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Jaye Ford is a former journalist who worked in print, radio and television for 12 years. Now she writes crime and thriller books including Already Dead and Beyond Fear.
Jaye Ford has contacts within the police industry to help feed her the important details that make her stories believable. “I do a lot of research, especially online, as I’m writing. I need to know stuff when I can see it coming up. I also do a fair bit before as well.
“I’ve got a retired police superintendent that I use for my police research. At the start of every book I sit down with him and tell him what I think the book is going to be about and we talk about how the police might be involved in that … because the way I write a psychological thriller is I always look at it from the victim’s point of view and what it’s like to live through that. He talks me through how the police would see it and how they would deal with it and how they would approach it.”
GETTING ADVICE FROM THE RIGHT SOURCES
“It’s interesting with [my book] Darkest Place, because the police actually don’t believe what’s happening to Carly. I didn’t want the police to be the bad guys, but it needed to be realistic in the way that they were approaching her, so it was quite important that I got that right.
“I’ve also got a friend whose husband is an ex-patrolman. He talked me through how he would handle the circumstances of meeting this woman and going back to her place repeated times and how his thought process would be going and how he would deal with someone like Carly. That was kind of a nice way of setting up the beginning of the book and how that all kind of fit into the rest of it and whether Carly was or wasn’t actually sane.”
JAYE’S TIP: WHAT REALLY TEACHES YOU HOW TO WRITE
“It’s the writing and the writing and the writing that teaches you how to write. You can’t imagine those things, you have to actually be putting words on the page to do that.”
Listen to the Australian Writers’ Centre’s spine-tingling Murder and Mayhem podcast here.
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