Process Blog Tour - Guest Post!

Michael Sears was one of the writers I tagged in the Writers' Process Blog Tour, and I'm delighted that he's my guest today. 

 Michael  is one half of the writing partnership who, with Stanley Trollip, forms the writer Michael Stanley, author of the fabulous Inspector Kubu novels set in Africa. Read more about him here or follow Inspector Kubu on Twitter or Facebook.

Here are his answers about his writing and writing process.

1. What am I working on?

Currently Stanley Trollip and I are working on three projects and inevitably that means they are all going quite slowly.  The fifth Detective Kubu novel is with our wonderful new editor – Marcia Markland at Thomas Dunne Books – so I’m drafting a plan for the sixth book in the series.  It started as an idea for a novella, but seems to have grown into a full length book.  It links the witch doctors of the fourth book and the Bushmen of the third book and keeps Kubu on his toes.

Meanwhile Stanley is well into a new venture for us – a stand-alone thriller set partly in the US, partly in Zimbabwe and partly in Asia.  We’re trying to decide if it’s first person narration, third person, present tense etc. etc.  But we think we understand the protagonist at last and that’s vital.

Finally, that promised novella is still out there tossing ideas into our heads.

2.  How does my work differ from others in the genre?

I suppose the obvious answer is that I write with someone else.  Even that isn’t as unusual as you might think.  There are quite a few very successful crime/thriller writing partnerships.  Most of them write under one name, (as we do) - our editor told us it’s too hard for people to remember two names.  PJ Tracy, Nicki French, Charles Todd, Roslund and Hellstrom immediately spring to mind.  But one finds that every writing partnership works rather differently, and what may make us unusual is that we both do everything – plotting, research, writing, editing.  And we enjoy every minute of it.

 3.  Why do I write what I write?

Keeping in mind that both of us are scientists who became enthusiastic mystery writers quite late in life, I think the answer is that crime fiction has always intrigued us.  There has been something of a renaissance in the genre in South Africa over the last ten to fifteen years and it was easy to get caught up in that.  Then, very long ago, we were in the bush together in Botswana watching a pack of hyenas tear apart and devour a wildebeest.  Nothing was left but the horns.  It seemed to us a wonderful way for a murderer to get rid of a body!  Of course that wasn’t a story, it wasn’t even a plot for a story, but it did get us thinking about why someone would want to make a body disappear that way – completely without trace.  And twenty years later that led to A CARRION DEATH.

It was our intention to set the story in South Africa, but it’s not so easy to rustle up hyenas to do their work on a body in South Africa without going through fences and control gates.  So the story migrated to Botswana, a country we both know and love.  That turned out to be a wonderful boon for us; it allows us to explore issues in southern Africa that are not related to the legacy of apartheid, but still deep and important issues here.  Blood diamonds, the plight of the Bushman peoples of the Kalahari, the legacy of the war in Zimbabwe, the power of the witch doctors.

4.  How does my individual writing process work?

When it comes to the writing, one of us will do a first draft of one or two chapters.  That is sometimes chosen by our individual interests and expertise, but often it is just when one or other of us has a good idea or concept for that particular piece.

The first draft then gets emailed to the other, and comes back covered in red track-changes - wording issues, comments, suggestions.  The overall reaction ranges from: “I love it – just a few tweaks” – translation: “It will be fine when you’ve completely rewritten it” to “This needs work” – translation: “Even after you’ve completely rewritten it, it will be hopeless.”

If you write with someone else you both have to buy into the writing being the most important thing.  Don’t have a thin skin!

Thank you, Michael!