WHEN ANDREW TAYLOR was diagnosed with repetitive strain injury (RSI) and realised he would have to dictate his books, it seemed that the career he had longed for since childhood was over.
'I thought it was going to be the end of the world, or at least the end of me as a writer,' says the author of more than 20 books, mostly historical crime fiction.
Taylor, 55, tried numerous treatments, but his RSI is now chronic. He's learnt to live with it though and says it's proved to be a strange kind of blessing.
He dictates his books, which are transferred to computer by his wife, whose own RSI is so bad she can't drive. She uses voice-recognition software (which Taylor can't because seeing the words appear on screen in front of him interferes with the flow of his work). Dictating his books has forced him to write a linear first draft - no cutting and pasting; no revising yesterday's pages. 'The problem with computers is that it's so easy to edit,' he says. 'If you're dictating, you're trapped in this eternal present. The big argument against it is that I feel I can't effectively revise a book until I finish it.'
But for Taylor, that's not such a problem. 'I don't know what a book is going to be until I finish it,' he says. He sometimes begins writing with little more than a title in mind. 'During the first draft some sort of plot emerges.'
For instance, A Stain on the Silence, due out later this month, is a story about missing children set in the present - his first such book for 10 years - with a back story set some years earlier. It evolved from the title, something Samuel Beckett said several times during the final years of his life. 'He thought of his work as the only thing that made it possible for him to go on, to have a stain on the silence,' Taylor says. 'The title came first.'
So, too, The American Boy, the title and inspiration for which resulted from Taylor's discovery that American writer Edgar Allan Poe had lived in England for four years as a child.