'Believe in your character' advice from writer

“Someone on Facebook told me she was worried about Lottie not eating enough, so in the next book I had her bringing an apple to work in her bag.”

When a reader gets so particularly involved in a character, it's a good indication that an author has achieved that most important thing, making the people she creates believable, writes Brian Byrne. One important thing helps to make that possible.

“You've got to believe in your character yourself,” crime novelist Patricia Gibney told those attending the Kildare Readers Festival event in Woodbine Books on Thursday evening. “She has to be the kind of person you want to hug at one moment, and shake in the next.” Just like often the case with a real life friend.

Patricia Gibney is now working on the eighth book featuring Detective Inspector Lottie Parker, a Garda in a fictitious place called Ragmullin which has a strong physical resemblance to Mullingar. Where the author is from, which explains that.

Across the evening, Mary Orford drew Patricia Gibney's own story from the author, in a series of questions worthy of the fictional detective herself. A story which began with the death of the writer's husband a short time after being diagnosed with cancer. As a form of therapy she took to writing ‘morning pages’, regularly writing three or four pages of anything.

“Now it’s better known as journalling. My focus was at first to get me out in the morning. I was all over the place, and I had to give up work because I wasn’t able for it.” After five years, the ‘write anything’ morning project had finished up as a book, based around DI Lottie Parker. “I decided it had to be published, so I sent it for professional appraisal.”

She says the report she got back was ‘heart-rending’. “I had to spend another year editing.” But then, what Patricia emphasises all the time at events like this, luck and timing took their turns.

“I sent three chapters to an agent, and she wrote back wanting to see the whole book. When I heard from her next, she was apologising for taking so long, but she had been absorbed by the book and wanted to see how it turned out. I wrote back saying I thought she had the wrong person ...”

After some work by her agent, Patricia was offered a four-book contract with a digital publisher in London, Bookouture. “I knew nothing about digital publishing, but my agent said go for it.”

A digital version of the first book, The Missing Ones, was very successful on publication in 2017, and others followed. Along the way, Bookouture was taken over by the established imprint Hachette, and her books are now being published in trade paperback in Ireland and the UK, and recently in the US.

“There have also been translations. In Spain — I was brought to Madrid to promote it — in Norway, France, Italy, the Czech Republic, and the books will soon be in China.”

On the creation of Lottie Parker, Patricia says the detective came out in her morning pages exercises. “A widow, a young family. A lot of my grief and anger. What makes her relatable to people is that she has a lot of real attributes. Including throwing herself into her job to get away from facing personal things.”

Her storyline subjects are dark, which she freely admits. "When I was writing The Missing Ones there was a lot of stuff in the papers and media about mother and baby homes. I grew up in a staunchly Catholic family, and it really hurt me. It was also all coming out at a very bad time in my life. You only have to fictionalise one story and it brings out all the darkness. There's just so much darkness out there, it feeds into the work."

Patricia’s work methods include keeping a dedicated notebook for each writing project. “I love buying notebooks. I write my notes when I’m out, and then type them into the laptop. Then I use the Scrivener writer's app to keep everything where it should be.”

She doesn't fully plot out a project, or its development. “I get an idea, somebody gets killed, stuff happens. I don’t know how it’s going to turn out. I’d usually have a number of suspects, and at around 80,000 words I’d settle on one. Then I’d go back and write what's needed to lead to them.”

Moving her characters around Ragmullin is managed by having a map of Mullingar on her wall with the various locations of the story marked in.

With the last of her contracted series of nine books about Lottie Parker looming, Patricia is hankering to do something a bit different. “I took a break in the summer and started a psychological thriller. But it’s beginning to look a lot like a crime story ...”

She tries to write every morning. If she misses the morning, she just lets it go until the next day. Experience has shown her that morning is her creative time.

Advice for other writers? “There are no hard and fast rules, everybody is different. Just keep writing, I probably discard as much as I keep. You have to be passionate. It's luck, timing, and a lot of hard work. It took me five years to write the first book, and now I'm doing two a year. You keep going and then one day it happens and it’s brilliant."

Mary Orford asked her if life as a published author is what she imagined it would be? “I’m the same as I was ten years ago. I'm an avid reader, and could never see myself without a book in my bag. I used to think that the authors I read myself, like Lee Child and others, were superstars. But now I’ve been meeting them at book festivals, and I find they’re just ... ordinary people.”

Like the best characters in the best stories.

(I'd like to acknowledge that Mary Orford asked the questions at the event, part of the Kildare Readers Festival, which led to this article. Which was a least half my work done. The evening was organised by Julie O'Donoghue of Kilcullen Library in association with Woodbine Books. BB)


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