Claire McGowan, author of 'The Vanishing Triangle' - Crime writer talks about planning the twists, switching genres, and stepping into true crime.
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2021
⏱️ 36 minutes
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Summary
Claire McGowan goes by two names. Claire for crime thrillers, Eva Woods for women's fiction. We talk about how she switches between the two, and how thoroughly she thinks through style and different readerships when she writes different genre.
Her new work is an audiobook series exclusive to Audible, called 'The Vanishing Triangle'. It shines a light on the unsolved disappearance of at least eight women from mid-nineties Dublin; their bodies were never found, and no suspect was ever charged. To understand why these crimes remain unsolved, Claire explores what life was like in nineties Ireland, and investigates how a shifting political landscape and Irish society’s views on the treatment of women impacted the investigation.
We talk about how writing true crime is different to writing crime stories from your imagination, how she researched and planned her work, and why she wanted to narrate the series.
You can hear why her writing routine is pretty loose, how she doesn't plan much, and how she managed to write 4 books in 18 months through lockdowns.
Grab a copy of 'The Vanishing Triangle' here - https://amzn.to/3jNujZA
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome along to a brand new episode of writer's routine. |
| 0:12.3 | This week we're chatting to Claire McGowan. |
| 0:14.2 | She's a crime thriller author whose first true crime story, |
| 0:19.1 | The Vanishing Triangle, is out now exclusively on Audible. She doesn't just |
| 0:24.2 | stick to crime. She's publishing women's fiction as well, uplit under the name Eva Woods. We talk |
| 0:29.8 | about how her style changes between the two genres. Also, how much she thinks about what needs to be different, what can't be the same, who her |
| 0:40.6 | different readerships are between those stories. |
| 0:44.0 | Also, she wrote four books. |
| 0:46.0 | Hmm, yeah, be envious of that. |
| 0:48.2 | Four books over the last 18 months or so. |
| 0:51.1 | And you can hear how she plans things while spinning so many different work plates to keep |
| 0:56.1 | them up in the air, to keep publishing. And we talk about why, for her new novel, the twist came |
| 1:02.2 | in a different way than usual. Well, this is very unusual for me. I've never really done any planning. |
| 1:07.4 | I've always been a kind of jump in, see what happens. I don't always even know |
| 1:11.9 | who the killer is. And I really enjoy writing that way. But I could tell with this book that I've |
| 1:16.8 | written quite a bit of it. It was like 20,000 words. And I just wasn't quite coming together in the way |
| 1:22.0 | that I hoped. And I really wanted to try and elevate it and just think, because it's a book about |
| 1:27.0 | sleep. So I was's a book about sleep |
| 1:27.5 | so I was thinking more things about sleep and consciousness really lend themselves quite well to twist |
| 1:32.9 | so all I did was I just made a list of every possible thing that could be going on and some of them |
| 1:37.8 | were just incredibly outlandish and just doing it that way I was able to come up with quite a good one |
| 1:43.1 | I think so there is more with Claire McGowan in this week's writer's routine. |
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