The genesis of ideas.
A question that all writers get asked from
time to time is: where do you get your ideas from? Well that’s not always easy
to answer. Ideas come from the mind, don’t they? From the imagination.
Well, yes and no, I would say to that.
There’s usually a spark somewhere that emanates from something a writer has
seen or heard, something read, maybe on the news. Sometimes it may come from a
snatch of conversation overheard on a bus, or in a café or pub. That doesn’t
mean that anything and everything gets turned into a story, and usually, if it
does, it comes out in a different form. And quite often it’s misremembered
anyway. But somewhere along the line that incident has stayed inside the head
of the writer, slowly taking shape, emerging half-formed, to be worked on,
polished, tossed about until it reaches its final shape where it’s quite
probably unrecognisable from the original incident. I often think ideas are
like sauerkraut, they start from very humble beginnings to ferment, with time
and patience, into something nutritious.
What
started me thinking about this was reading Plotting
and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith, herself an absolute
master of the art. She gives as an example the various stimuli that set Bram
Stoker on the way to his masterpiece, Dracula.
When holidaying in Whitby he
apparently came across an old newspaper report of a shipwreck which had landed
on the beach below the ruined abbey with no survivors on board. From this he
developed the idea of Dracula’s coffin washing ashore.
At this year’s Cromarty Arts
Festival Ian Rankin talked about his idea for the short story and radio play The Death Watch Journal.
On holiday with his wife in St. Lucia he saw a clipping from an edition
of Private Eye about a private detective who had been found dead in a car park
whilst looking into a miscarriage of justice. This combined in his mind with
another incident in which children found a body in a wood in an abandoned car
and Voila! A story began to emerge.
For myself, ideas can take years
– even decades to germinate. Hangman’s Wood began because I saw the writer Simon Kernick being interviewed by
Mariella Frostrup, and talking about an incident that occurred to himself and
another boy when they were abducted and taken into a nearby wood and physically
assaulted. My current work in progress, Washed in the Blood, was precipitated by two incidents, both of
which took place over thirty years ago. One was a report of a small child’s
body washed up on the beach somewhere down south. The child had been in his
pyjamas, and no-one ever claimed him. The other part of the plot was driven by
a story told me by a total stranger at a bus stop, which was that her grandson
had just committed suicide because the company who’d employed him on a Youth
Employment Scheme had given him the sack as soon as he was eighteen and
therefore entitled to a proper wage.
So ideas can come from the most
unexpected places. And at the time they may not even feel like ideas. But where
they don’t come from is from somebody saying to you – I know a good story you could write. That, I’m afraid just doesn’t
work. That’s your story, not mine, and I like to use my own imagination, even
though sometimes it seems to be wearing a bit thin!
Paula K
Randall
