Skip to Content

"Please edit me."

4 July 2011

'I'm not much of a plotter. I start off with an inciting incident, and in classic crime fiction what happens it that all the action flows from that incident. It's very comfy when it all ties up and feels like a complete universe, but my stuff doesn't always work that way...

I always say "Please edit me", because I don't want to write those big, flabby books where the writer's making loads of money and nobody wants to tell them that it's crap. You know who I'm talking about. You have to take your ego out of it and say, do I want people to be obsequious to me or do I want to write good books? If it's the latter, you have to take criticism. It's annoying, but that's how to do good stuff, listen to other people.'

Denise Mina, author of The End of the Wasp Season, in the Independent on Sunday