Regular readers of the blog will know that Paul Finch is one of my favourite authors and so I am very excited to be sharing a Q&A with Paul today where he gives some very in-depth answers which I hope you enjoy reading! Paul's latest novel is
Hunted which I
reviewed recently on the blog as part of the blog tour for the book.
1. Does your background - as a police officer and then as a script-writer - help when it comes to writing your books?
The answer to both those questions is yes. Though Heck’s adventures are entirely fictional, and bear almost no relation to my own time as a police officer, the police world in which he dwells is as believably real as I can make it. I don’t get bogged down in procedure and protocol. Frankly, that would be boring. So much police time is spent engaging in paperwork, sitting in court and so forth. No one would want to read about that. So while I tend to skip that detail, I want to get the nuances right, the street-speak, the interaction between the ranks, the legalese etc. So while I’d never say the Heck novels were realistic in terms of the way they portray crime-fighting – they are action-thrillers after all, I’m very keen on them being authentic. And this is where my own police service comes in. I lived it so I can write it. In fact, when I was first recruited to write for
The Bill at the end of the 1990s, I was one of the few writers, if not the only one, who didn’t have to participate in ride-alongs with the Met, as I was already very familiar with day-to-day police life.
As for script-writing, that always helps you as a writer simply because it requires such discipline and tightness of touch. One key thing I learned writing screenplays was to eliminate anything that wasn’t essential, whether that be in terms of drama, plot or character. Anything that doesn’t directly serve the overall aim of producing a crisp, concise, fast-moving narrative with no sag in it whatsoever (hopefully) has to come out. So, though the reader will never see it, most of my Heck novels tend to shed 40-odd thousand words between the first draft and the second draft. I want it tight as a corkscrew. By the same token, all scenes – in novel terms, all chapters – must end on a note of tension. This is not necessarily an explosion or someone hanging off a cliff, but something to raise the stakes, the idea being to sweep the reader along into the next section without him or her stopping for a break. This is definitely something I’ve imported from my script-writing, and I think it’s the main reason my novels are regularly described as “page-turners” or “unputdownable”. It’s very flattering when I read that kind of stuff, and if it’s true, very satisfying.
