When you’re writing a crime/mystery novel, your focus gets very insular. You get so close to what you’re doing that, I find, it’s really important to occasionally look outside for inspiration.
When I’m stuck or stale, I get inspired by (and this is a work-in-progress list):
Books
The Dark is Rising Sequence – Susan Cooper
The Secret History/The Little Friend – Donna Tartt
Inspector Morse (the whole series) – Colin Dexter
Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow – Peter Hoeg
A Place of Execution – Val McDermid
The Ice House – Minette Walters
And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie
Devices and Desires – PD James (the opening scene still gives me shivers)
Death of a Wombat – Ivan Smith and Clifton Pugh
Stasiland – Anna Funder
Anything by Henning Mankell
TV
Twin Peaks
The Killing (Danish version)
Red Riding Trilogy
Movies
Swimming Pool
Let The Right One In (Swedish version)
Lantana
Secret Window
Picnic at Hanging Rock
The Ghost Writer
Music
December – George Winston
Mozart
Muse
PJ Harvey
Places
Bruny Island – I stay at my shack on my own, which terrifies me (and is therefore good for crime-writing).
Tasmania’s East (the empty coastline from Swansea upwards) or West Coast (especially Strahan, Macquarie Harbour and Gordon River), or the Midlands (the wide open farmlands and bleak hills).
Online
I use Ommwriter occasionally
I love Toast‘s online catalogues and Toast Travels
Wallpaper – currently, this Donna Tartt one
Looking at this list, I realise the majority of items on it are notable for their remarkable expression of a ‘sense of place’ – particularly a cold, out-of-the-way, edge-of-the-world place… (hello Tasmania). There are many, many more books, for example, that I absolutely love, but they don’t all make the cut when I need to be inspired in my own writing.
