Tag Archives: writing

And…Action!

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Tomorrow, known as le quatorze juillet in France and Bastille Day in the rest of the world, is the day when shooting begins for my short film Coming Home. The actors, screenwriter (moi) and film crew are in Paris, and the director is in Washington DC. What could possibly go wrong?

If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard from me recently, here’s why. Forgive me the cliche but it’s been a rollercoaster ride and it’s not over yet.

It was back in April when my filmmaker friend, who seems to spend his time in the air between LA and DC but with occasional stops in Paris or London, asked me to write a 15 minute script for my actress friend Holly-Rose Clegg. She starred in our one woman show that Katie Haigh Mayet and I took to the Edinburgh Festival in 2017 (yes, folks, it was that long ago). The director filmed Holly earlier this year in this short remake of a scene from The Joker with Joaquim Phoenix.

After that, he was determined to submit a short film to next year’s Cannes Film Festival. He wanted it to have a European feeling, imagining Holly on a French train, and that was my only guidance. He was determined to direct the film online because this is his vision for the future of cinematography. The next thing you know, I’d written a screenplay about a couple who meet on a dating app but who realise that they can never be together. To tell you more would be a spoiler alert…

Once Holly and the director decided, much to my surprise, that it was all systems go, we set out to find the other actor who would play with her in the film. That’s another story which I can’t share with you just yet. But I immediately realised that despite knowing nothing about the film industry, with the director in another country I would have to navigate the French film industry from bottom to top by myself, even though I was “only” the screenwriter. I had to find a film crew, get filming permissions, advise on locations, find extras, organise catering, and find a hairdresser and makeup artist. And that’s just for starters.

By a stroke of luck, or fate, my downstairs neighbour in Paris happens to teach cinematography and she literally taught me the A to Z of filmmaking in France, for which I am eternally grateful. But I add to that the friends who have given their time to support us as well as the complete strangers who have helped me jump through hoops when I thought the whole project was going to crash to the ground.

Tomorrow morning is D-Day. Before our rehearsal today, I’d been out printing forms at a place open on Sundays and buying an external drive capable of swallowing all the footage we want to upload. When we auditioned the second actor for the film, my eyes were damp with tears at the chemistry between the two of them. The director said to me that when we shoot the film, “you will shed tears of joy.”

In three days, we’ll know whether that’s true…

Drop the dead dog, or how I turned to “cosy” crime

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I turned to “cosy” crime after finishing the fourth gritty police procedural in my series of detective novels set in Norfolk.

At this stage in my fiction writing, I wanted to have more fun and less gore. Having read Richard Osman – who appears to have cornered the market in this subgenre of crime fiction – and studied the tricks of the trade of other “cosy” crime authors, I decided to take the plunge.

It struck me that the experience of my French sister in law, a longtime local councillor who made a living from a smallholding in deepest Brittany, had the potential to be turned into a fictional murderous romp. Set in a small community and focusing on the relationship between Bretons and Britons, there were all the elements for a “cosy” series, it seemed to me. And so amateur sleuths Jennifer and Pippa made their appearance in the fictional village of Louennec.

However, as my publisher can attest, I soon fell foul of the “cosy” conventions, in which murders – while they can be plentiful – are almost secondary to the plot. They’re never of the grisly kind that I’d described in my earlier novels. And they definitely don’t involve animals.

My worst offence was to kill off a dog. I should say that the Collie cross belonging to one of the characters in The Brittany Murders was extremely annoying because he kept on trying to round up visitors. When discussing an early draft with my editor, she gently pointed out that whenever a dog, or a pet, died in a cosy mystery, the publisher received letters of protest from readers. So Captain the Collie had to be resuscitated and the novel restructured around him. (I’m reminded of distressed listeners’ protests to the BBC in August 2023 when a dog was put down by a vet in an episode of The Archers).

But in that same draft I’m afraid to say that I was a repeat offender, because a white-furred rabbit named Lady Gaga on the smallholding was going to be slaughtered. Needless to say, the rabbit escaped the chop in the final version and has so far survived in the first two books of my Brittany murders series, although her babies quietly disappear offstage every so often.

Another aspect of everyday life on the farm had to be toned down for mentioning “too much blood” in a weasel attack on a henhouse. Then there was the adopted daughter of two of the main characters, who reacted to being bullied at school by self-harming. This was deemed “too dark” and disappeared altogether.

Meanwhile though, I was happy that another “cosy” convention involves sex, or the lack of it, because as every writer knows, describing sex is notoriously difficult. In a “cosy” mystery, sexual activity is hinted at, rather than watched from the bottom of the bed.

So there are some of the pitfalls of genre hopping. It can be a steep learning curve, as I discovered myself, but I hope you’ll bear with me and follow me down this new “cosy” track. The next book in my series of Brittany novels, Murder at the Château, is out on June 6, 2024.

World Book Day, the first draft of my new crime novel and the night visitors

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It’s World Book Day which coincides with my completing the first draft of my new crime novel, Blood Sister, #2 in the DI Clayton series. I’ve been sitting immobile on my sofa for so long that I must be at risk of contracting DVT.

But the book event leads me to think about the creative process and one of my main difficulties as a fiction writer. For me, that is reaching a goal of 70,000 words which corresponds to the average novel size. It must be my background as a journalist which constrains me from the expansive and discursive, but with time and experience I’m gradually getting to grips with the problem. Relax, Penketh, I say to myself, let it go!

Journalism of course comes in handy for researching a book. In the case of Blood Sister, I’ve been in touch with a forensic scientist, put myself through a forensic course run by Dundee University, contacted gun experts, Classic car owners and a medical doctor. Not to mention tramping round Norwich where the novel is largely based. It’s fascinating to explore an unfamiliar world, and I’ve just handed the draft to a retired policeman who will pick up on any procedural mistakes.

But in the writing, you have to unlearn all the journalistic tricks of the trade in favour of “show, don’t tell”. I ground to a halt in early January at 47,000 words. I told a fellow writer friend, the other half of my two-woman support group, that I could see where the story was going and that I couldn’t imagine getting beyond 50,000. Why not bring in another sub-plot, she said, helpfully. But the problem with that was my worry about introducing new characters in a police procedural which already has quite a few. Would the reader become confused? And, more to the point, a new sub-plot would have to develop organically from the story.

In the end, inspiration struck in the middle of the night. I’ve discovered that my most creative moments are when my brain starts churning after midnight. Dialogue, plot inconsistencies, character insights, you name it, have to be written down on a notebook that I now keep in the bedroom. They say that solving cryptic crosswords, at which I’m hopeless, also happens when you’re doing something completely different.

As a result of the night visitors inside my head, I managed another spurt which took me to 60,000 words. Blood Sister is still 10,000 short of my goal, which I may never reach, but I’m no longer in despair because the rewriting will inevitably expand, polish, and hopefully improve the book. But while I solved a problem, I gained another: insomnia.