Goodreads asked Chris Collett:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Chris Collett I can't do much better than Stephen King who said that to be a writer you must "read a lot and write a lot." I had no formal training, either in creative writing or journalism, but I had read lots of crime novels so I knew which ones I liked, and roughly how they worked (though at the time I had no idea they were called police procedurals!). I simply began to write the kind of story I wanted to read.
This next advice sounds contradictory, but I think it's important to listen and respond to editorial advice, but also to trust your instincts. As Raymond Chandler said: "Don't write anything you don't like yourself, and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know." In the first DI Mariner book I was persuaded to rewrite a scene my then-editor felt was improbable, which featured Jamie who has ASD. I should have trusted my years of experience of working with young people with ASD, which told me that the scene as I'd written it was perfectly plausible and had some great opportunities for dark humour. At the time though, I didn't have the confidence to make a stand.

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