Singing in the Shower, Talking in the Bath

I read this quote on Facebook a couple of weeks back. It ran something like; you know you’re a writer when instead of singing in the shower, you run through dialogue.

Facebook can be quite a pain with these quotes, and normally I dismiss them without a second glance. But this time, as opposed to the trite, allegedly inspirational crap, there was more than an element of truth about it.

With STAC #8, The Summer Wedding Murder completed and safely packed off to Crooked Cat Books, it’s time to turn my attention to the next STAC Mystery, number 9, working title, Costa del Murder. In case you can’t guess, it’s set in Torremolinos on the Costa del Sol. It’s not entirely coincidental that my wife and I spent a week there in January.

I’ve actually been working on this for a few weeks, but I was concerned with Chapter One, some (or all) of which will appear in the back of The Summer Wedding Murder. Now I need to write the rest of it, and I had one scene in mind; a conversation between Joe and a suspect, which takes place in an outdoor café on the seafront.

I’ve just written that scene. It runs to 2,000 words and it took me slightly over 90 minutes.

There are days when I struggle to write 1,000 words in eight hours. How come this one tripped so lightly out of my head and onto the screen? Simple. Instead of singing in the shower, I talked in the bath.

Whenever I took a bath I ran this scene over and over and over again, like an actor rehearsing his lines without a prompt. By the time I came to write it today, I knew it off by heart. All I had to do was type it out.

Naturally, this has not gone unnoticed in the Robinson household. My singing has been likened to the noise of an angle grinder cutting through rusty steel, only less tuneful. So the missus was quite pleased not to hear me, but rather concerned that I appeared to be talking to myself.

“I don’t see why you’re so surprised,” I said. “Every time I speak to you, I might as well be talking to myself.”

This may appear a priceless system for getting the job done. 80,000 words could come from 40 baths. But it would mean getting a bath every night for the next six weeks, and if I did that, Her Indoors would swear blind I had another woman somewhere.