Writer’s block and incubation theory

If you watch a kettle boil when making a cup of tea, you’ll notice three things. First, it’s boring, and you feel like you’re wasting time. Second, time itself seems to slow down, right before it boils. It’s as if those pesky water molecules need an extra kicking to get them to dance around more and actually boil. Third, it goes quiet before it actually boils. The calm before the storm. There’s a fourth thing, too. If you think, ‘to hell with it, it’s hot enough’, and decide to make the tea anyway without letting the water boil, it won’t taste as good.
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Lost in wrecks – hardcore wreck-diving

One of the motivations for writing 66 Metres was wreck diving. I’ve dived wrecks in many different parts of the world, and I am always fascinated by seeing these graveyard ships, imagining how they were before, and witnessing how nature colonizes them, turning even warships into havens for fish and coral.

But they are often spooky, approaching out of the gloom. And there is always an amount of added danger, from becoming lost or getting trapped inside one, to catching a limb on a jagged edge and cutting yourself (never a good idea in shark-infested tropical seas), to finding poisonous fish (e.g.…


Inside a killer’s head

When writing a thriller, there needs to be a sense of jeopardy for the protagonist. Perhaps a killer is after her, maybe more than one. The killer can be left vague, abstract, distant, and this allows the reader to imagine how terrifying they can be. [nice image by Jiceh, by the way]

Or…

The author can go inside the killer’s head, show the reader what is in there. This approach is less followed, for several reasons.

(1) The writer is not a killer (well, usually, one hopes), and writers should ‘write what they know’.…


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