Rachel Knightley talks to award winning Nordic Noir crime novelist Alex Dahl

Alex Dahl is the author of six psychological thrillers. Her third novel, Playdate, is currently streaming on Disney+ and she’s published by (among others) Penguin Random House USA, Head of Zeus UK, Harper Collins Australia. Her work has been translated into 16 foreign languages and her debut novel, The Boy at the Door, was shortlisted for a CWA dagger award. She’s a half Norwegian, half American author and studied Russian, German and international studies in Oslo and Moscow before pursuing an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University – at the same time as Dr Rachel Knightley.

Alex talks to Rachel about the importance of doing the writing you want – both in the responsibility of knowing you’re the one who needs to make it happen for you and the self-knowledge of what it is you want your writing and your writing life to be.

Find out more about Alex at

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2167982/alex-dahl/

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Writing Workout based on Alex’s interview

Warm-up: From Motivation to Identity

“I am quite character driven: most of a novel springs from understanding the characters...I have to understand their motivations and what drives them and what do they want? What are they willing to do to get it?” Alex Dahl

Consider the character you’re working on. What do they want? What are they prepared to do to get it? What aren’t they prepared to do that can stop them from getting it?

Main Exercise:

“That's something I always ask myself and it's actually something that I've started to apply to real life. It's like in interactions with people, like characters. It's super enlightening to just bring it back down to what does this person actually want? What is their desired outcome, whether it's a child or a partner or just a random stranger, same as with characters: what is it that drives them in this particular interaction? And that's so useful for me in novel writing, because it really does inform so much of the interpersonal relationships and also how to structure the plot, because you can always bring it back to that and be like, okay, so I'm stuck here. But in this particular moment, what is the pressing point for this character? What do they want?” Alex Dahl

Take a blank sheet of paper and choose one of these questions:

• What do I want for my writing?
• What am I doing to make it happen?
• What am I not doing to make it happen?
• If I knew it would all be okay in the end, what would I do next?