Tag: Writing

Looking up Murder Online…

Special guest Nicola Whyte, debut writer of 10 Marchfield Square, reveals how to look up murdering people online without drawing the attention of the authorities (and Mark has a book recommendation)…

TRANSCRIPT

MARK: As a crime writer, do you get why people will see your internet search history and incriminate yourself? Well, this I mean, I think any writer will, will worry about this. So what was the strangest thing you’ve had to look up?

NICOLA: I mean, every now and again, I will suffix it with ‘for a crime novel’ on the end, just in case. Like that gets me out of jail free. I don’t know what is the most incriminating…? I think, probably, undetectable poisons these days. I think it’s quite hard now to come up with an undetectable poison.

MARK: I bought a book called Deadly Doses, which is a really good book on poisons, so I don’t have to look it up anymore. You remember books, don’t you?

NICOLA: Yeah, offline; innocence is what you’re saying.

MARK: Yeah. Absolutely.

NICOLA: Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I found some interesting stuff….

MARK: (Holds book up) Yes. A Writer’s guide to Poisons.

NICOLA: Yeah. Okay. I’m going to get that.

MARK: Essential reading.

NICOLA: I had to do some very dodgy case study reading on antifreeze poisoning. 

MARK: Right?

NICOLA: The Americans, they poison each other countries a lot. You know, I think they have a lot of, like, deserts and things that are very brightly coloured and sweet. And, yeah, there’s a lot of people trying it almost — almost ! — not quite getting away with antifreeze poisoning.

MARK: Excellent.

NICOLA: Very crime novel!

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Can an Author Query Too Much?

My special guest on the Creative Differences podcast, Nicola Whyte, debut writer of 10 Marchfield Square, reveals that her biggest mistake may have been querying too much…

TRANSCRIPT

MARK: What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made in your writing career?

NICOLA: Probably querying too much… like, querying a book too much. When I knew the market wasn’t ready. But I kept querying because I was so sure that somebody would see the potential. And then, of course, what happens is the market shifts and everybody’s already seen it, and you can’t send it out again. So I think that definitely that happened to me with a cosy crime novel I wrote in 2019, and everybody was going ‘Cosy? No, we don’t… nobody publishes this. It’s got to be really dark. That’s what we like dark, dark, dark, dark. And I’d sent it to everybody and got the same (response): I really enjoyed this. I love the pitch. I love the title. But, no, we don’t publish this at all. Ooh, Richard Osman? Hello! And I had literally sent it to everyone, so it’s currently in a drawer awaiting its time. 

MARK: Maybe it will have its time at some point. I still think your biggest mistake was not finishing the robot silent witness book, you know?

NICOLA: Oh, you’re gonna love it, Mark.

MARK: I am first in line. First in line for that one.

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Nicola Whyte: Planning the Middle

Special guest Nicola Whyte, debut writer of 10 Marchfield Square, reveals how she plans the middle act of her novels to avoid overwriting…

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TRANSCRIPT

MARK: What small thing has made a big difference to your creative process?

NICOLA: I think planning the middle, really. Because I used to plan the end and then, you know, your characters do their decisions, and then it would be like, hey, guess what? This 90,000 word novel is 130,000 words. And now I’m like; if I know the middle, it is much easier to stay on track. I think that’s probably the biggest change for me. I think in terms of, yeah, stopping me from going absolutely bananas. But also like a piece of information like… we talk about the German market: I was in a, a workshop with Imogen Cooper, and she said that if you translate a book into German, it adds almost a third onto the length of the book. When you consider translation costs, and paper costs, and ink costs and all the rest of it, it was like, whoa. Because up to that point I was like, it’s not that big a deal to cut some words, but actually, you realise in terms of making it appealing… So those two things together really focus me on not overwriting, not just enjoying myself forever and meandering off down wherever, and just keep me focused. 

MARK: So yeah, yeah, I see that’s a very good point. The German editions of my books are quite chunky, but I just thought it was because they were a slightly smaller format. But that makes complete sense now. And when you when you talk about planning the middle… because for many people this is one of the most difficult parts, because the opening is all fun and games, the middle act is where you need to escalate and things have lots of consequences and sooner or later you have to tie these things up. How are you planning that middle?

NICOLA: So it’s that big shift. What’s the big change that is going to happen? That gear change. So when I’ve decided like what’s the big turning point, where everything sort of goes up a gear, once I know what that is, then it keeps me on track. And it means that my characters are never… You know, it’s like keeping the target in sight so they can’t veer off too much. You know, if you do what the characters want you to do, you will end up so far away from where you need to be. And editing for word count is probably one of the most painful versions of editing. When you’re trying to shave off 40,000 words and you’re going, ‘I can’t possibly!’ but you have to. Learning the hard way is also a very big motivator.

Nicola Whyte: The Percolation | Mark Stay’s Creative Differences Episode 11

I had a wonderful time chatting to Nicola Whyte the debut writer of 10 Marchfield Square about how she was inspired by the nooks of London and Douglas Adams’s whodunnits. We also discuss planning the middle of a novel, “soft boiled crime”, designing author websites, and we get nostalgic about the Ottakars book chain and much, much more!

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LINKS 

NICOLA’S WEBSITE

PERSON OF INTEREST

ALL THE LOST SOULS BY AMIE JORDAN 

MASSIVE ATTACK AND TONY COLLIER: LIVE WITH ME

CULTURES

MOTHERING SUNDAY

ROSALINE

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM THEIR FRIENDS BY STUART MACONIE 

POKER FACE

THE BOOKS BESIDE MY BED BY PAUL ARMFIELD 

Mark Stay’s Comic Con dates… 

PORTSMOUTH – SUNDAY 22ND JUNE 

TENTERDEN STEAMPUNK FESTIVAL – SAT 28TH JUNE 

BASILDON – SUNDAY 29TH 

LFCC FRIDAY 4TH, SAT 5TH, SUN 6TH JULY 

MIDLANDS COMIC CON SAT 12TH, SUN 13TH JULY 

GUILDFORD SAT 19TH JULY 

For more dates in pop over to https://markstaywrites.com/diary-and-appearances/

Join the Green Room: https://ko-fi.com/markstaywriter/tiers

Are you a Writer? Want answers?

Twice a month, I run online sessions for writers called the Green Room.  You can ask me questions about the craft of writing, your WIP, or the business of publishing. The sessions are fun and informal and chatty. You can send me questions in advance. They’re recorded live and saved on Kofi for exclusive access to Green Room supporters. Recent topics for the Q&A sessions include…

‘Show, don’t tell’

Writing for children

Dealing with feedback

Happy endings

Writing historical fiction around real events

And much, much more!

And once a month we have a 200 Word Workshop, where you can send me 200 words from your current project and I give it a critique.

I’m running this via Kofi, where you can join by clicking on the Green Room membership tier for £20 a month.

There’s no long term commitment. With Kofi, you can support for just a month, or for as long as you like. 

My goal is to be able to give supporters advice that will make a real difference to their writing and career, because the way I see it: having worked in this industry as a salesperson, bookseller and author for over 30 years, I’ve made every mistake, so you don’t have to.

The next session is Thursday 12th June, 8pm BST…

FIND OUT MORE BY CLICKING ON THIS BRIGHT GREEN BUTTON!

And here are the international timings…

TIMEZONE INFO

THURSDAY 12th JUNE, 2025, 8PM BST

9PM CEST

12 NOON PDT

1PM MDT

2PM CDT

3PM EDT

FRIDAY 13TH, 5AM AEST

FRIDAY 13TH, 7AM NZST

Join Nicola Whyte on the Creative Differences Livestream

Nicola Whyte’s debut whodunnit 10 MARCHFIELD SQUARE has been getting rave reviews and I’m delighted that she’ll be joining me on the next livestream.

Nicola’s work has been listed for the Comedy Women in Print Prize, the Cheshire Novel Prize, the Daily Mail First Novel Competition, the BPA First Novel Award, and the Times Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition.

Join us live to join the conversation about writing whodunnits, being a debut novelist, and all those little things that make a big difference to the creative process.

As always, it promises to be a fun evening, so pop that date in your diary…

WEDNESDAY 11TH JUNE, 8PM BST

JOIN US ON FACEBOOK

Or join us live on Youtube…

Sarah Pinborough: Describe a House

Before you watch this clip, take a moment to describe a house (maybe even write it down), then watch this clip with bestselling author Sarah Pinborough whose novel WE LIVE HERE NOW is out now (and is set in a very spooky house!) and was partly inspired by this exercise — Credit to author Mark Chadbourn for the exercise!

TRANSCRIPT

SARAH: You know the author Mark Chadbourn?

MARK: Yes. Yes, yeah I do. Yeah.

SARAH: We were at an event somewhere, and he was doing this thing where you have to describe a house. So he was like, describe this house, da-da-da-da… And so, he goes, ‘Is there a path?’ ‘Yeah, it’s kind of a stone house.’ ‘Where is it?’ ‘It’s on its own, in the middle of nowhere. It’s quite a cold place. It’s quite forbidding. It’s kind of oppressive, doesn’t want you to come in and blah, blah, blah.’ But then when I got to the end of this, he said, when you get people to describe a house, it describes their emotional… How they view relationships and their emotional thing. And this idea of no one’s coming in my house. And actually when I look back, I’m like, well, here I am, single at 53 (laughs), and I maybe there was something in it, but it’s kind of that house in my head that I pictured then, you know, like this kind of in the middle of nowhere on its own, doing its own thing house.

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Sarah Pinborough: Relatable is Commercial

Here’s a clip of me mansplaining theme to bestselling author Sarah Pinborough, before she sums it up succinctly… 🙂

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TRANSCRIPT

MARK: We have a thing called the Green Room where people… we talk about writing, and I bang on and on about things like central dramatic arguments and themes. When you say, what is your book about? You’ve just given us a brilliant example because you’ve, you know, it’s about the lies couples tell each other and that thematically, you know, runs through the whole story and it’s so strong because we spent, you know, eight minutes talking about it already. And I think we could talk about it all night. But it’s and that’s what I think makes your book so compelling because it is, you know, about these terrible truths…

SARAH: It’s that awful word, ‘relatable’.

MARK: ‘Relatable’.

SARAH: ‘Relatable’.

MARK: Relatable equals commercial equals money in the bank. Yeah, it’s Mike says 100%. All you need is a dog. And we had we had, we had Mike and his dog on here a few episodes ago, folks. I’ll, I’ll put a link in the show notes. You can check the episode out.

MIKE SHACKLE: I am a professional. I’m sorry.

LINKS MENTIONED

The episode with Mike Shackle and his dog…

Here’s my writing group The Green Room…

JOIN THE GREEN ROOM

And here’s my favourite video on theme and the central dramatic argument with Craig Mazin…

Sarah Pinborough: “I Triple Write.”

This month’s special guest bestselling author Sarah Pinborough reveals when she knows that’s she finished a draft and how she ‘triple writes’ her books…

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TRANSCRIPT

MARK: How do you know when you’re done?

SARAH: Well, Mark, invariably, I am skating in the last knockings of the deadline. So when I write the end, I literally think ‘I’m going to scan through this and I’m sending this fucker off,’ so… But, because I do triple write, as it were, like I plan in a notebook, then I rough write into Scrivener, then I copy it over into Word, tidy it in Word. I do it in like 8000 word chunks. I’ve kind of… if it’s not untidy and it’s not…. You know, it’s probably most people’s second draft, when I hand it in. And I kind of think… I mean obviously this would be different if it was on spec, but I’m like; they’ve paid for it. Let’s see if it’s holding, you know, because if it’s not holding, it doesn’t matter how pretty I make it. (If) there’s a massive structural problem, let’s get to that. You know, so I kind of figure that’s the way.

Sarah Pinborough: When is She Ready to Write?

This month’s special guest bestselling author Sarah Pinborough reveals when she knows that’s she ready to start writing…

TRANSCRIPT

MARK: What’s the thing that makes you think you’re ready to start writing on a project?

SARAH: When I’ve got the ending locked in place. I can’t start to write without… I have to see the final scene of the book in my head. So… Behind Her Eyes, the final chapter was in the pitch of the book. So I don’t have the whole book planned, obviously, but I tend to kind of have to have the characters names, a bit of a tent pegging. and the ending has to be locked so I know what I’m working towards. But you know, I’m great one for mulling… mulling for a long time. I think that’s the hardest part, isn’t it?

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