It’s the third and final instalment of my Theakston’s Old Peculier crime writing festival rundown – at last I hear you say! I save the best till last my blogging friends. Trust me.
And to prove that, it will be a reasonably short post. See, you’re already smiling.
Sunday morning saw the panel ‘Keeping it Real’ whether crime fiction should in fact mirror real life crimes or stay well away from the headlines. Chairing the panel after obviously not much sleep, but doing an upstanding job anyway was David Mark who was joined by Stuart Neville, Chris Carter, Stav Sherez and Tim Weaver.
Neville stated after writing Ratlines which is written about the Nazi’s, he got really angry emails. Emails he was surprised to receive.
Sherez said he liked ‘making stuff up’ because it felt like cheating otherwise and Weaver said that if you were going to use a real life event then you had to be responsible with what you did with it.
Carter made a great point in that fiction has to make sense whereas real life doesn’t and he exampled this with the rather gruesome true life story of the German cannibal who advertised for participants for him to eat and got 204 responses! If you wrote that, you’d have an editor and readers just not believing it could happen.
The final thought I came away from that panel with was from Stav who said that writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I liked that.
Back in June I wrote a blog post with a YouTube video attached that I’d found. It was actually a TED video of a man who is recording one second of every day of his life and I had decided to do this. You can find the post Here. For Harrogate, I thought I would try to do a kind of condensed version, but bearing in mind it is only over a couple of days, I did a few seconds each day, it’s a short video, but here are the results.
I would like to thank the chair of this years event Steve Mosby, Theakstons Crime, The Old Swan and of course, Dead Good Books for a great weekend that for me, went flawlessly. You can find a list of blog posts about the event at Steve’s blog – which is of course a great blog to follow anyway – Here.
And that’s me bowing out of cataloging my weekend for another year! Here’s to many more.
The German cannibal thing is wild. You’re right, you can’t make that stuff up and if you did, no one would believe you.
Liked the video you put together – that was a clever idea.
Rebecca – Terrific video! And thanks for sharing your Harro trip with us. It really does sound like you had a wonderful time. I like Sherez’ point that writing is ‘concentrated thinking.’ That makes sense to me.
It looks like a great event.
This had amazing speakers. Any chance they taped them and shared it on YT?
I know they had cameras there as they had big screens half way up the room for viewing. I’m not sure if they were actually recording though. I’ll ask the chair Steve Mosby on Twitter and let you know.
The video you made really captured the spirit of the event. I admire your talent and ambition. 🙂