Raindrop Solutions

No not the bit where your central character is subjected to torture/wrongful arrest/character assassination. With only three weeks to go to the close of the competition, this is the moment to start thinking about editing. The time when you force yourself to cut out all those beautifully crafted sentences and sly, witty, jokes, for the sake of pace and plot advancement (and because when you re-read you’ll probably realise they weren’t all that beautifully crafted etc. at all).

Here are two experienced authors on the pain (and necessity) of doing a full edit before you submit your work.

First up, Michael Ridpath, on why you need to edit.

My fourteen-year-old son hates rereading his essays and correcting them. Frankly, I sympathise. Until I wrote my first novel I felt the same. Correcting mistakes was important if you wanted to avoid looking like an idiot, but it was hardly fun, especially when compared to the creative rush of placing new words on white paper.

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One of the questions that comes up every year in the Debut Dagger is “Do you accept novels for Young Adults?” And the answer is – yes. In fact some years ago a short-listed entrant who submitted a young adult novel ended up with a publishing contract. And Alan Bradley’s entry, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (the 2007 winner), although not specifically targeted at the young adult market, had an eleven year old girl as the heroine of his story.

So in case you do plan to enter a young adult novel, this bulletin contains advice from a best selling author who specialises in that field. Sophie Mckenzie’s first novel Girl, Missing pulled in rave reviews and she subsequently went on to produce three very successful series aimed at the young adult market: Blood Ties, The Medusa Project, and the Luke and Eve books. This year saw the publication of the sequel to that first novel – Sister, Missing

Here she is on how to write a successful Young Adult Novel:

I write the kind of books I like to read… these tend to be psychological thrillers with strong relationships at their heart. My main characters are usually teenagers simply because, for reasons I’m not entirely clear about, I enjoy writing from a teenage point of view. Many of the principles of successful writing apply whoever ends up reading the book – but here are my top tips for making a YA thriller work as well as possible.

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Hopefully by now you’ve decided on what you want to write and who is going to tell your story. So for this bulletin, we’re concentrating on crime novels that are set outside the ‘usual’ areas.

If you centre your story in modern day New York, Mongolia in the thirteenth century, or Churchill’s bunker in World War Two, your reader will immediately start to form pictures in their mind. They’ll probably be based on other novels, films, or television programmes, and they may be totally wrong, but at least they’re ‘seeing’ the background. But if you decide to place your action in the future, or in a different world altogether, the reader has nothing to trigger their internal projector. It’s all down to you to set the scene – and you’ve only got three thousand words to do it. Which can be a major problem; you really can’t afford to use too many words describing the background when you’ve got to get the action moving and establish your character(s). It’s tricky, but not impossible, and some of our entrants in the past have explored these forms of crime fiction.

So for those of you who want to give it a go – here is advice from two authors who’ve tackled those genres.

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Right, if you’ve been following these bulletins you have worked out what your story is about, where it starts, and how you’re going to make your reader turn over to Chapter Two. Which brings us to – who is telling your story.

Most books have one character who becomes the central point of the action. Some have two or three; which is fine, but try not to change viewpoint too much in that first, all important, chapter. Concentrate on building up a strong central character that your readers can care about. And on the subject of that central character – if he/she weighs three hundred pounds, has biker tattoos, wears a ponytail, won the all-comers knitting contest, lives with his/her mother, and breeds ferrets – it really isn’t necessary to tell us all that in the first chapter. Keep the story going – you need to persuade the reader to turn to Chapter Two, which they’re unlikely to do if you’ve bogged them down in too many biographical details.

So who is your hero/heroine? Here is advice from two authors on how they created their central character(s).

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Two weeks into the competition already. I’m pleased to say that since the last Bulletin we’ve heard from two previously short-listed entrants (coincidentally both based in Australia) with good news about their books. More of that later. We start off with advice from author Zoë Sharp on how to decide what you are going to write (and as an added bonus you also have the chance to win a free e-book featuring Charlie Fox, described as by the Chicago Tribune as the coolest heroine in contemporary genre fiction.)

So, how does your story start? Or, more to the point – where?
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Hello and welcome to the 2012 Debut Dagger Competition.

Those of you who have done the maths, will realise that this year the competition is only open to entries for thirteen weeks, rather than the usual fourteen. You’ll also have spotted that we’re starting a week early. The reason is quite simple; entries increased yet again in 2011 and we need the extra time to get through all the entries before the shortlist announcement at Crimefest in May.

In 2011 we had nearly seven hundred entries from twenty six countries. Once again there was an impressive mix of the psychological, supernatural, quirky, historical and action adventure.

The overall winner was South African writer Michele Rowe with What Hidden Lies; the story of the hunt for the killer of an alleged sex offender on the spectacular Cape Town coast.

Highly Commended went to UK author Graham Brack for The Outrageous Behaviour of Left-handed Dwarves where the death of a young woman in Prague reveals a series of scandals reaching to the highest levels of Government.

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