CULTURE CLUB
Peek into the process behind Kate Rhodes’ sixth Isles of Scilly mystery, The Brutal Tide A Cambridge WRITER’S DIARY
I got my first publishing deal about 12 years ago, but didn’t want to give up my job. I was living here in Cambridge and working at a college in London. To walk away from that career, which I’ve built slowly and carefully over the years, felt like madness. But my agent said to me, “You’ve got a three-book deal, you need to make each of those as good as you can.” The year is set out in very distinct patterns: I write a lot in the winter. It makes sense to do the bulk of the writing on those chilly days when you’re stuck indoors. Each year, I try to get down to the Isles of Scilly to do some research – but also take a holiday. It’s like going back in time. There’s only one supermarket for the five islands and you go between them on these tiny little boats. What motivates me through these books is the characters I’m creating. It gets to the point where they feel very real. Kitto finds the islands liberating and frustrating. He’s a complex character, and I love writing about him and his world. If you manage to create characters that you are genuinely interested in and give them plenty of backstory and quirks, it’s not that hard to spend time in their company. The human mind really interests me. I was able to really enjoy shapeshifting and getting inside the mind of my first detective Alice Quentin. She is living in
writing is a little bit like ventriloquism; you’re throwing your voice into somebody else’s character. It starts with the location. I often sit around looking at photographs of the islands and trying to imagine living on St Martin’s, with growing and cutting flowers for the winter being the main industry; what kinds of crimes are likely to occur? Sometimes I’ll just get a really strong visual image in my mind. At the start of one of my books, I imagined this woman dressed as a bride dangling a rope against a great black granite cliff. The way I work has been even more visual for the last couple of years. These books have been optioned and are now in production for TV, meaning I’ve written a couple of scripts that will soon be shooting pilots. They’re very keen for me to make these books as visual as possible, and really locate them in the islands. You’re either a visual thinker or not. The pictures come to my mind before the words. I like not writing about the territory I live on. It frees me from having to think about it when I’m walking down the streets. My mind goes elsewhere. That tourist mindset is useful – when I go on holiday somewhere, I want to see everything. I want to climb the mountain, get on the boat and do all the trips, because I may only go to that place once. If I go down to Scilly, it’s like taking a deep dive into their culture. I interview a lot of people. I’ll try and get out to all five islands if possible, to feed me with information for when I come back to Cambridge and start writing that story.
a little flat in London, one of the busiest cities in the world. To suddenly transport my imaginative world down to Scilly, where some of the islands only have 80 people living on them, was a joy. It suddenly felt like I could breathe again in this big, expansive landscape. It felt quite liberating to go from this tiny woman, five foot tall, to this guy who is six-and-a-half feet. All MAKING WAVES The latest instalment of Kate Rhodes’ acclaimed mystery series is available to purchase now from all good bookshops
The pictures come to my mind before the words
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