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IDEAS
by Sue Welfare
‘Write something about your new book,’ said the lovely Carol Kinsey, host, writer and creator of DizzyC’s Little Book Blog. Like a lot of other people there are days when I just stare at a blank page, wondering what to write – So this is a short piece on where to find ideas to get you all fired up and raring to write.
People often ask me where I get my ideas from for books. The truth is there is no one answer. I read constantly, watch TV and films, listen to the and radio. I’m really nosey and talk to everyone and all the while my brain sucks it up like sponge.
It’s like soup in there - picked packed full of snippets and weird ideas collected from here there and everywhere. I also keep a notebook and record random thought and jottings so I can actually remember it.
But all those jottings and ideas, all those scenes and snippet of dialogue aren’t enough – I need something else. I need the thing that will glue all that stuff into a plot.
And when I have it the thing is like the final park that sets me off and all those bits and fragments and snatches of dialogue finally feel like they have a place to go!
For my new book One Night Only the thing was a conversation I had with a friend who had come home for a family funeral. I still live in the town where I grew up and although I have lived in other places, I’ve always felt very rooted in the community and love living here, so it was interesting to see the place through these guy's eyes.
As we were talking he said, ‘Oh nothing here’s changed since I left.’ And then a sentence or two later was saying how he felt like everything had changed; which was like a little seed that grew and grew.
Everything changes and nothing changes, felt like the magic thing. Trouble is one phrase is not a book, I needed some other elements. So I went fishing through my note books and the thought soup.
I’m constantly stuck by how often in life we strive to make something happen and while we’re busy doing that and really focusing on it something else comes along and changes our lives for ever. Things seldom turn out quite how you’ve planned.
And then of course when you look back on any life there are the chances we didn’t take and the paths we didn’t follow - that boy we might have married, that job we might have taken – there are times when you can help but wonder what might have happed if you had made other choices.
So those where the kind of thoughts that I started with. Then I needed some to explore and experience all that stuffed I was cooking up. At the time there was a big thing in the media about older women not appearing on our TV screens – and I write a lot about women over forty and often older – so that was where my heroine, Helen, arrived from – and as soon as Helen showed up I needed a good reason for her to finally go home and an even better reason for her to have stayed away for so long.
So that’s the basic idea for One Night Only.
Here are five other great places to find ideas!
- Classic fairy stories
- The problem pages of women’s magazine
- People watching in public spaces – just exactly why is she so angry with him?
- Listen to friends and family and total strangers (don’t forget to fictionalise their stories, just pinch the central idea, and use that as a starting point for your own story, being true doesn’t make the reality of what happens to them into good fiction.
- News, newspapers and magazine – imagine how those events would effect your characters.
For more details you can contact me on my website with it
www. Katelawson.co.uk – but you’ll probably find out a lot more about me on Facebook. You’ll find me there as Sue Welfare.
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