Chris Armstrong
This is such a difficult question! There is no definitive answer. All that I can say is that both of my books, all of my (as yet unpublished) short stories and all of my poems would never have come into being without some hook to hang them on. Some germ of an idea. I find it impossible to start with the idea that today I will write a poem - something will trigger a thought and I will know that I need to be at my desk. The Dark Trilogy came into being because I felt that one of my poems - an obliquely autobiographical poem - Retrospective, published in Mostly Welsh - needed some explanation; and, as I wrote in a previous answer, my current work began after I read a sentence that resonated with me in an article about James Joyce!
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