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Bronwyn Parry is an Australian author who has published 10 books, including As Darkness Falls and her most recent Storm Clouds. Her most recent novel has been shortlisted for the 2016 Sisters in Crime Davitt award.
Bronwyn talks about the extent of her research when attempting to set up the correct landscape and atmosphere for the scene of the crime in her novel As Darkness Falls. “Obviously police procedure was something that I needed to research a bit about. Now, setting it in a fairly isolated community means that there’s not necessarily hard and fast rules because things can happen differently out there due to the lack of resources and – and distance from resources and things like that. But I did talk with a number of police officers. I actually contacted the local police station and was pretty lucky to be put in contact with a female police sergeant who had worked a lot in isolated communities. She was fantastic in just giving me a few tips about, making it a little bit more real, I guess.”
When researching for her novels Bronwyn talks about how she likes to have a strong sense of place. “The other thing too was the landscape – the setting is fictional but I needed to model the landscape itself on a particular area so I went and visited the area that I chose as the model and just spent a bit of time out there and walking around and driving around and thinking about well, how would this landscape impact on the characters, but also on the unfolding crime and the search to resolve that crime.
“There was the seed of the idea from this particular landscape that I had visited before, so when I realised this was an isolated area, I thought I could use that as the model for the setting of my book. But when the plot of the book evolves the book evolves, and I needed to find out various things, so I went out and travelled and searched for those answers.”
BRONWYN’S TIP: KNOW YOUR MARKET
“I think you need to know the market. That doesn’t necessarily mean writing to the market, but it means knowing where your writing is in relation to what is currently being published and what publishers are currently looking for because you can’t sell it if you can’t pitch it.”
Listen to the Australian Writers’ Centre’s spine-tingling Murder and Mayhem podcast here.
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