Today it's my stop on the blog tour for Made to be Broken by Rebecca Bradley. I'm delighted to welcome Rebecca to my blog. Made to be Broken was published on 20 June 2016.
Kill Your Darlings
by Rebecca Bradley
Can I first start this
post by thanking Vicki for hosting me on her blog. Over the past week or so, I
have found out just how wonderful and kind the blogging community really is and
Vicki is among those filled with kindness. So, thank you Vicki.
Advice
given to new writers is to ‘Kill your
darlings’. You can trace this quote back to William Faulkner who said ‘In
writing, you must kill all your darlings.’ It was then compounded by Stephen
King when he said ‘Kill your darlings,
even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your
darlings.’ This advice isn’t about killing off your characters, but about
the harsh slice of the editing pen. When going through your manuscript you are
told to make sure to kill those darling words, be harsh, get rid of any that
don’t earn their keep. If they are there simply because you love the way they
sound, but they hold no value, then they have to go.
So,
am I going to tell you about my editing process today? How I rid my manuscript
of all my beautiful and lyrical prose that I wish I could keep but it has no
place in the Major Incident Room of DI Hannah Robbins?
No.
I’m
actually going to talk about killing my actual darlings. My characters. But,
not really kill them.
Confused?
A
lot of series fiction has a regular set of characters. A team of detectives who
deal with the crimes that occur on their watch. They get put through the mill
at every opportunity and generally their lives are twisted upside down. When I
set out writing, I wanted my series to be a little different. Having worked
sixteen years in the police service I know life isn’t like that. It’s rare you
work with exactly the same team year after year. The team you are a part of
changes in a very fluid manner. People apply and join the team as and when
someone else leaves or extra staff are needed. But when it comes to leaving,
there are a multitude of reasons for someone moving on. You can have someone
leave temporarily on maternity, move for promotion purposes, move for a sideways
move in a change in department because of their own career plans, retirement, a
forced move because the job requires staff somewhere else and sometimes people
just decide to leave the job. Any police department is an evolving unit.
If
the reality is so carousel like, I wanted my fiction to mirror this. I don't
want my readers to be comfortable with any book they read in the series, I want
them always to be wondering if any character safe, is one of their favourites
going to be leaving? It's not that I want to torture my readers, it's that I
want to insert a reality and also some unexpectedness.
Police
procedural novels, as the phrase itself indicates, are usually run as a police
murder investigation. Though, it's the case itself that gives the story its
punch, as procedure isn't very gripping.
So,
I thought if we can, in some way, have a fluidity of movement within the
characters and is something else other than the main story, it’ll make it both
realistic and, hopefully interesting as readers find out if their favourite
character is going to make it through. That's not to say I want to make changes
in every single book, because again you can go quite long periods of time with
quite a stable team and I’m also not going to keep making changes for the sake
of making changes.
But,
at the end of the day, the only safe character in the series is Hannah Robbins
because it is the DI Hannah Robbins series.
Though,
don't test me on that… *Evil cackle
How
do you feel about this, the movement of characters? Does it make you uneasy as
you like a regular cast of characters, or do you think this could be an
interesting look at a working series?
About Rebecca Bradley
Rebecca Bradley is a retired police detective who lives in Nottinghamshire with her family and her two cockapoos Alfie and Lola. They keep her company while she writes. Rebecca needs to drink copious amounts of tea to function throughout the day and if she could, she would survive on a diet of tea and cake while committing murder on a regular basis.
Sign up to the newsletter on the blog at rebeccabradleycrime.com to receive the first 5 chapters of Made to be Broken, exclusive content and giveaways. Find Rebecca on Twitter - @RebeccaJBradley
By Rebecca Bradley
Published by CrateSpace/Amazon (on 30 June 2016)
ISBN: 978-1533651013
Book description
A rising death toll. A city in panic.
A young mother is found dead in her home with no obvious cause of death. As DI Hannah Robbins and her team investigate, it soon becomes clear that the woman is the first in a long line of murders by poison.
With the body count climbing, and the city of Nottingham in social meltdown, the team finds themselves in a deadly race against a serial killer determined to prove a point.
And Hannah finds herself targeting an individual with whom she has more in common than she could possibly know.
A young mother is found dead in her home with no obvious cause of death. As DI Hannah Robbins and her team investigate, it soon becomes clear that the woman is the first in a long line of murders by poison.
With the body count climbing, and the city of Nottingham in social meltdown, the team finds themselves in a deadly race against a serial killer determined to prove a point.
And Hannah finds herself targeting an individual with whom she has more in common than she could possibly know.
Visit Amazon to buy Made to be Broken here.
