A Hobby for Life

By Rosemary Clarke

The only hobby I really enjoy is writing.  Even when I was at work I would be working on screenplays, stories, etc while munching on a sandwich in my lunch hour.  On trains and buses, I regularly write and look for characters, which on a long journey is a very interesting thing to do; imagine seeing the person opposite you not as an everyday traveler but a spy with their collar turned up and deep into a book, or someone with a pile of papers on their briefcase could be an embezzler out to bring down one of the banks and truthfully we don't know who anyone is.

     Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought Holmes to life after being astounded by the methods of his tutor Dr. Bell who solved puzzles in medicine and taught his students to do the same.
    

 I read a lot as well to see how other writers phrase their work.  David Peace believes that crime should not be entertaining and so he concentrates mainly on the families and others who are left; what it feels like to go onto that police podium facing the press for both the family and the police. 

Michael Marshall Smith likes to lull people by soft words and ordinary places then...BAM!  then there's the mischief of Jasper Fforde who loves to play with the classics with Miss Haversham carrying an Uzi machine gun and loving fast cars, a detective called Thursday Next, and in one book bears using humans as drug mules for the illegal substance....porridge!

     But the one I shall always admire, I call him The Master, is Robert Bloch.  This unassuming American writer could take a place or a description of something and paint such amazing pictures with his words: read the REAL Psycho if you dare!

Copyright Rosemary Clarke