Mike Murphy's writing diary

Monday 7 December 2015

I am back to writing Why'd they murder Grandma?, the second in the Grey Nomad series because I want to have a substantial part of it written if Fremantle Press do take up the first, Murder For A Grandmother.
For this book I've chosen Joan and Tom as my pov characters. It created some difficulties at first as I didn't have them as clearly in my head as Athol and Debby, though whose eyes the first book was told. However, I've got over that and the story is moving ahead. I haven't done an outline as such but I have a list of scenes and events that will be included as it goes along, I find this is essential in a murder mystery as there have to be red herrings and hidden clues built into the story and unless I know in advance what these are going to be it would be too easy to go off down a culdesac.
I still have to deal with the romance that was developing between Athol and Debby in the first book but I can do this by having Joan acting as cupid and trying to push them together when Athol in particular is hesitant.
The good thing at the moment is that I feel I know exactly how the book will develop and I'm looking forward to each stage of writing it.
I'm doing it in scenes in Scrivener so I can decide later where the chapter breaks will fall, I probably won't use as many short scenes as I did in the first book but they may change. Today I rewrote the first scene where Joan meets a new character, Sissy Wildflower, and we get the basics of who's who and what's what. Next I will be rewriting the scene with Tom at the woodwork shop.

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Authors I like

Anna Jacobs

A mentor in my early writing days and still one of my favourite authors. Her sagas about family life in Lancashire are among my favourites but she is a prolific writer and it's all good.

Michael Robotham

Michael urged me to keep writing when I was in a depressed period after another publisher's knock-back. He is basically why I kept writing and turned to self-publishing. I've read all his books and I'm always waiting eagerly for the next one.

Dave Warner

I only recently discovered Dave as a writer after having had his Dave Warner and The Suburbs album since it was on vinyl. It's interesting having another writer who sets his stories in Western Australia.

Dick Francis

I've read all his books at least twice and sometime more often. He's the writer I always return to when I need to feel totally in my comfort zone. Good stories, tight plots, easy writing style. I'd love to know if it really was his wife Mary who wrote them. His son Felix is doing a great job of keeping the family business going.

Leslie Thomas

Ever since Virgin Soldiers I've been hooked on Leslie Thomas and his Dangerous Davies series are among my all-time favourites.

I am because I write

I come across a lot of people who would like to be writers and I often wonder why. For me there has been no question. Since a very young age I have been a writer. Certainly not a famous or even successful one but while other people were doctors or teachers or sportspeople, the thing I did best and was most comfortable doing was writing. For some reason I had a natural flair for it and that raw talent was honed when I became a journalist and learned that what bubbled out of my head was not what was needed. I had to to be able to write to order. One of my earliest lessons came from Bob Duffield, a reporter who took the story of the closure of Perth's Roe Street brothels and wrote different versions of it for convervative, sensationalist, religious and sociological publications. I learned that writing was a craft to be learned, and I have spent many years learning not only the craft of writing, but of story-telling, which is an art in itself. Whether it's a poem, a short story, a novel, my family history, one of my blogs or web sites, I will always be writing something. It's simply who I am and what I do.