Detective John Dark’s daughter has been missing for two years. In his frantic and unfruitful search for her two years ago, John Dark overreached and was reprimanded and demoted.
Now suddenly back into the homicide department, Dark is put on a chilling case – a man who killed his wife in their locked house and then dressed the body up to resemble a deer, but claims to remember none of it. A few days later an impossibly similar case crops up connecting the suspects to a prep school and a thirty year old missing persons’ case.
Just as he is getting back into his old groove, a new lead in his daughter’s disappearance pops up and threatens to derail his career again.
Time is running out and John Dark needs to solve the case before more people are killed, and while there is still hope to find his daughter.
In the style of True Detective and Silence of the Lambs, WHITESANDS is a thrilling supernatural crime novel.
It’s true what they say. Writing is all in the revisions
In its first draft, Whitesands was a different book. The main character, Detective John Dark, wasn’t even in it. In the third draft, the book was set up with intervening chapters of John Dark being interviewed because of a thing that happens late in the book. It broke the timeline and slowed the pace so I took them out in the fourth draft.
The fifth draft, which I wrote SEVEN years after the first one, was written in one week in Exeter in the U.K., when I was invited to be a Writer-in-Residence. The final draft came after a thorough wringing of edits. It is what is out now and only mildly resembles the first draft.
But the first draft got the train on the rails, and the magic happened in the revisions.
I also learned there that, as much as I thought the opposite, I am indeed a pantser and not a plotter.
Don’t be afraid to let your influences show
A lot of writers avoid being too influenced by other books as they write, so they will read only non-fiction while they work or, as I learned Catriona Ward (author of the fantastic Last House on Needless Street) does, will read nothing at all. This is done so not as to be overly influenced.
I, however, positively wallow in my influences. I positively roll around in the prose and the structure of other books as I write. I actively try to use work I admire as a sieve through which I write.
In the case of Whitesands, my copy of The Silence of the Lambs was always within reach. The way Thomas Harris starts his chapters, the way he shows us the villain not through hints but by giving them the stage in long dedicated chapters. The pure depths of dread and bleakness.
I would read Raymond Chandler and try to emulate the feeling of his prose and the style of Mr. Dickens.
Seek critique and love the lessons
This is absolutely the best way to improve your writing. As I worked my way up into being a writer I knew that I had to learn how to write. There are, in my opinion, two ways to do this and you have to do them both at the same time; read books considered classics (or at least very good) and get your writing read and critiqued.
There will be a tendency at first to explain the critiques you are getting to the reader “Oh, yeah, I wrote it that way to keep people guessing.” or “That, they were in the house already. Most people are going to get it, I don’t need to fix it.”
You need to listen and remember that the work is not you. The points reviewers have for you are points readers will trip over as well. Fix them and learn from them, as painful as it may be.
Oh, and read more Dickens.
The details don’t matter if the story is there
There are parts of Whitesands that are pure police procedural. Only, I do not really know anything about the procedures of a police investigation except for what I’ve seen on TV.
However, the police procedural is like in Seven – it’s what we imagine a police investigation is like. I let the story take the front seat and made up any details that seemed to matter. Of all the people who have read Whitesands, only one person has mentioned it.
It helps that this is not a police procedural story at heart, like Seven. There’s a story being told that just happens to have detectives as main characters. Don’t worry if you are writing a space opera and don’t know how the gravity tech actually works. If the story is exciting it won’t matter.
Raymond Chandler himself completely forgot about a dead character in his first book.
Writing a book takes a loooooong time. Be patient.
I wrote the first words of Whitesands waaaaaay back in 2009. I started and realized that I did not, in fact, know how to write, much less how to put together a novel. So I tried writing short stories, took a few lessons and started reading with purpose and discipline. I read Dickens because writers are supposed to, and then I realized why – every single fucking book by Dickens is a masterclass in characterization, prose and structure. I read Joseph Conrad (great prose, dull pacing and structure), Hemingway (prose again), Shirley Jackson (wow) and Chandler, Carver, Shakespeare… I learned to write. I then took another shot at Whitesands and another and edited and re-wrote and pitched to agents (unsuccessfully) and then to publishers (successfully). It took just about ten years from idea to publication. And it was totally worth it.
Johann Thorsson is an Icelandic writer who enjoys cold drinks, puppies, pizza, a warm meal after a hard day’s work and books. His work has appeared in numerous publications in both Icelandic and English. Whitesands is his first novel
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