Extreme book research

When you spend your life writing about safe-cracking, skydiving and bomb-defusing, the fastest way to lose your readers is to skimp on the research. They’re already suspending as much disbelief as they can. The more preposterous the story you’re building, the more solid the foundations have to be.

This is a great excuse to do things that are outside your comfort zone. You may not be able to find a real-life bomb to disarm, but your characters will need other skills. For Money Run, I wrote a scene in which the protagonist drove a stolen sports car off the roof of a skyscraper. I signed up for a defensive driving course beforehand, in order to learn how my car would handle high speeds in hazardous conditions. Not well, as it turns out. One of the exercises found an instructor sitting in my passenger seat as the car roared towards a stack of traffic cones at 110 km per hour. At the last second he’d shout either “left!” or “right!” Even on the few occasions in which I swerved the correct way, I always knocked over the cones.

Read the rest of my guest blog post for The Pewter Wolf!