- Hi, I'm K.L. Slater,
and I write bestselling psychological thrillers.
I'm going to share with you
some tips and tricks on how I write.
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I think suspense is really important
for an author to give the reader,
and it's really important to give the reader or the listener
a reason to keep turning the pages.
As an author, you have to stop characters
achieving or getting what they want.
It's sort of like there's a story happening,
but there's also an underlying sense of doom
or an underlying sense of tension.
So for instance, you're building up to a point
in, say, "Missing" where they child is going to go missing
and the reader knows that.
At the point the child goes missing, then the goalpost
is set again with the suspense of who's taken her.
So you're forever working in sort of increments
of keeping that suspense going and giving the reader
something to try and work out for themselves,
especially in, I think, a thriller or a psych suspense.
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The very best plot twists you don't know are coming.
I think if you've built up suspense well as an author,
the reader might suspect something's coming,
but they don't expect the twist that you're going to do.
That's the very best kind of twist.
I think a good plot twist comes from left field,
totally unexpected, and yet the clues were there.
So I think it's getting harder for authors
to pull that kind of plot twist off,
because readers are just so savvy and getting so smart
and looking for the clues and the plot twists,
and that's part of the fun.
It nearly always happens later on for me
in the process of writing the first draft,
and sometimes the twist isn't there,
or the best twist isn't there until I'm editing,
and that's just the way it works for me,
and I think it's something about getting to know
the characters and fully understanding the story
in its entirety, and something will occur to me.
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I had a working class upbringing.
I grew up in a mining village, mining towns around me.
It means something to me, that struggle,
and I can refer to that struggle and I know how it feels
to be in a situation that's not perfect,
so even if my main character ends up wealthy
or, you know, having an exciting life,
they've usually got that background, and that, for me,
is key, that the person is ordinary,
having an ordinary life, and I think that's quite attractive
in the type of book I write, that people are quite ordinary
and then something extraordinary happens.
I think it's equally as important for the reader
to identify with the villain in some way, if possible.
Not always possible, I've had some pretty bad people
in my books, but if possible,
I think it makes that person seem real and more believable.
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I think you can write in a setting
that's completely different to what you know,
but I do think there's a particular advantage.
I think there's a particular advantage
to writing a setting that you know.
In my case, you know,
I was born and lived in Nottingham all my life.
For me, it's a natural thing to use a setting
that I'm very familiar with, and it helps me,
because it doesn't take much thinking of the setting
and I can put my efforts and resources
into the plot and the storyline
when I know the setting so well.
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My ideas usually come, perhaps always come, from real life.
So an example of an idea that I had
was for my book called "The Marriage"
and actually it was my husband,
he was reading his newspaper on his iPad, and he said to me,
"Oh, I think you'll be really interested in this."
It was a story of a woman
whose son had been killed by another man,
and it was a one punch incident.
He'd hit the woman's son, and he'd died,
and she had eventually,
through the restorative justice system,
they'd got talking, and they'd made a friendship of sorts.
That was the seed of the idea.
Now, all my ideas start as seeds,
and I get a lot of seeds of ideas that never go anywhere,
because one of the ways that I know
if an idea's worth taking further
is because it stays in my mind and I'm thinking about it,
and even when I'm writing something else,
it's on the back burner.
What I did with "The Marriage" was I thought,
if I took that initial idea of someone's son
being killed by another man and instead of becoming friends,
she actually married him, and then I started
to sort of put the pressure on
and develop the idea into something
that was starting to be quite interesting and different.
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Generally, there's not any one given formula,
because that'd just make authors' lives so much easier,
but there are certainly things that writers can do
to create a bit of a template,
a start of a framework of a formula
that you can follow to help you along the way.
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