all the people I know and all the strangers I have observed over the years and draw out the key elements that are going to make up my character. And then I talk to them and let them talk to each other. I need to hear their voices and picture them in my mind. And then I focus in on the telling details that will let the reader see and hear them as clearly as I do.
CC: How do you plot? Do you start at the result and work backwards?
VM: I always plot in advance. By the time I'm ready to start writing, I know the basic shape of the story and all the key staging points along the way. Usually, a book starts in quite a small way -- something I notice, an anecdote someone tells me, a throwaway line in a radio programme or a newspaper article. Whatever, it's something that pushes my hot button and makes me think, 'Oh YES, now that is really interesting...' For example, with The Last Temptation, it was sitting on an afternoon pleasure cruise on the Rhine and gradually taking notice of the commercial traffic on the river and musing that this was a secret world of which most of us know nothing.
The next step is to try and expand my knowledge of whatever it is that has set me going. At the same time, I'm playing the 'what if' game with every bit of information I can garner. Gradually, the shape of the story starts to emerge, and that's when I know whose story it is --whether it's a series novel or a standalone. Then I have to start thinking about the characters. Then it becomes a sort of biofeedback -- the more I learn about the characters, the more it shapes how the plot develops according to their skills and limitations. And then as the plot develops, I find out more about what these people are doing... And so on, till I've got it all straight in my head. Then I write a synopsis for my personal use. And then I start to write.
CC: How do you decide when and in what context to reveal details about your characters and your story?
VM: It's not a conscious decision-making process. It's a combination of instinct and acquired technique. The first draft of my second novel, Common Murder, began with five beautifully crafted chapters of back story for my protagonist, Lindsay Gordon. When I sent it off to my agent, she said, 'Lose the first five chapters. They're lovely, but they don't tell the story. Everything you've told us here can be fed in as and when we need to know it.' That taught me a very important lesson, and I think it's now so deeply embedded I don't have to think about it any more.
CC: Do you make a conscious decision to tell a certain proportion of the story through narration as opposed to dialog, or do you go by feel?
VM: Always by feel. I'm not at all formulaic about my writing. Most of what I do is informed by what feels right to me. I think the best way to develop these instincts is to read, read, read. You can learn as much from a bad book as a good one. Other people's mistakes are a very cheap way to discover what not to do!
CC: Place is so vivid in your books, both as a physical entity and as a source of local culture and personality. You obviously do a lot of research and careful geographical planning, like scene blocking in drama but on a larger scale. How do you integrate place into plot and vice versa?
VM: I think I've got a strong visual component to my imagination. I like to build a picture in my head of where a book is taking place; it adds an extra dimension, and it's also one of the most powerful tools in the suspension of disbelief. If you can create a credible landscape for your story, the reader will tend to believe you when you move on to the more preposterous elements of what you're telling them. This is particularly important in the crime novel, I believe, because deep down we all know this is not how crimes are solved in the real world. When I'm writing, I like to run the scene like a film in my head. Sometimes a scene works best as a long shot that incorporates a lot of scenic detail, but other scenes need to be close-ups, where we're tight on the characters and focused on them and their reactions.
Places are often inspirational for me. I wanted to write about the White Peak in Derbyshire for years before I finally set A Place of Execution there. It took me a long time to figure out that if it was going to work, it needed somehow to be organic, a story that could only take place in that particular landscape.
Sometimes, you only have to walk through the streets of a city to know it's crying out to be written about. I felt that in Toledo -- here's this medieval jewel, perched on its rock in the Tagus river, and yet it's history is stained with blood. Time and time again, violence of one sort or another ravaged this place, but you'd never know from a casual stroll. And I couldn't resist using that history to make it the scene of a very contemporary crime in Killing The Shadows.
CC: Do you have any anecdotes you’d like to share with us about working out plots and characters?
VM: We should never underestimate the power of the subconscious mind. I remember getting to the end of one novel and realising that I had the wrong murderer. It all worked, but it was somehow unsatisfactory; it felt crass and insufficient. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised that there was actually another character who had a much more interesting motive for the murder, a motive that would allow for a more dramatic ending that was also more emotionally and psychologically satisfying. And I was cursing, because all I could think was that I was going to have to go back and do a major rewrite to make this work.
But when I went back, I found I didn't actually have to change a thing. My subconscious knew better than my conscious mind what was really going on here. Everything was already in place to make this new resolution work. The only change I had to make -- apart from the ending itself -- was to insert one extra scene, introducing the character to the reader slightly earlier in the book.
And here's the other thing about the subconscious. It goes to work while we're asleep. One of my most effective techniques is to lull myself to sleep with thoughts of what I'm going to write the next day, concentrating in particular on any problems I'm anticipating. And nine times out of ten, when I'm standing in the shower in the morning, the solution pops into my head. How economical is that?