The art of crafting a pageturner

There are no formulae or rules of writing a pageturner but half of writing is about learning the craft and the rest is art, says crime fiction writer

Clare Mackintosh

. On Sunday, she, along with Amish Tripathi and Ashwin Sanghi, talked about the latter in detail. and their method ranges from Excel worksheets to a private email ID for storing interesting bits from books or interactions.

While Mackintosh uses Excel to structure her chapters and chart what her readers will conclude from those, Sanghi maps his story in terms of years, what each character is doing then and the country’s politics, economics and social mores at the time. He also has a Gmail account to record whatever strikes him as raw material to expand on in the future because “everyone gets ideas but they don’t retain those”. To this, Mackintosh quipped, “I hope you don’t forget the password.” Tripathi offered his email ID as back-up.

All three fiction writers put in a lot of research before they write because it is important, said Tripathi, to “tell lies as close to the truth as possible to make those believable”. But creating compelling characters that readers care about is what makes a bestseller, said Mackintosh, adding that she usually knows where a story will go but sometimes it changes during the course of writing. Tripathi said he knows the end of his story at the beginning but the path sometimes changes.

On the source of ideas, Mackintosh said they come from newspapers or something that happens around her but what interests her is not the case as it happens but what happens outside it – what, for instance, happens after a murder or how it changes people’s lives. The “what if” is the starting point, she said. Her career as a police officer has made her interact with a range of people – those on the streets to the ones in the big houses – and “people-watching” has made her a better writer, she feels. However, she doesn’t want to write about other people’s tragedies for entertainment or money and hence fiction is her choice.

On writing historical fiction, Tripathi said it requires the recreation of entire scenes which are totally different from how things are currently, but since readers don’t know how it was centuries ago writers can take more liberties in using their imagination.

The three writers agreed on using conversations to tell a story rather than going for long, boring descriptions. Mackintosh said she initially faced difficulties on this front but became better at it after she worked on a screenplay. Sanghi recommends writing stories like they would be told before friends, and to read aloud conversations to gauge how real they sound.

Our personal experiences feed the stories we write and writing is therapeutic in the sense that it helps us deal with our tragedies, said Mackintosh. But she also thinks that it is not necessary to experience an emotion to write about it. If we can understand it such as feel what it would be like to lose a loved one, we can write about loss and grief, she said.

Tripathi feels that characters are more nuanced when the writer is non-judgmental. Expanding on this, Mackintosh said that playing on readers’ prejudices and how they are likely to judge a character, however, can be used with skill to bring in twists.

Stories are born out of real world experiences, said Sanghi, adding that the first step towards writing is a lot of reading. Ideas can be improved by discussing them with others but in the end, writing is a personal experience and Mackintosh said she doesn’t think what her readers will like when she is finally penning down a story.