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Michael Robotham is the author of a number of excellent crime thrillers including Lost, Suspect, and Shatter. HIs latest novel, Bleed for Me, has just been published and over the weekend he was interviewed by Jason Steger. |
Robotham is one of those writers who doesn't plot in advance. He started the book twice, discarding 30,000 words of very different novels each time. ''It's like digging and you find a little dinosaur bone and you start brushing away and you don't know if you've found a massive dinosaur or a buried dog bone.''
He wouldn't have it any other way. ''If I knew what was going to happen right through from chapter to chapter it would be like a normal job. I wouldn't be excited about going to work every day. Things happen when I write that excite me, things surprise me, things shock me and things frighten me. And if they do me, they must the reader as well.''
But if the writer is in control, how can this happen?
''Like in all drama, you create these seeds of conflict, put your characters under pressure and see how they react. And suddenly you either come up with something new to throw into the mix to totally turn everything on its head or a character will react in a way you don't sort of expect.''
