Write Now with Scrivener, Episode no. 42: William Shaw, Author of Crime Fiction and Adventure Thrillers

Show notes:

• William Shaw
• The Wild Swimmers
• Aphantasia
• The Conspirators
• Raymond Carver: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
• Writers just want to be left alone
• Elly Griffiths: The Locked Room
• Martin Green: Seven Types of Adventure Tale: An Etiology of a Major Genre
• The Interpreter
• Adam Higginbotham: Challenger

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William Shaw writes in two genres: he writes mysteries, and he writes adventure thrillers under the name G.W. Shaw. His latest novel in the DI Alexandra Cupidi Series is The Wild Swimmers. I began by asking how to pronounce the name of the character. He said he should have picked a different name, but “she started as a secondary character in another novel, so it didn’t matter. The question I get asked every time is, how do I say her name? And it never occurred to me, because we all read so differently, and one of the things I don’t do is I don’t sound out in my head.”

William had mentioned in an interview that he has aphantasia; I asked him about this. “I always thought ‘the mind’s eye’ was a quaint little metaphor that people used, and I didn’t actually realize that people could close their eyes and see their friend’s face, or imagine an apple. If I try and do that, I just get the inside of my eyelid. So it was a great surprise to me to realize that everybody else was adding these images. I’ve been a writer for ages and people say, ‘Oh well, your descriptive passages are lovely,’ I think in some ways, that I’m probably at a slight advantage because I don’t see things in my head in that way, but I know what they look like.”

I told William that, reading his books, I found that there is an odd presence in the way that he writes that almost feels more visual than many other writers. He replied, “I think half the trick of writing is to put things into people’s heads. If you over-describe, you make it harder for them, because they have to take in all the details you give them. If you say, ‘tall man, blue eyes,’ they put the rest around that.”

William started out as a music journalist in the 1980s. “I literally walked into a magazine in Clerkenwell, in London, and said, ‘Can I write an article about The Smiths, please?’ In about three weeks I was assistant editor of the magazine.” He claims he wasn’t very good at it, but he was good enough to do this for about 20 years. “I wrote really bad articles for a long time. I got better at it. I got better at interviewing people. And I think it taught me a lot about character, and it taught me a lot about deadlines, which are also very useful. But I was the world’s worst music critic.”

After having published several non-fiction books, dabbling with fiction, as many journalists do, William eventually found his path. “I found myself writing a book and I realized it was crime fiction, which I’ve always loved reading. The moment I discovered crime fiction, I knew what I was doing. Part of my journey as a writer is understanding why crime fiction works so well for me. It’s a very powerful genre, because, in detective fiction, the detective doesn’t just solve the crime. He solves something else. He’s looking at society, or he’s looking at a landscape or a community, and they find something else about that world.”

William has a writer’s shack that he goes to “about three-quarters of the way through a book when it’s a complete mess and I’m too sulky to talk to other people. And that way you can live in your own personal misery until you’ve sorted out what the book’s about.” It’s totally off-grid, with no running water and only solar power. When the weather is bad, “it’s like God’s own editor is sitting above you, saying, ‘Okay, it’s a cloudy day. You’ve got to write fast.’”

William has written 12 novels with Scrivener. He says he’s a complete pantser. “I’ve tried plotting, and I cannot write if I plot. I find it very boring, and it doesn’t inspire me at all. I tend to use Scrivener in quite a basic way. I use the index cards [Corkboard] to remind myself what’s in each chapter if I need to follow them around. And I love the fact that there’s a really nice iOS version. I can write on an iPad and take it back and sync it up. Writing on an iPad with a good program is a real pleasure, because an iPad is the biggest low-energy tool. I like to wander around with an iPad and a little keyboard. I can write anywhere, and then it all syncs up with whatever I got on my desktop.”

I pointed out that William’s books have a lot of short chapters, and asked if Scrivener makes this easier for him, having the reminder in the Binder of what’s going on in each chapter. “I hadn’t thought of that. It does make it easier. I’ve got a pace that suits a narrative. And a chapter, as long as it’s not less than 1,000 words - and probably doesn’t hit 2,000 unless I really want a slow chapter - really works for me. I understand the arc of that. So if each one is a separate bit in the Binder, I know where I am. I like to think of each chapter as a little story within itself. You can take them out, you can rework them. And if you have to lose them as a chapter, it’s not hard.”