Mike Murphy's writing diary: Slowly but surely

Monday, 7 June 2021

Slowly but surely

My new novel has not started off with a bang. I wrote two chapters and then decided it needed a more suspenseful beginning. A new first chapter later I found myself with a hole between it and the chapters I had written earlier and no clear idea how to bridge it. I knew what had to go in there but not how to shape it. Then yesterday morning it came to me and I wrote solidly for several hours, always a great feeling. The two main threads are now in place and I feel comfortable about working through them to the end which I already have firmly in that deep well at the back of my head from which all ideas and inspiration seem to flow.

Meanwhile the first copies of my short story anthology, along with the reprints of my two novels are only days away. It is going to be very interesting to see whether the new cover on A New Era For Manny Youngman results in increased sales as I had a few comments that the first cover was not working.

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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.