I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.

Writers are, as a profession, nothing if not eccentric.

Crime writers, I've noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven't been caught yet!

Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre.

Writers need each other.

I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn.

Scottish writers are particularly successful in the crime genre.