I’d love to tell you The Buried is the book I couldn’t stop writing… But it just wasn’t like that! From the very start, writing The Buried was like pulling hen’s teeth. It must have showed to my publisher, Anna, because when I did finally finish it and submitted we started edits right away. Over the numerous edits, every word has changed. Scenes have been deleted, paragraphs erased, sentences transformed.
The storyline hasn’t altered – the idea, the plot exactly as I’d planned, but the scenes and the way they’ve been written, have. (My editors really make me look good!)
It’s strange to have a whole book upended like The Buried was. The only other time I’ve had that happen was when I was writing one of the ‘Young Dave Books’, and I deleted 50,000 words with a week until my deadline and rewrote 60,000 words in a week!
What I know is THE BURIED IS A MUCH BETTER BOOK for it!
Did I ever feel like I hit my magic zone when I was writing this book?
Firstly, what a magic zone?
Well, that’s when everything suddenly clicks together, and the writing just flows from you. Everything feels easy, and when you go back and reread, you think: ‘Did I really write that?’ The answer is always yes because no one else does!
Did I find that zone in The Buried? Yeah, but not until the second edit. Again, that’s different for me. Normally the first twenty thousand words in any book I’ve written just turn up. They’re easy to write. I’m laying the plot out and getting to know the characters. All of that is fun and easy.
It starts to be more difficult when it’s time to pull the plot lines together from about 21,000 words in, and I must get those threads to all make sense and be realistic at the same time.
The other part of any book I have trouble with is the ending. It doesn’t matter how many craft books I read, or authors talking about their process that I listen to; I always rush the ending. I suspect because by then, I just want the bloody thing to finish so I can get feedback from the publishers and start on the edit.
Writers (well, me at least and a few others I know) are notoriously neurotic and needy and feedback from the people we respect most in the industry (for me, my agent, Gaby, publisher, Anna and editor, Maddy) is important to keep us going!
When you do read The Buried, I hope that you don’t see any of the struggle that was behind the words in the first couple of drafts. I hope you fall into the pages, get swept up in the Kalgoorlie underworld and walk along with Detectives Angie Sullivan and Damien Carmichael as they investigate a ram raid and what turns out to be decades of lies and secrets.
And what makes me start another book, when it was so hard to write The Buried? Well, I guess it’s a bit like having a baby. Labour might be hard and painful, but a few years later you forget how difficult it was. Writing is truly like that. By the time I front up to write the next book, I’ve forgotten my moaning and groaning, sore wrists and hands. I feel so excited to get to know more characters and write another story…
Until about 21,000 words in!
A place to hide. A secret to bury.
The fourth thrilling novel in the bestselling Kalgoorlie series from beloved Australian crime writer Fleur McDonald.
A fiery car crash into a shop is only the beginning ...
When a car slams into a Kalgoorlie corner store, Detective Angie Sullivan hopes that it is a chance mishap. But as she starts an investigation, unsettled by the arrival of a new detective from Perth, she is drawn into something darker than it first appears.
The death of a local homeless man at the same time seems at first to be a tragic accident. But inconsistencies at the scene - the abandoned mineshaft where he lived - suggest a more sinister truth.
Angie and her team must grapple with secrets, betrayals and murder to unravel a mystery that stretches back across decades.
