In this episode of The Writing Life, NCW Chief Executive Chris Gribble caught up with Claire McGowan to discuss how she got started as a writer, her route(s) into publishing and how she’s maintained and developed a career in writing across a range of genres and over a lengthy period of time.

Claire McGowan published her first novel in 2012, and has followed it up with many others in the crime fiction genre and also in women’s fiction (writing as Eva Woods). She has had four radio plays broadcast on the BBC, and her thrillers What You Did and The Other Wife were both number-one bestsellers. She ran the UK’s first MA in crime writing for five years, and regularly teaches and talks about writing. Her first non-fiction project, the true-crime book The Vanishing Triangle, was released in 2021. She also writes scripts and has several projects in development for TV.

Together, they discuss how Claire’s teaching work has developed across her writing career and how her new course for NCW, How to Create Suspense in Fiction, distils a lot of what she’s learned about the many different ways and means of creating suspense in your writing: from character to landscape, to plot to style.

Edited by Omni Mix

Image © Donna Ford