Saturday 2 April 2011

WHAT IF…….. Anne Cassidy

People often wonder why I write such dark stories. I tell them that I am one of life’s pessimists. I spend a lot of time imagining bad things happening to me or the people I love. This could be the beginnings of madness, I guess but for me, it has turned nicely into a job of work.


I am a writer of Crime Fiction.
I write stories where bad things happen to good people. Or where ‘normal’ people have to make choices that might mean bad things will happen.

This comes from my own attitude to life. When I’m standing on an underground platform and the train is about to come in I say to myself What If someone pushed another person onto the lines in front of the train? What If I witnessed this? What if I told the police what I saw and then got a phone call late at night where someone said,

“If you don’t withdraw your story someone in your family will get hurt!”

What would I do then?

This is often how my stories start. I have a morbid way of looking at the world and always think that I will either be the victim of a crime or somehow sucked into a crime situation. In other words because of pure luck (or bad luck) my life will change.

So I write crime books and they almost always start with WHAT IF…

(Avoid me if you see me on an underground platform.)


Anne Cassidy’s new book is  HEART BURN









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2 comments:

  1. I've done whole workshops on What-iffing! Its the very stuff of writing. Great post Anne.

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  2. I too use the What If question in my sessions with primary school kids - starting from 'What if there were dragons living under where you live?' (the premise for our Lothian Dragon books), and the kids always come up with brilliant ideas. I think it's a really attractive question to engender out-of-box thinking (unless we meet you on the underground).

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