With only days before the Crimelines launch, today I’m talking to

Marie Basting

[©2014 M.Basting]

Tell us how you got involved in the Crimelines project?

As a student on the MA Creative Writing course at MMU I was invited to submit a piece for the anthology. I was unsure at first. I’d never written a short story before, had only ever written for much younger children and knew nothing about the crime genre. In the end, I figured what the heck and went for it. Yep, what the heck, it’s how I make most of my decisions.

Was it your first time at writing a short story to be published?

Yes, as I said above, I’d never written a short story before. Apart from at school perhaps, but I’m not sure two sides of illegible writing in a tatty exercise book counts.

What is it you enjoy most when writing short stories?

Well I can only really talk in terms of this story. The thing I enjoyed most was, perhaps bizarrely, the constraints: the restricted word count, the crime theme and writing for a different age group. I had to step outside of my comfort zone and experiment.

What are the main difficulties?

I think my style of writing is actually quite minimal so I really enjoyed writing within the constraints of a very limited word count. I tried really hard to focus on the story moment and to only include information that moved the story forward. I guess the biggest challenge was making sure that in doing this I didn’t kill the atmosphere totally. Minimalism is fine, but the reader still needs to have enough information to visualize the story.

Tell us a little bit about what’s ahead of you as a writer.

For now, I’m going to just keep writing. My main focus is on my MA and making the most of every opportunity presented. I’d love to see more of my work in print, but for the immediate future, I’m happy to spend my time fine tuning my skills and writing for the love of writing. I’m really excited about my current project. It’s a story I’ve wanted to tell for a long time, being based on real events in my family. For a while I felt too close to these events to be able to fictionalize them but the time is right now.   Finally, I can apply the what the heck philosophy to this.

Thank you Marie for this interview.

You can find out more about Marie, and follow her progress here.