Andrea Carter on Death at Whitewater Church: ‘My story starts with setting – always’

Towering headlands, windswept beaches, derelict houses. Ruined churches. What inspires me is place – landscape and buildings. When I visit somewhere for the first time, I find myself imagining what might have happened there, and whether the memory of those events might have remained embedded within the walls, in the atmosphere, marking it out as a place of contentment or sadness or fear. My grandmother believed that to be the case; she believed that a place retained the essence of what had occurred within, and that one could sense it. And despite years of level-headed, rational legal training I happen to think she was right.

While I was working as a solicitor on the Inishowen Peninsula, in Co Donegal, I began writing a crime novel. It was just for fun, to see if I could do it. Something to occupy me in the evening after work, or at night, when I couldn’t sleep; a way of keeping work stresses at bay.

It was no coincidence that my protagonist emerged as a female solicitor named Benedicta O’Keeffe, known as Ben (my own friends and family call me Andy), nor was it a coincidence that Ben ran the most northerly solicitor’s practise in Ireland, as I did at the time (although only by a hair’s breadth).

I wrote sporadically and slowly, creating a setting, chipping away at a story and coming up with new characters – enjoying myself thoroughly when I did write, but feeling no compulsion to commit to it. I had a day job. And the idea that someone might actually read what I had written never even crossed my mind.

After 11 years in Inishowen I moved to Dublin to transfer to the Bar and I continued to work on the novel, more consistently and with more commitment. I took some writing courses and realised that I had a lot to learn.

I switched the voice in which I was writing from third person to first, and oddly my protagonist ‘Ben’, who I had thought was nothing more than a braver (or more reckless! ) version of myself, began to separate herself from me. She developed her own characteristics and her own flaws, and a back story that was not mine. I began to like her.

What was even more significant for me was that Inishowen, beautiful and windswept, with its towering headlands and golden beaches, sea stacks and ruined forts, became easier to write about now that I was detached from it – its colours and sounds more vivid because I missed them.

At no point did I plan out the novel. I simply wrote as I like to read; with every chapter the mist cleared a little, and I could see what would happen in the chapters to follow. I think it was that very quality of not knowing how it would end that drove me to finish the book.

When I did finish, I submitted the book to the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair, and it was longlisted. I realised I wanted to continue writing about Inishowen and so I began writing a second novel with the same protagonist and setting. Although I was in possession of neither agent nor publisher at the time, it seemed that I was writing a crime series! But the following year this second novel, Whitewater Church (as it was then called), was one of the 10 winners of the Novel Fair, which then allowed me access to agents and publishers I would never have had otherwise. And it was at that point that I realised I was no longer writing for myself. I wanted my books to be published.

Many, many rejections later, a blind submission to an agent in London (chosen at random from the Writers and Artists Yearbook) produced a request for a full manuscript and within three weeks I was on a plane to London to meet Kerry Glencorse of Susanna Lea Associates in her Soho office.

I was under the illusion that I already had a finished novel, but over the next few months I learned the importance of editing. Kerry worked with me on a number of edits before pronouncing the book ready for submission, and every one of those edits improved the novel. They tightened plot lines, developed certain characters and eliminated others, and dealt with my writerly tics (who knew I was so fond of the words wry, sick and clench?). By February last year, thanks to Kerry’s belief in the book and her brilliant editing, I had a book deal with a London publisher and a publication date for my first book: autumn 2015. What came next (after the Prosecco!) were more edits.

Although I understand and appreciate the value of editing now in a way that I didn’t before (even gaining some masochistic pleasure from the process), I still write the way I have always written. I am driving along a foggy road at night and there are times when the road stretches clearly ahead and other times when it is barely visible; either way, I can never see further than the next bend.

I write the first draft straight through, because for me it is about story: that age-old human need to relate and to hear stories. The first draft is rough, like a piece of stone I need to sculpt, and I have been known to construct scaffolding which I remove later. But my story starts with setting – always.

To quote Robert Louis Stevenson, “Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwrecks.”

Death at Whitewater Church will be published on September 3rd, and the second in the series, Treacherous Strand, will follow next year. I have dedicated my first novel to my grandmother.