Hello, welcome along to writers' routine. This week we're chatting to Dervle McTiernan. She's known for the Cormack-Riley series, and her new one is a standalone called The Murder Rule. It's inspired by the Innocence Project. Now, we talk about

how a new trick has really helped her editing, also how she gets to know characters, and how her

writing has changed through time. The balance of organic writing to highly organized writing has

shifted book to book. Like the first book, I had no clue what I was doing, no method, no technique, no plan,

second book was hyperplanned, third book was something in between,

fourth book was something in between, and I think that would probably continue to change over time.

But largely this is what I do.

I have a general idea what I'm going to write about, usually a situation, but there has to be a character I really care about at the beginning of the book, somebody who, you know, that I'm really interested in that I kind of have a really strong emotional response to.

My first step is to build out who that character is.

I spend a lot of time with that.

And as I do that, obviously, other characters start to flow from that person.

And I kind of already know the situation they're going to be in.

There is loads more on the way in a brand new writers routine with Devla McTiernan.

Yes. Hello, welcome along to the show. My name's Dan Simpson. Thank you for being there. Thank you for bearing with me while I was on my holidays, had a little break. And we're back with a brand new episode. Fantastic one. This is where we take a look inside the working day of some of the world's most successful authors, how they get ideas, how long they sit on those, when they think

it's right to research and to plot and to get down that first sentence, when, where, and how they

write. That's what we cover. This week, it's with Dervla McTiernan. She's got an

interesting story behind her stories, really. She spent 12 years working as a lawyer in Ireland,

and then following the financial crash back in the late Northeast, she moved to Australia

and turned her hand to writing. She wrote a short story called The Roommate,

which was shortlisted for a crime writing competition,

then went on to publish The Ruin and a string of other bestsellers.

Her new one is The Murder Rule.

...