WHERE DO I FIND IDEAS?
Many people will tell you that newspapers and the like are a great source of inspiration. And you may find that this method works well for you. Often even a small story warranting only a few column inches in a local paper can spark off many thoughts of ‘What if?’.
What if the printed story were to have taken place in another part of the world where different values or laws apply? Or in a war zone perhaps?
What if the main characters in the piece were older, younger, famous or particularly talented in some way?
What if the little guy decides to fight back against seemingly impossible odds? That’s always worth a thought. John Grisham’s ‘wet behind the ears’ lawyers have been taking on corporate giants with stunning success for years now.
From such starting points the imagination can take you almost anywhere you want to go.
Now it gets personal
Having said all that, more often than not my initial inspiration begins with something I already know about or have already experienced.
By the time you reach adulthood you will have accumulated literally millions of personal memories. People you have known, places you have visited and situations you have had to deal with are just some examples.
The inspiration for my first published novel, In the Long Run, came from my just happening to be in South Africa when the 1990 running of the previously unknown to me Comrades Marathon was taking place. With over two million people lining the hill strewn fifty-five mile route to cheer on the twelve thousand plus competitors, I was immediately blown away by the enormity of the event. This was the perfect backdrop for my novel. Now all I had to do was populate it with fictional characters and create sufficient conflict for them.
The inspiration for Buried Pasts was entirely different. My Canadian father was a pilot with Bomber Command during World War II. I never knew him at all because he was killed in action on his 28th mission during the summer of 1944 when I was only a few weeks old. All I had to remember him by was a few old photographs and my mother’s recollections of their brief time together.
After the modest success of In the Long Run I became far more confident in my writing and decided that my next published book was going to be my long planned tribute to Dad. Digging out an old manuscript of the first draft done in the early 1990s, I gave it a total rewrite. It’s no coincidence that the hero of the story carries the name of Stafford (as similar as possible to my own family name without being too obvious), nor that Stafford’s fictional 79 Squadron was as close as possible to Dad’s real life 78 Squadron.
Of course, unlike real life, my central character here had to survive the war, especially as the major part of the story takes place eighteen years later in 1962. But throughout, in my mind Stafford was always Dad. Whatever literary perils and problems Stafford faced, this, I fondly imagined, was how my father might have handled the situation. No novel I ever write in the future will be as personal as this one.