What if....
In the run up to publication of my new thriller, Don't Say a Word, there was the classic dinner party questioning I also saw with The Good Mother: “Wow! You write books? Where do you get your ideas?”
I’m afraid I have to avoid the tendency to look a little blank, while thinking ‘Where do you not get your ideas?’
Because all of us, every day, have ideas, don’t we? Things that interest us, fascinate us, that we’d love to explore.
I think the better question is really: how do you think? And how do you know when the germ of an idea is worth exploring for a whole novel?
For me, there’s a classic ‘what if?’ moment, followed by a ‘why?’. For my last novel The Good Mother, it was the ‘what if a mother woke up in a room and didn’t know where her daughter was?’ I then in-fill with the ‘why’ that would possibly happen, and that’s the meat of the novel.
In my latest book, it’s so ridden with secrets and the joys of an unreliable narrator, to avoid spoilers I can only express this as ‘what if x, y, z? Oh, and also: a b c!’ and then there was a lot of ‘why’ to in-fill.
I’m sorry I can’t tell you more – you’ll have to read the book for that. But what I can say, is that behind all the ‘what ifs’ and ‘whys’ of my books, there is also another, more pertinent question for a reader: what would you do? If you were, like Jen in Don’t Say a Word or Susan in The Good Mother, convinced that there was a real existential threat to you and your child, what route would you take? How far would you go to protect your darling son or daughter?
You’d go the furthest you possibly could, right? But how far is your furthest? And from what starting point? That’s what makes the difference for Jen in Don’t Say a Word. She thinks she’s gone as far as she needs, from a very low ebb. But she must go further, and further again. Because she, too, asks herself: what if? What if she doesn’t do her bit?
That’s unthinkable. But she thinks it. We all do. And some of us write it down.
That, in short, is where the ideas come from.
Don't Say a Word
Don't Say a Word is available for all e-readers now: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Say-Wor...
I’m afraid I have to avoid the tendency to look a little blank, while thinking ‘Where do you not get your ideas?’
Because all of us, every day, have ideas, don’t we? Things that interest us, fascinate us, that we’d love to explore.
I think the better question is really: how do you think? And how do you know when the germ of an idea is worth exploring for a whole novel?
For me, there’s a classic ‘what if?’ moment, followed by a ‘why?’. For my last novel The Good Mother, it was the ‘what if a mother woke up in a room and didn’t know where her daughter was?’ I then in-fill with the ‘why’ that would possibly happen, and that’s the meat of the novel.
In my latest book, it’s so ridden with secrets and the joys of an unreliable narrator, to avoid spoilers I can only express this as ‘what if x, y, z? Oh, and also: a b c!’ and then there was a lot of ‘why’ to in-fill.
I’m sorry I can’t tell you more – you’ll have to read the book for that. But what I can say, is that behind all the ‘what ifs’ and ‘whys’ of my books, there is also another, more pertinent question for a reader: what would you do? If you were, like Jen in Don’t Say a Word or Susan in The Good Mother, convinced that there was a real existential threat to you and your child, what route would you take? How far would you go to protect your darling son or daughter?
You’d go the furthest you possibly could, right? But how far is your furthest? And from what starting point? That’s what makes the difference for Jen in Don’t Say a Word. She thinks she’s gone as far as she needs, from a very low ebb. But she must go further, and further again. Because she, too, asks herself: what if? What if she doesn’t do her bit?
That’s unthinkable. But she thinks it. We all do. And some of us write it down.
That, in short, is where the ideas come from.
Don't Say a Word
Don't Say a Word is available for all e-readers now: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dont-Say-Wor...
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