HARRIET TYCE

The bestselling crime writer and former criminal barrister provides concrete evidence of five books that most influenced her own writing life

©Rory Lewis Photography

My new book is called A Lesson in Cruelty. I started writing the first draft on 7 July 2022, and finished it by 31 October. Then the hard work began – it went through three structural edits and several rounds of line edits. I pressed send on the finished document about seven months after I’d finished the first draft, so the edit took nearly twice as long to do. Before I started writing it, I’d spent six months working on the plan for something completely different. The plan ran to tens of pages and by the time we were discussing relocating it from the Highlands of Scotland to the south of France I knew it was dead in the water. I gave myself a couple of days, and prayed for inspiration.

When I started writing A Lesson in Cruelty the following week I had two thoughts in my mind – I was going to stay in the field of criminal justice, and a suggestion from my editor, ‘Shawshank Redemption’ but women. A character presented herself to me, a woman about to leave prison, and I followed where she led me. Another character inserted herself a few thousand words in, a mysterious woman in an isolated place in the Highlands, so I followed her too, intrigued to find out how her story would intersect with my former prisoner. I set myself a daily target of 1,000 words and I stuck to it, though by the end I was writing far more. To say this book was unplanned is a huge understatement, and it’s no wonder that it required as much editing as it did. It got there in the end though, and I think that it has a propulsion in the writing that would have been missing if I had planned it. I wouldn’t recommend it as an approach, though – the editing was very hard at times and I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to pull it off.