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Special Offer for Dymocks Booklover members Visit the SCMP Dymocks Book Club website
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Tim Blake's daughter Sydney has gone missing - and when he looks for her at the hotel where she says she has been working for the summer, none of the staff have ever heard of her. If she hasn't been working at the hotel, what has has she been doing, and what was she hiding from her father? More importantly, how is Tim going to find her? The Booklover asked Linwood Barclay about his writing, that has gripped a legion of readers.
Q With all of the twists and turns, your plotlines are very intricate, with many pieces fitting together to produce the story. Do you need to spend a lot of time mapping out this out before starting to write each book?
I can only map out so much of a plot before I begin. I know my way in, I have a general sense of what the story is about and where I want to end up, but finally I grow frustrated with pages of planning notes and decide to just jump in. It's a bit like standing at the edge of a pool filled with cold water. But it's only in the writing of the book that I start to see the opportunities that are available. Sometimes I work backwards. I think of a twist near the end, then I go back into the story to set things up.
Q Have you ever been stuck trying to get the pieces to fit together? What helps you find a breakthrough in moments like this?
If it feels like you're trying to jam a round peg into a square hole, you really need to find another way. Readers can tell when you're straining to make everything fit. When I'm stuck, I have a number of options. Talk to my agent, who is great plot problem solver with super instincts, so play some golf on the Nintendo Wii, run some model trains, or cut the lawn. I've solved a lot of plot problems while pushing a lawnmower around.
Q Until 2007 you were working as a journalist whilst also writing your novels. Did you need to set an intensive regime to combine both - and has this changed since you became a full-time writer?
I wrote five or six novels while still producing three columns a week for the Toronto Star. (Fortunately for me, it was a humour column, and the research consisted mostly of just being me, and keeping up with the news.) I was using up Star vacation time to finish books, and getting pretty exhausted. When my novel No Time for Goodbye was a publishing hit in Germany, I felt I could take a year off from the paper. During that year, my books started taking off in many other markets, particularly the UK, and I made the decision not to go back to the paper. I thought, once I retired from the Star, things would get a little easier, but as the books have grown in popularity, so has the business of promoting them. But I'm not complaining. This is what I've wanted to do my whole life.
Q What first inspired you to write thrillers? Was there a particular book or author, or did inspiration come from another source?
I had always wanted to write. By the time I was in my twenties I'd written three or four crime novels, none of which I was able to get published, and a good thing, too. Between 1996 and 2000 I wrote four books -- three humour books and a memoir -- that were published only in Canada. They traded on my reputation as a columnist. But what I really wanted to do was write a thriller. In 2004, my first novel, Bad Move, a comic thriller, came out. I did three more books with the characters from that one, then went to darker standalones with No Time for Goodbye.
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Visit any Dymocks store for tickets to meet Linwood Barclay on July 8th.
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