I am writing biographical fiction and I’m trying to stay as true to the history as possible. This has given me a good initial structure of the content or plot of the novel. After that I imagine the characters talking to each other and the things that they will say. Often this comes to me when I am driving the car, taking a shower or just as I wake up in the morning. I quickly jot down the ideas. After I take out the scribbles and turn them into dialogue on the computer. Sometimes there is context like a description of where the characters are and the things that they are doing but often there isn’t. I need to go back in at a later date or put some effort into defining those things. I look up historical information on settings and places to fill in some of the details.

While writing the first draft I restructured Wilful Murder a few times. I’ve changed the working title three times already. It was necessary to condense some of the historical timeframe so that it would fit and I could skip the boring bits.

Writing a synopsis was a useful way to try and define what the book was about and considering the question ‘What does the character want?’ Katheryn Heyman mentioned this in a workshop that I attended and it helped me significantly understand where the end of the book was for each character and try to bring their stories to a close together at the end. The book is over when each character either gets what they want or realises they aren’t going to get what they want.

Pace and suspense are two other things that I think about. The end of the Wilful Murder book is quite fragmented – jumping between three POVs. I think this will create a sense of urgency and pace, a kind of crescendo to the end but I also don’t want it to be too bitsy. Some of that is made worse by spreading the events out through time so that’s where I have used my creative licence to condense the events to be more sequential in time. At one stage, Beth’s illness seemed out of place and I didn’t know how to tie it in. I was going to cut it out completely but then an investigation into the historical facts proposed a solution. She gets married in Launceston a few years after the illness in Launceston – I could introduce a way for her to stay in that town after the illness instead of coming back to the family and that ties it in to Ann’s motivations and regrets. It is amazing sometimes how the historical record keeps on giving.

Once the first draft is done there is a lot of editing that I need to do to add in some description and linking sentences between the scenes in the same chapter.