Where/when are you most likely to get an idea for your novels?

Tana French I love mysteries. I always have - real ones, fictional ones, solved, unsolved. So a part of me is always looking for mysteries. So far, the ideas for my books have come from ordinary everyday things that set me looking for potential mysteries. Faithful Place came from a battered old suitcase I saw in a skip one day, outside an old house that was being renovated - I started wondering who had left it there, whether he or she had meant to come back for it, what had stopped him or her...

And The Secret Place came from a wonderful site called PostSecret, where people create postcards revealing their secrets anonymously, and send them to the site's owner. The site taps into two deep and contradictory human needs: the need to share our secrets, and the need to keep them inviolate. I think those twin needs are at their most intense in adolescence, so I started wondering how a board like that would work out in a secondary school - and then I started wondering what would happen if a teenager used it to reveal what he or she knew about a murder...

flag