How do you create a plot so suspenseful, it will stop a reader's heart? By tapping in to your own nightmares, writes author Gordon Brown, as he investigates the dark art of crime writing

WHEN I was about five years old I woke up in the middle of the night, and realised that I couldn’t breathe. There’s no real detail to this particular memory, just an uneasy recollection that my lungs had stopped working. The next morning things were fine. Over the next seven or eight years I would suffer similar "attacks". Come nighttime I would put off going to bed, fighting hard to stay up, not wanting to face what I knew lay waiting for me.

Not that there was anything wrong with me. My mum had me thoroughly checked by doctors along the way – each confirming I was healthy and that my lungs were in fine, functioning form. The most likely diagnosis was that it was all in my head. This didn’t make the episodes any less real. When they struck it was a terrifying. At that age it was nigh on impossible to explain what was happening to me. I was convinced, in the darkest moments, that there would be no next breath.

To this day the fear, created by those incidents, still lives with me and, if you want a bit too much information, my right nostril has always been partly blocked. When I have a cold, I find it impossible to breathe through my nose. If a burglar broke in, with me the victim of man flu, and tied me up, wrapping my mouth in duct tape, I think I would suffocate. Or, as a minimum, panic the way I used to back in the day.

It’s easy to see how this impacts on my writing. As an author of crime and thriller fiction, I’ve placed more than my fair share of protagonists, and victims, in situations where air is at a premium. The very start of my next book, Dynamite, opens with a man being hanged. What he’s thinking and what he’s feeling, in those final moments, is all played out over the first half-dozen pages or so.

This got me wondering about the the role fear plays in my writing. After all, crime fiction has done more than most to embed some gruesome narrative in the collective psyche. Being a crime/thriller author it seemed appropriate to look into this with the eyes of an investigator. And all good investigators interview witnesses.

With this in mind, I decide to talk to some fellow authors who will be appearing with me at Bloody Scotland in Stirling next weekend. One of them, Alexandra Sokoloff, tells me of the time a paedophile tried to grab her while she was walking home from school. She has a vivid description of a small, creepy man that she just knew was dangerous. She freely admits that this incident has informed her writing, even leading her to frequently probe the notion of evil. "That specifically gender-based fear and experience of being prey, and my anger about it, constantly informs my books and screenplays," she says.

Childhood fear plays hard in my own memory. I remember the first time I was bullied and the shame as I cried all the way home – the bully was fully two years younger and much smaller. Nicci Gerrard (one half of the crimewriting duo Nicci French) tells me that "being bullied makes the familiar world scary". I so agree with this.

When I was in my teens, I had a fear of going to our local shops. My family lived near Castlemilk, on the south side of Glasgow, at a time when local gangs of youths freely roamed without much hindrance. Simply doing the shopping could result in a brutal kicking from the assorted nutters that hung around the café at the bottom of our street. I use that feeling of dread a lot in my writing. That age-old trick of the bogey man hiding just out of sight – waiting for the right moment to emerge, knife in hand.

Writers need to draw inspiration from somewhere and since most of the crime writers I know are not criminals or victims, it’s their imagination they turn to.

Imagination is a factory that builds stories but, like any other factory, it requires to be fed raw goods at one end to produce finished goods at the other. In the writer’s head some of the raw goods are their past experiences, carefully stored, waiting to be processed and utilised.

I ask another of my other author friends, Lin Anderson, what role fear plays in her writing. Her answer is simple: "Every opening chapter features something that frightens me." In her novel, The Reborn, she wrote about dolls fashioned to look like babies lost in childhood. Scary or what?

When I start a novel I don’t set out to scare people. I’m not conscious of trying to engender fear. Then something grips me. A line, a thought or, maybe, a phrase I heard that day. Whatever it is, the words leak onto the page and, like some sort of grotesque Mr Benn, they transform into a moment of tension. My protagonist is dully forced into fight or flight – fear being the driver.

I often write in first person and in the present tense – as if describing the scene as it unfolds in front of me. As if I’m right there, experiencing, first-hand what is happening. The tightening gut, the racing heart, sweat running freely. My first published novel, Falling, is based on this simple emotive response – even the tag line of the book was "Run, die or fight back". Fear is hard-wired as the "go to" emotion of choice that I return to again and again.

Sunday Herald editor and author Neil Mackay, another "witness", tells me that his most enduring memory of being scared, as a youngster, was watching the fall of Saigon when he was four years old. As a child brought up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, the television news simply amplified the violence he was living within. Today he writes powerful novels that, in his words, "play on my own fears".

I’m a writer that has always written while on the move. I’m the man with a Mac. I often tell people that I am more likely to write on a plane or a train than at a writing desk. I travel a lot. In the last 18 months I’ve been to the US more often than I’ve been to my local Co-op. So of my time has been spent travelling that, when I was asked to write a short story for a crime blog, I took my main character, Craig McIntrye, and placed him on a jet heading for Spain. Next to him was a man he was sure was mixing a bomb.

That story is one that has been waiting to get out of my head for a long time. If you fly often enough you can’t help but wonder if this trip is the one that will make the front page of tomorrow’s paper. Not that this is a childhood fear. Up until I left school my holidays were strictly limited to the golden sands of Fraserburgh. Yet ask yourself, next time you are on a flight, and it all gets a bit bumpy – what’s your gut reaction. Hold someone’s hand? Cry out? Feel your bowels loosen. These are all basic, childhood reactions.

Now, I’m not a psychologist and I’m not about to go Freud on you. But think on it. We are, as Sean French (the other half of Nicci French) puts it to me, "just one step away from horror".

I see this idea of tearing away the familiar as a central theme in crime fiction. The brutality of murder in someone’s living room, or the fear of being attacked on the street – it’s the very mundaneness of the settings that unsettles. There is a moment in time that epitomises this for me.

Well before I was legally allowed to go to X-rated movies I went to see John Carpenter's 1978 film, Halloween. There’s a scene in which Jamie Lee Curtis and her two friends are walking back from school. It’s set in the middle of the day, not the usual stereotypical late night with lightning cracking the sky. The sun is out. One of the friends says her goodbyes and in the distance, beside a hedge, Laurie Strode (Curtis) sees Nick Castle (Michael Myers), just as he steps out of sight. This scared the hell out of me. Who gave John Carpenter the right to take the daytime and make it scary? Up until then the night was my backdrop for terror – not the day. Carpenter had taken the familiar and distorted it.

That’s what the breathing thing did to me. It tore away the familiar. We all breathe without thinking how we do it and then, when you do start to think about it, you can’t quite figure what set of muscles is making it all work. You begin to realise that you don't really control those essential muscles in any conscious manner. What if they stop working? That’s when I would run down the stairs to seek out the reassurance of my mum and dad. To find the familiar.

I contact yet another of my long-suffering author friends, Craig Robertson. "Craig, what was your first memory of being scared?" It transpires that Robertson has a mother and father who thought nothing of asking their eight-year-old son to help out a next-door neighbour. Nothing in that, you say – except the neighbour had a problem with rats. "Being small enough to crawl into the space and old enough to carry out what was needed," recalls Robertson, "I had to slide backwards through the smallest of spaces to seal the gap where the rats were coming in with card and wood and tape."

Funnily enough, Robertson, in his second book, traps his lead character under Central Station with, guess what, rats.

There’s nothing new in playing to deep-rooted fears in literature. Edgar Allan Poe, a man with more than a little claim to inventing the crime story, focused on the fears of the day back in the early 1800s. His short stories Premature Burial and Berenice both deal with being buried alive – a subject so scary to Victorians that they set up an association called the Society for the Prevention of People Being Buried Alive.

Another of my witnesses, Eva Dolan, had a great family life and, as she says, "didn’t mind spiders and wasn’t scared of clowns" but she was truly terrified of that family security being whipped away from her. It’s of little surprise, then, that Dolan’s novels often deal with the individual trying to come to terms with a world that they find unfamiliar and scary.

So am I saying that my experiences as child are fundamental foundations in the way I use fear in my writing? Probably. But, like Poe tapping into the terrors of his era, or like watching Halloween, fear isn’t a thing restricted to childhood memories. My writing is constantly influenced by new fears that have arisen over the years. I couldn’t bear to watch the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs – and not because of the pain being inflicted. I just had massive empathy with the policeman in the chair who pleaded with his torturers not to mutilate him, because he had a small daughter waiting at home for him. With two young children of my own, that was way too close to the mark for me.

I’ve always struggled to write about violence towards children. Yet, only a few months ago, I overcame this struggle to write a short story for a new anthology about a child serial killer predating in New Orleans. I don’t focus on the violence – that’s still a step too far for me – but I did enjoy killing the killer. Maybe the catharsis of writing the story was something I had to do. Perhaps I needed to confront that fear in the safe knowledge that I was in control.

This leads us into fascinating territory – and perhaps it helps explain why I write what I do. As an author, it’s my ball and I decide who play and who doesn’t. I’m the referee, the captain, the manager and the multi-billionaire owner all rolled into one.

Drawing from childhood is visceral. It’s still a dangerous place to go swimming. But when I do, it’s on my terms. After all, I can always jump in and delete the words later.

Yet those words often turn out to be the best ones – the ones with greatest impact. They are the words that draw from that dark place long ago – the ones that make things just that little bit scarier.

GJ Brown’s (Gordon Brown) latest book, Meltdown, is out now, published by Gallus Press.

Lin Anderson, Gordon Brown, Eva Dolan, Nicci French, Neil Mackay, Craig Robertson and Alexandra Sokoloff are all appearing at Bloody Scotland, Scotland’s International Crime Writing Festival) from September 9-11. Visit www.bloodyscotland.com for more information.