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 | 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 | Sep 18, 2015 | Uncategorized
It’s a fact of life that there are times when the shadow can be mightier than the substance. Over ninety years ago the German film-maker F.W. Murnau chilled cinema audiences with the 1922 silent movie, Nosferatu. It’s still chilling people today, and probably the...