Crime Writing, Quality, and Volume

Portrait by Lori-Lee Pike

Friend and writer, Tom Halford, makes a very welcome return to the blog this week.  Hi Tom, thanks for taking some time out to be here today...

The first stories I wrote were crime stories.

When I was a kid, I wrote about a giant fruit loop who was terrorizing a small town in Atlantic Canada (Harvey Station, New Brunswick).  I thought I was quite clever to have my story feature a cereal killer who was also a serial killer.

As I got older, I started reading authors like James Joyce and George Eliot and Norman Levine and Alice Munro and Michael Winter.  I made the mistake of thinking that I could write like them.  My stories shifted from silly and violent to quasi-literary and quasi-autobiographical.  Some were good and some weren’t.

The point is that now I’m back where I started, trying to write quirky crime fiction, and I’ve noticed an important difference between some of my favourite literary authors and some of my favourite crime writers: the number of books they publish.

My favourite literary authors might publish a book every five years, whereas my favourite crime writers publish a book every year.  I was completely stunned to find out that some crime writers publish three books a year!

Three books!

How do they manage?

First of all, how do they muster the output?

If you write 1,000 words a day, and a novel is 60,000 words, then you could write a rough draft in 60 days.  There are 365 days in a year.  So, technically, you could write three rough drafts in 120 days.  That would leave the other half of the year for editing and for a few holidays here and there.

So, assuming there is no writer’s block and assuming that your only responsibilities in life are to write, then it is physically possible to write three novels in a year.

But second of all, how do they make these novels any good?

I am not speaking of any of other writer than myself, but it takes a long time to work out the kinks in a story, and it takes a long time to make a story (what I think of as) interesting.  To figure out the characters, to make sure that their voices are all distinct, these things take work.

However, it seems like many of the authors writing multiple books in a year have made the extremely intelligent move of writing in a series.  They don’t need to invent new characters each time, and certain elements of the plot carry over from one novel to the next.  They don’t need to spend as much time working out the kinks because they’ve already been smoothed over in previous novels.

So, now that I’m back to writing quirky crime, my biggest issue is volume as it relates to quality.  I’ve got an idea for a novel, but I’m worried I’ve gone too far with it--made it too ridiculous--another serial killer who is also a cereal killer scenario.
My other problem is that I’ve got a novel that I’ve been working on that could be part of a series.  It’s in the same universe as my first novel Deli Meat. However, the issue with this series is that I keep killing all of the characters.  There’s no one left to carry into the next novel!
All of that is to say that I’m amazed by the crime writers who publish a book a year, and even more amazed by those who publish more than a book a year.  I don’t know how you do it, but whatever tea or coffee you’re drinking--and I don’t know what it’s laced with--but can I have some?

Great post, Tom, and I'll have whatever those authors are drinking too!

You can follow Tom on Amazon  Twitter  and his book Deli Meat is available Here