I always wanted Clementine
Starke to be rather unconventional as a character but it took me a number of
drafts of the book before I finally figured her out. From the start, I’d had
the idea of a reclusive young woman, damaged by an incident in her past that
still haunted her, but trying to make her way back into the real world through
connecting with people on social media who shared her interest in true crime.
The tricky part was getting the balance right.
When the book begins, due
to the incident in her past, Clementine doesn’t feel emotion. She’s not a
sociopath or psychopath in the traditional sense – she was able to feel emotion
as a child – but trauma from an incident left her with a prevailing feeling of
‘nothingness’. In the first draft of the book I didn’t know what exactly had
caused this. I’m not a writer who plots the story out in advance – preferring
to ‘pants’ it, writing by the ‘seat of my pants’. This made writing Clementine
tough. The storyline of her teaming up with the true crime addicts who she met
online in the forum of website True Crime London flowed easy enough, but her
inner thoughts and deepest motivations evaded me. It was a frustrating time.
In my mind she was a
determined female lead, a strong woman, refusing to be kept down by her
traumatic past. But I couldn’t write her like a typical action heroine, because
although she was the driving force of the story she was also reclusive and
doubting. Her behaviour was less predictable, her decisions more erratic. Yet,
she wasn’t like Amy, the psychopathic lead character in Gillian Flynn’s amazing
thriller Gone Girl. Clementine wasn’t born without empathy; she was made that
way by the incident. It always came back to the incident. And yet even at the
end of the first draft I still didn’t know what had happened.
I got feedback on the
book, and set about improving it in the second draft. I rewrote my detective,
Dominic Bell’s, side of the story relatively quickly. I felt it was taking
shape. But Clementine’s voice, and her inner world, still eluded me. I wanted
her to be strong but vulnerable, make bad choices that put others in danger but
somehow still likable, and I wanted her to feel emotionful, even when she
couldn’t feel and understand the emotions herself. I needed to know what
happened in her backstory. I had to know more about the incident.
In the end, the key to
Clementine’s character – the motivation that drives everything in her life –
and her own voice, came to me in the middle of the night. It woke me up. But it
wasn’t divine intervention or ‘the muse’ or anything mystical that helped me,
it was Gillian Flynn. Not actual Gillian Flynn in person, obviously, but
something she’d said in an interview. Earlier that day I’d been watching a youtube
video of her The National Writers Series appearance, speaking about her writing
process and creating characters. It’s a great talk – I recommend you check it
out – and I’m pretty sure that’s what kicked my subconscious into overdrive to
figure out what the hell I was going to do with the Clementine.
I woke up with the opening
paragraph to Clementine’s chapter in my head, and a sudden realisation of what
the incident was, so I groped for my notebook (always on the floor by my bed)
and scribbled down the lines that are still the opening lines in chapter one:
They say I was dead for three thousand and six seconds. They say that
when I woke I was different, but I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is
that my world became a different place once every one of those precious seconds
had expired.
Then I got up, took my
notebook with me, made myself a mug of coffee and sat down at my desk. I spent
the rest of the night writing Clementine Starke.
Can a group of true crime
addicts take on the police to catch a serial killer?
KISS THE GIRLS… A young
woman is found dead in her bedroom surrounded by rose petals - the latest
victim of 'The Lover'. Struggling under the weight of an internal
investigation, DI Dominic Bell is no closer to discovering the identity of the
killer and time is running out. AND MAKE
THEM DIE... As the murders escalate,
Clementine Starke joins an online true crime group determined to take justice
in their own hands - to catch the killer before the police. Hiding a dark
secret, she takes greater risks to find new evidence and infiltrate the group. As Starke and Bell get closer to cracking the
case neither of them realise they're being watched. The killer is closer to
them than they think, and he has his next victim - Clementine - firmly in his
sights.
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