Hey Rob, you’re a discovery writer

After the publication of No Time for Doubt, the tenth Downland Murder Mystery, I didn’t set out to take a break from writing.

A rest, certainly. A change of direction, definitely. A bit of marketing, perhaps.

In the end, I spent two years trying to work out what I was supposed to do. I lost sight of what I wanted to do, especially when life got in the way.

Thankfully, I recovered to find my way back to what I love most - writing.

The end of Kent Fisher

When I finished the final edit of No Time for Doubt, it felt like the end of Kent Fisher.

I’d done as much as I could with my sleuth, and the characters and backstory that supported him. He’d solved the longest and deepest mystery, which began in the first book in the series. Deep down, I knew that solving this mystery would signal the end of the series.

My editor worked it out. But I said nothing to my readers. I figured they might work it out when there was no news of another novel.

It was time to try something fresh and stretch myself.

I had a story that began five years before the end of the Downland series. A story I worked on in fits and bursts, slowly complicating the plot each time.

It felt like a good idea to write a cosy mystery. Something new, gentler, with fresh characters. The South Downs location remained, naturally, but the focus would be on Alfriston.

Until I realised half the story took place in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Two locations, over a hundred miles apart, weren’t quite within the remit of traditional cosy mysteries.

Neither was a complex and implausible plot with more twists than Chubby Checker.

Not sure whether the novel, provisionally titled Deadly Inheritance, had a future, I set it to one side.

So much for writing something fresh.

But if I couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to write, I could at least do something useful for my career.

Deadly Inheritance called out to me. Having loaded it onto my Kindle reader, I read it from cover to cover, making notes the old-fashioned way with a pen and paper.

Boy, did the story need simplifying.

Unfortunately, life got in the way.

My mother’s Alzheimer’s was getting worse. Much worse.

Contact with Social Services, and their necessary systems and checks, wasn’t easy. At first, they said my mother didn’t need any help. While coming to terms with their decisions and the emotional strain of dealing with them, my mother’s condition deteriorated.

I can’t remember when, but my mind stopped functioning creatively.

It went into hibernation. It wasn’t a conscious decision to stop marketing or writing. I simply didn’t feel like it.

The months passed, but at least we made progress with my mother. Following pressure from us on her doctor, a new social worker took up the case. Assessments showed my mother could not make important health decisions for herself and needed assistance.

Shortly after moving to a residential home that specialised in dementia, she fell in and passed away in July of this year.

Fisher’s Fables

Death invariably makes you look back. But alongside the personal memories, my thoughts returned to No Accident, the novel that launched Kent Fisher and the Downland Murder Mysteries. Like my struggles with marketing, No Accident had a troubled and complicated journey.

It was so heavily planned, I had a lever arch folder stuffed with notes. Two-thirds of the way through writing the novel, I stalled because one of my characters refused to do what I had planned for them.

It took years for me to find a solution.

During this time of grappling with my characters and plans, I wrote a humorous blog about my work. Wishing to remain anonymous, I let Kent Fisher tell the stories that satirised senior management decisions and policies.

I stopped planning and simply wrote Fisher’s Fables. Somewhere in those blogs, written in first person present tense, I discovered my voice.

I rewrote No Accident in that voice and found a publisher not long after.

You think I would have learned from that.

Fortunately, I did.

The day after my mother passed, I sat down at my PC and deleted every folder and file about marketing.

It was time to find the old me.

The return of creativity

Over the next few weeks, the ideas flowed as my creative mind came out of hibernation.

And not a plan or structure in sight. Just like Fisher’s Fables.

I’m a discovery writer, not a planner.