CRIME WRITING
MAXIMUM SENTENCE
Criminal barrister turned million-selling author Helen Fields describes what her years in court have taught her about delivering a well-paced crime stor y, and what you can learn from her experience.
Helen Fields
Life is a series of stories. It really is as simple as that. As social human beings, most of us are pretty adept at telling them, too. So how is it that we often forget all those years of training we’ve had when we sit down to write a short story or a novel? That, you see, is the over-think. It’s the point when we tr y, as writers, to ‘come up’ with a narrative voice. Huge mistake. There’s no real magic about narrative voice. The only way for it to be natural and to make it convincing, is for that voice to be your authentic self. We’ve all read books when it feels as if the author is trying too hard, or the style feels fake, and that inevitably is because the adopted writing style isn’t the author’s real voice.
By the time I came to writing books, I was very lucky. I’d had years to think about how to use my voice to be persuasive, although I really didn’t think about what I was doing at the time. Looking back now, I can see how my career as a barrister helped me shape the stories I write today. In media, and in life, people often joke about lawyers being good liars. In fact, there are all sorts of rules that prevent barristers from telling lies in court or within the process of a case, but when you look more closely at the implications, what barristers are expert at is shaping a set of facts into a compelling, engaging story for a jury. Sometimes it’s about understanding what to leave out. Likewise, how to leave the most important facts to the very end for maximum impact. It is, in fact, about leading a jury to see the case from your client’s perspective, whether that be prosecuting or defending. The best barristers are the best story tellers. That’s not fiction, of course, but the strategy and skills are the same.