Where do you get your ideas?

Where do you get your ideas? It’s a stock question when interviewing an author, not that anyone’s asked me yet! However, it’s best to be prepared, so to celebrate the launch of my first novel, Witness, I’ve had a little think about where the ideas for the book came from.

Neil Gaiman says his answer to this question is, ‘I make them up. Out of my head.’ – but admits that it tends to make interviewers unhappy. He goes on to explain that he gets his ideas from daydreaming and asking himself ‘what if…’ questions, which pleased me no end, as that’s what I do.

St Swithin's pre-1880

I can trace my ideas for my first novel, Witness, back 30 years to a post-university stint on a history research project at the University of East Anglia when I was asked to produce a pamphlet about St.Swithin’s Church, also known as the Norwich Arts Centre. St. Swithin’s had an association with the medieval tanner’s guild and this sparked off an interest in cloth preparation, so when I joined a creative writing class in 

St Swithin's today

Leicestershire and was set homework to write the first chapter of an historical novel, I started off with Matthew Reed’s stomach lurching at the smell of urine as he entered a fulling mill on the banks of the River Ver in St. Albans. Editing moved this scene to chapter four, but this was where idea for the whole book started.

The creative writing class got me hooked and when it finished I started a writing group with some of my fellow participants and my historical novel developed. In stowing away on his father’s cart, Matthew’s dream had been to get to London. One obvious place for his father to sell his cloth was Cheapside and during my research I stumbled across an article on an American blog which mentioned the ‘Cheapside Horde’. This remarkable collection, now the feature of a major exhibition at the Museum of London, is regarded as the greatest cache of Elizabethan jewellery in the world. In 1912, workmen demolishing a 17th century building discovered a decaying wooden box beneath a brick floor. Stashed there by some long-forgotten goldsmith, the contents of the box included over 500 pieces of 16th and 17th century jewellery of the type which would have been worn by wealthy merchants and their families rather than the aristocracy.

The Cheapside Horde

The idea of this jeweller stashing his wares under his floorboards took hold in my mind. What had happened to him? Why had he never gone back to collect his box? Perhaps he was murdered and he’d never even told his wife where his riches were hidden, and so my goldsmith, Thomas Hyckes, was created as the maker of this jewellery. In early versions of Witness, I had Matthew and his father, John, examining the jewellery and buying it as a gift for Matthew’s mother, but this got lost in the editing process and instead Thomas Hyckes became the friend in London to whom John Reed could turn when Matthew finds himself in danger. The Cheapside Horde is not in itself mentioned in the novel, but we do see, or rather hear, Hyckes carefully putting his stock away somewhere secret in his workshop on the corner of Friday Street and Cheapside.

As the novel progressed I wanted to learn more about the craft of writing and so booked myself on an Arvon course with the authors Jill Dawson and Kathryn Heyman. We covered a huge amount in our week of workshops and writing, and I learnt a great deal about developing characters and about the underlying structure of a novel. I decided that Matthew was on a journey, both in an emotional and physical sense, and created a map of where I wanted him to travel, which ended up stretching from London to Waltham Cross. I’m a very visual person, and so this map, made up of pages printed from Google Maps and glued together, was where I pinned bits of research associated with Tudor England and places along the route of the Old North Road. Much of this went into the second of Matthew Reed’s adventures, some of it never went anywhere other than the map, but one bit of research which made its way into the first novel, Witness, was about the Eleanor Crosses, which ended up featuring at several points during the novel.

Waltham Cross

Charing Cross

The inclusion of the Eleanor Crosses is largely down to family living near Waltham Cross, where a fine restoration exists of one of the twelve memorial crosses Edward I erected along the route of his beloved wife Eleanor’s funeral procession between Lincoln and London in the 1290s. This cross interested me originally because of its similarity with the one standing outside Charing Cross Station in London, which I had passed on many an occasion during my later teenage years - Charing Cross being my entry point to central London nightlife from the suburbs. In Witness, the Eleanor Cross link begins with Matthew and the playwright, Richard Beaumont, in their scene in at the foot of the Eleanor Cross in St. Albans.

The inspiration for writing can come from various places. Thankfully, writing what you know does not mean that you have to stick to things within your life experience. If it did I’d write mostly about school, children and dogs. To me, writing what you know means using your experiences in your writing. A major part of Witness was written while travelling round Europe for a year in a small van with my husband and our dog. Lots of small details from this modern day trip ended up accompanying Matthew in his journey. I studied a man fly fishing on the banks of a river in Luxembourg, and this, filtered through research on the history of fly fishing, found itself a tiny place in Tudor St. Albans. In Poland most places we camped seemed to have stands of silver birch, and we collected fallen branches for our camp fire. I noticed that when the bark was peeled back it left a beautiful pale pink wood shining beneath. It also left brown stains on my hands. Some of these details made their way into parts of the novel.

Often the ideas you start with spiral off into new places. In fact, it can become difficult to keep track of your research as you flit here there and everywhere, chasing your thoughts. It’s a fascinating process, but there’s an inherent danger of it all taking over your writer’s life to such an extent that little writing gets done. Blogging can be a bit like that sometimes, so I’d better stop now and get back to my last bits of editing on the sequel to Witness. I’ve yet to decide on the title, I still have a cover to produce and I need to get back to writing my Iron Age novel. 

Guided Visualisation

Doing my writing warm-ups, in the form of ten minute object writes, reminded me of a workshop session I ran for a writing group a few years ago and have also used with classes of children to help them explore their use of the senses in creating writing.

We tried something called ‘guided visualisation’, following a series of exercises based around a tray of 15 random objects I had gathered together.

The exercises invited no-pressure, anything-goes writing and the value of them was that each writer brought unique experiences to the object.

Some writers love these prescribed types of exercises, and others hate them.  Whatever your feeling, it’s worth giving it a go once in a while, because sometimes the results can be exhilarating, sending your stream of consciousness into a completely unexpected direction. 

Exercise 1: "Object Tray Game" – Uncover the tray and give 1 minute to try and take in as much information as possible. Write down everything you can remember in as much detail as possible. This is not ‘Kim’s Game’ though, so don’t just try and memorise the objects – you are trying to write details about each object.

Exercise 2: Ten lines – Choose one item from the tray. Look at your item until you are certain you have memorised everything about it. Then put it back and start writing. Do not look at it again until you are certain you have described everything about it in the best detail you can manage.

If you've done a good job of paying attention to detail, you should have no trouble writing ten lines or more on the description of a simple item. If you're having trouble getting that far, take a help card and use the hints.

Help Card

Use these senses – sight, touch, smell – and write whatever occurs to you.

What do you notice about the shadows the object casts?

What does the surface feel like?

What colours is it and what colours/images  are reflected in it?

Are there any marks on the surface? Any signs of wear? Any scars? Any engraving?

If it has several parts, how is it put together?

Replace the object with another. Again, look at the object, hold it in your memory, and write every detail of your chosen object, no matter how minute. When you've finished check to see what you got right, what you got wrong, and what you overlooked entirely.

Exercise 3: Take a picture of a character. I just print some random pictures from a Google image search. Imagine that you're going to have to identify them in a police line-up, or better yet, describe them to a police artist. Take in as much about them as you can in one minute, then put the picture aside and write down as much as you can about the person.

Repeat with another picture.

Exercise 4: Choose an interesting setting that you know quite well – the shopping centre, the park, an old Victorian house. Try and really pay attention to the surroundings. Do your best to notice everything, not just with your sense of sight, but with all your senses.

Exercise 5: You should have a good idea of a person, a place and some objects by now, so put them together to create a scene in which you use everything you observed. Put some action in there. Put dialogue. But your main issue in this exercise is to create an absolutely over-the-top all-senses-engaged presentation of two people and the space they occupy.

Picture This 3

I love this chap's face all squashed up against the glass, but just who is he and what's he doing?

Creating Convincing Characters

This is an activity I used with a group of adult writers, but you could use it on your own. It’s a way of creating a new character, inventing their back story and generally getting to know them.

You will need to prepare some resources first. I made three sets of cards, using a different colour for each set (I’m used to working with children!), but you could just make three lists.  On set one I wrote a selection of names, on set two various ages and on set three jobs.

1. Draw a card from each set to get the basis of your new character.

It could be Joe – aged 9 – a shoplifter

Or Twister – aged 19 – a bodyguard

You might have to decide on gender if it’s not obvious from the name.

2. Now decide on the dramatic function your character will perform within the structure of a story. They could be the protagonist/hero, the antagonist/villain, the helper/guardian or the hinderer/trickster.

3. Listing six milestones on that character’s journey to their job. These should explain how a character ended up in that profession.

4. Draw around your own hand. Imagine it is the outline of a hand of the character in your story.

What is the hand used for?

Describe each finger in detail. If they are wearing rings, why are the rings there?

Describe any distinguishing marks.

What is the texture of their skin?

What does the hand come in contact with during the week? At the weekends?

5. Draw an outline of the same character’s foot.

Describe their shoes. Where were they bought?

How many pairs of shoes does the character own?

What surfaces does the foot come in contact with?

Consider how connected the character is with the ground on which they walk: would they prefer to live somewhere else? Why?

Now you’ve begun to get to know this character you can start thinking about how you might use them in a story. Try one of these:

Choose one of the 6 milestones in the character’s journey into their job. Use it as a starting point for a piece of writing in which something happens to the hand and/or foot. Include at least four elements from the exercises you have just completed,  ‘showing not telling’, to convey an aspect of the character’s personality.

This character is taking part in a ritual (burying a pet, celebrating a divorce, exorcising a poltergeist, a Sunday lunch, a bikers’ initiation). The ritual is interrupted. How? What happens next?

Your character is on a plane and they begin to talk to the stranger sitting next to them. They don't have to be swapping confessions. One of them might be boasting or lying. You might want to think about a genre for the story, but aim to move your plot towards an outcome in which one of the characters is unexpectedly changed by the encounter.

Your character is flying to an exciting destination where they hope to act or feel differently. List five or six items associated with their old life which they cannot bear to leave behind. What happens to these items in the new setting? How does your character let go of them?