by Sarah Rayne | May 20, 2016 | Sarah Rayne
There was a time when a degree of glamour attached itself to a journey – when journeys themselves could provide a writer with a splendidly atmospheric setting. You could place your characters on a train or a ship and cast them into all manner of perilous, murderous,...
by Sarah Rayne | Apr 22, 2016 | ancient legends, haunted houses, old diaries, Sarah Rayne, settings for fiction
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I wrote a quartet of fantasy books set in ancient Ireland and starring a charismatic, slightly-dangerous, and not entirely human creature… Cormac mac Airt was inspired by a medieval King of Ireland of the same name, and I...
by Sarah Rayne | Feb 27, 2016 | Sarah Rayne, settings for fiction
The legal profession has always been a novelists’ treasure house, and lawyers themselves are a gift to writers of fiction. If your plot has wound itself into a hopeless tangle, you can often solve matters by allowing the family solicitor to discover old documents or...
by Sarah Rayne | Feb 14, 2016 | charect, haunted houses, Sarah Rayne, settings for fiction
There’s a marvellous theme running through Benjamin Britten’s opera, Owen Wingrave, which is based on the Henry James’ story. It’s, ‘Listen to the house.’ It’s something I’ve done for years. By ‘listen’ I don’t mean yomping round the Tower of London and thinking...
by Sarah Rayne | Jan 7, 2016 | ancient legends, ghosts, haunted houses, Sarah Rayne, Uncategorized
Quite near to where I live is a beautiful and mostly unspoilt village which is chockful of history. It’s home to the 1,000-year-old Horn Dance, whose performers still caper through the village with enthusiastic glee once a year; it’s mentioned in the Domesday Book,...
by Sarah Rayne | Dec 4, 2015 | ghost stories, ghosts, haunted houses, Uncategorized
It was not a day on which I was expecting to meet a ghost. I know I write books with slightly eerie settings and incidents – also outright, unashamed ghost stories – but I don’t actually expect to actually find myself in one of those settings. It was, in fact, a...
by Sarah Rayne | Nov 20, 2015 | Sarah Rayne
When portrayed on the grand scale, villains in fiction can be surprisingly fascinating. Would vampires as a race have gained such worldwide appeal without a sinister undead gentleman in evening dress dominating the screen or the page? Equally, would psychological...
by Sarah Rayne | Nov 6, 2015 | Uncategorized
There’s frequently a point in a book where it’s nice to have characters grouped round a dinner table discussing the latest plot developments. This can be helpful for giving the reader an update on where the story’s got to – not to mention doing the same for the...
by Sarah Rayne | Oct 25, 2015 | Uncategorized
When I began to write the first of the Michael Flint/Nell West haunted house series, I didn’t actually know it was destined to become a series. In fact I had never previously considered writing a series at all – or even so much as a trilogy. Despite working in the...
by Sarah Rayne | Oct 15, 2015 | Uncategorized
Ghosts, like any character in a book, need a motive – a reason for haunting. They don’t just turn up because there’s a vacant slot at the moated grange, or because the grey lady at the old rectory wants someone to make a fourth at bridge. They don’t attend night...
