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MINNETTE
WALTERS |
| During what was billed as a rare visit to
the Black Country, Minette Walters attracted a record audience to
Tipton library. Before meeting her fans, she spoke to
Maureen Carter |
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Minette
Walters never loses the plot. As one of the country’s leading
crime writers, she happily admits not having one. What’s more
she can be two-thirds of the way through a book and still not know
who’s the murderer. As far as Walters is concerned, it’s
the only way to write and she’s on a personal crusade to urge
others to do the same.
“I’m always trying to encourage people to have the
courage, forget the plot schemes. Say, I’m going to go out
there and write a book. Just fly by wire. Go with it. It’s
exciting. It’s a wonderful way to write.” That it’s a
successful formula for Walters is unquestionable.
She has the manor, the Jaguar and the clout to prove it. The early
blurbs invariably described her as having taken the crime fiction
world by storm. Her debut,
The
Ice House, won the John Creasey award in 1992. The following
year saw an Edgar from America for
The
Sculptress , and a CWA Gold Dagger for
The
Scold's Bridle in 1994 rounded off a unique hat trick. More
success followed. In fact the storm’s never really abated. By
the time you read this, her latest book Acid Row will probably be
topping the bestseller lists.
If it all seems effortless, just a little too easy - it isn’t.
Walters is a professional. She did the time before doing the crime.
She still puts in the hours and turns out the goods: eight hours a
day; hopefully a thousand words at the end of each. And if the goods
aren’t good enough, she scraps them and starts again. It’s
an integral part of the wire flying technique and ensures she never
has mornings when the blank screen stays that way.
“The minute you release yourself in that way, it’s very
liberating to be unafraid to chuck two chapters out if you decide
you don’t like them. If you have no problem with that, if you’re
not looking at every word as something that’s been dragged out
of you, and if you actually see them as something that works or
something that doesn’t work, it’s brilliant. If it doesn’t
work, you don’t want it; it’s crap, throw it out. If you
have that approach to it, then it doesn’t matter if you feel
you’re going nowhere because you’re still putting words on
the paper.”
“The process of putting those words on the paper and deciding
they aren’t going to work means that actually you’ve
probably seen what will work. I think an awful lot of people do get
terribly hung up on the fact that what’s there, and what was
there yesterday, has to stay because it’s building a story.”
As for writers who don’t know which way to take the story: “Most
people wake up feeling they don’t know where to go because
actually the bit they’ve done in the last week has taken them
in the wrong direction. It’s better to recognise that you’ve
taken a fork, go back to the point where it was working, take out
the fork and start again on the main line. Then you’re in a
much stronger position because you start to feel happy again.”
Walters exudes the happiness.
Crime writing gives her an enviable lifestyle. The manor, paid for
from her earnings, is in Dorchester, about a mile from Thomas Hardy’s
house. She and her husband both work from home. Her two sons are at
university. Her study, in what used to be an old dairy, has three
French windows where she can look out onto a lily pond. Not that she
seems to need the inspiration.
“We’re very, very disciplined. About 8.30 in the morning
we take ourselves off to our offices and we probably won’t see
each other again till half-one/two. It depends who’s cooking
lunch… I then take off probably about three hours after lunch
because that’s not a good time for me for working. I can do it
but it tends not to be very productive. I start again about
five/half past five and I work through till eight/eight-thirty. It’s
a long day … but that’s the joy of being able to work from
home. You can actually take the breaks.”
It’s a long way from the magazine world where she started. At
one point she was subbing a women’s magazine’s crochet
patterns page.
“If you got one stitch wrong, the whole thing fell to pieces.
It was a nightmare.” Wisely, she decided it wasn’t her
metier. She progressed to her first feature: a 250-word evaluation
on the merits of rival cold creams. Promotion beckoned and she
became editor of the magazine’s hospital romances. Every month
she read four hundred, 30,000-word manuscripts and usually found
only four that were publishable. The experience helped focus Walters’s
own fiction-writing ambitions. After moaning to her boss about the
quality of submissions, she was told to do one herself. She ended up
writing thirty-five. This was in the days of genteel virgins who
weren’t allowed to kiss until the final page. Sex was taboo and
double entendres outlawed. (One writer came up with a 30,000- word
story about love on a tennis court without once mentioning the word,
balls). Think Cartland not carnal. It was a great learning
experience and brilliant practice for the future but as Walters puts
it, crime writing’s a great deal more fun.
So, with no plot scheme, no synopsis, no plan, where does the fun
begin? “I start with relatively simple ideas and I explore
those ideas through characters, so I spend a lot of time building
characters, and a lot of that never gets into the final book. The
reason I don’t do a plot scheme is that if I knew what was
going to happen, I’d become very, very bored writing it. It
would just be filling in gaps. I’m as excited, I hope as the
readers are, every time I wake up in the morning thinking, I wonder
what’s going to happen next?”
One of the details she muses about is: who did it? “I can get
half-way or two-thirds of the way through and I begin to get
slightly concerned because I can’t tell which one of them has
committed the murder. It’s not as illogical as it sounds. It’s
actually a very good way to approach crime novels, I think, because
then you write everybody up to the same extent. You’re not kind
of glossing over people who you think, oh well they didn’t do
it so they aren’t important.”
She approaches it like a police officer at a crime scene, asking a
series of questions about the victim, the suspects, their
relationships and so on.
“I’m asking all those questions and I’m working it
out along with the real policeman who might exist in real life. But
there does come a point - thank goodness so far in all of them –
when I think: Yes! Actually I do know who did it. And it’s all
to do with motivation. You suddenly realise that one of them has
more motivation than the others.”
“I often get seduced by other characters and I think, oh,
maybe I’ll go for that one. But all the while – it’s
very, very strange - when you go back and re-read…you find you’ve
written in all the clues to the one who has done it. So clearly,
while you’re writing, your subconscious is very well aware of
the guilty party but you need your conscious to be aware of it as
well. It’s a very interesting process…”
She’s thrilled if she can write more than a thousand words a
day. “I’m not so happy when, say, I’ve managed, like
in one twelve-hour period, to write only two sentences. When you’re
getting towards the end of the book and if you’ve got a
deadline, that kind of thing can be a bit worrying.”
It rarely happens. In fact, for every thousand words that appear,
she’s probably written twice as many. “Because I’m an
exploratory writer, a lot of it gets thrown away. I write a great
deal more than anyone will ever read. It sounds terribly easy if you
say, oh she writes a thousand words a day. It actually takes much
longer than that.” It comes back, again, to getting the words
down, a process she feels some wannabe writers are reluctant to do.
“I get very concerned about people approaching retirement age
coming up to me and saying, I’ve always wanted to be a writer.
And I say, Fine. So how much have you got in your bottom drawer? And
they say, Oh, nothing but I was very good at essays when I was at
school.”
“Just as actors are stage struck, I call it being page struck.
If you want to be a writer, you will have vast quantities of things
you’ve written. Yehudi Menuhin did not pick up a violin and
play a concerto at the age of six without practising. You have to
practise the craft and the only way to do it, is to write, to know
what works and what doesn’t.”
She’s also a great believer in agents. “I think if you
can get an agent before you get a publisher, that’s definitely
good news. But it’s much harder to get agents nowadays than it
is to get publishers because they’re so picky.”
Walters is with Gregory and Radice. The agency specialises in crime
fiction and regarded as one of the best in the business. It was
smart enough to hang onto The Ice House until an offer came in from
a good publisher, despite the book being turned down by “almost
everybody.” Macmillan paid just twelve hundred pounds for it
but as Walters laughs, “at that time, I’d have paid them
twelve hundred quid.”
Nearly ten years on, a signed first edition is probably worth more
than the advance. No wonder Minette Walters is laughing. Who wouldn’t?
"At the beginning, I have no plot scheme. I don’t do
synopses. I start with relatively simple ideas and I explore those
ideas through character. I spend a lot of time building characters
and a lot of that gets thrown away. It never gets into the final
book. The reason is that if I knew what was going to happen I’d
become very very bored writing it. It would just be filling in gaps.
I want to know what happens. I’m as excited, I hope as the
readers are. Every time I wake up in the morning, I’m thinking,
I wonder what’s going to happen next.”
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