Neil White - Beyond Evil

Of course, Marie’s wasn’t the only body they found at the house, and Gemma had done her best to tell the police who had been buried there, along with providing names for the charred corpses they found inside the house, John Abbott included.

Charlie watched as Sheldon went to the door to the office, between the tattooist and the kebab shop. He held out the ribbon for Donia, who skipped across.

Charlie smiled. He had offered Sheldon the job as his legal clerk, a non-qualified helper. He hadn’t been interested at first, but the thoughts of the empty days ahead made him change his mind.

Donia took the ribbon from Sheldon and stretched it across the doorway. She was grinning, jumping up and down excitedly.

‘Cut the ribbon,’ she said.

Charlie stepped up and took the scissors from Sheldon.

‘Are you going to make a speech?’ Sheldon said.

Charlie thought about that. ‘How about “this will be interesting”?’

Donia laughed. Sheldon pursed his lips, he had expected more than that, but then a smile broke across his face.

‘That will do,’ Sheldon said. ‘This will be interesting.’

‘It certainly will,’ Charlie said, and he snipped the ribbon.

They were open for business.

Acknowledgements

My name appears on the cover of this book, but that doesn’t go anywhere close to telling the full story.

My editors at Avon have been fantastic, as always, pointing out the flaws without being too brutal, and so I will always be grateful to Caroline Hogg and Helen Bolton for their input and help. My thanks also go to Keshini Naidoo, an editor with whom I have enjoyed a great relationship from the very beginning. Of course, I would never have had the opportunity to work with the people at Avon had it not been for my wonderful agent, Sonia Land at Sheil Land Associates Ltd, and so I thank her once again for working so hard on my behalf.

Away from my publisher, I would like to thank Angela Melhuish for setting up my Facebook fanpage, and Luca Veste for maintaining it with such enthusiasm.

To everyone else, thank you for the emails and for attending the author events. It’s been great to hear from you.

Neil White’s Writing Tips

I have been writing crime fiction for eighteen years now, although only as a published author for the last six of them. The twelve years before then were all about trial and error, submission and rejection, along with the occasional fallow year when I just got on with living my life.

I do not pretend to be any kind of an expert on the craft of writing. All I do is give it my best shot and hope for the best. With that in mind, I have been asked to give my top five writing tips, and so here goes.

I’m not going to tell you anything about how to write your prose. If you have got this far you are a reader, and so you know what you like to read and this should be reflected in what you want to write. Neither am I going to talk of environment, and how you should find your special writing space, like there is some kind of literary feng shui. I write on an oak desk with the stereo playing BBC Radio 6 Music, in a room where the Playstation 3 tempts me to be distracted, but that is only because I’ve been able to negotiate a private space in my house, like a nerdy version of a garden shed. My writing space has been all sorts of things: a cupboard under the stairs, the dining room table, a table on a train. I’ve written on holiday and in my car during the lunch break in my day job. The environment has never affected my writing, provided I had some peace and quiet.

I’m not saying I would like to write a whole book on a laptop in the front seat of my car, but the important thing is the ability to think, not the quality of the space in which you think.

My writing tips relate to the discipline of being a writer. These hints and tips might not work for everyone, as writers work differently, but these are the guidelines I set for myself.

Accept it won’t be good at the beginning and keep going

Like a morning jog, the hardest part of writing is setting off. All that stands before you is 100,000 words and you do not know what they will be. So you can turn off the computer and do something else, or else you can plant that first word on the page and keep going.

One of the problems I have, whenever I start a book, is that the last piece of writing I have seen of mine was a completed manuscript that had been rewritten and reshaped countless times, and so it represented my very best effort. When I start something new, it is back to unpolished, and so it is too easy to think that it just isn’t good enough. It is the same for new writers, where you set out with grand designs of the next great novel of our time, but then stall through lack of confidence after a read-through of the first couple of chapters.

Break through that and keep going. The later parts of the book will be easier to write than the opening chapters, where you will find your style and your rhythm. I rewrite my opening few chapters more than any other part. Just accept that and keep going.

Write it how you like it

I set out with one goal whenever I start a book, and that is to write something I like. It might be that your ambition is to write for fun, not to be published, but whatever your motivation, there is no point if you don’t like what you have written. Write what you want to read, not what you think other people want to read.

So don’t follow trends or piggyback other ideas. Don’t write about a boy wizard who goes to wizard school just because Harry Potter was very popular. Write it only if you like it. A story written by someone whose heart wasn’t in it will be just a book without heart.

If you write what you like, all you can hope for is that other people like it too, and even if they don’t, at least you can be happy that you think it is a worthy piece of work. You can hardly expect other people to like it if you don’t like it either.

Be prepared to cut out things you like

One of the hardest things about rewriting is editing out passages or phrases you like, because they sound good or convey a certain message. To put it bluntly, if something doesn’t add to the story or character, get rid of it.

Not one reviewer will say, ‘Poor story, but it was worth reading the whole book for that second paragraph on page thirty-seven.’ If it is a good story, the removal of irrelevant passages, however well written, will enhance it, rather than detract from it. On the other hand, if you can only write one good paragraph, stick to the day job.

If you really like the passage or turn of phrase, save it and use it in later books.

Know your ending

My journey as a writer started on holiday in 1994, when I decided that sunbathing wasn’t my thing, and that my time would be better spent scribbling in a notebook. I wrote four pages during that holiday. I thought it was great. When I got home, I bought a typewriter and set off on the journey. It was the start of something big.

It was important to keep going, I thought, and that the story should evolve naturally, an organic experience. So I did that. Four hundred pages followed, where the plot just unfolded in front of me.

Well, I say unfolded. It just sort of tumbled out. It was rubbish. From start to finish a jumbled and confused mess, with no narrative thread. It took me three years to arrive at that realisation.

I started again, a new plot, a new idea, except that this time I planned it. I wrote a summary, which expanded into four parts, and then each part expanded into smaller segments, so I ended up with chapters, which I broke down into scenes. Most importantly, I knew what the story was about.