Inspiration and research behind my books…
One of the questions most asked of an author in interviews is ‘Where do you get your inspiration and ideas from?’
It’s quite a tricky one to answer really as the smallest thing can spark the germ of an idea.
The Woman on the Beach
Here’s an example; this was my sun-lounger on my most recent foreign holiday, Mexico in January 2020. Who would have thought that watching a dog run up and down the shoreline, keeping track of his owners while they swam in the sea would set my mind whirring with the intricate plot-line for The Woman on the Beach… but it did. The whole episode found it’s way into chapter one, although if I remember correctly the dog wasn’t a golden retriever, the woman wasn’t wearing a red dress and, as far as I could see she didn’t have a tattoo on her arm. She probably wasn’t English and almost certainly didn’t have a friend called Liv.
Sometimes I get an idea for a title, as I did with Alice in Theatreland and the whole story develops from that. The main character is Alice, she’s a naive dancer from the provinces trying to make her way in the West End of London, the theatreland district. I set it in the mid 1970’s as that was when I was a dancer myself so I knew the process of auditioning and also the clothes of the era without having to do any further research. I used an unpleasant impresario I had come across and made him more wicked than he was in actuality to create the utterly despicable Richard, who I must confess I really enjoyed writing. I was also able to draw a little on my experience of working in a West End night club when I developed Gina’s character, although thankfully my boss was nothing like Franco. In some ways the story wrote itself which is probably how I managed to complete the first draft in just ten weeks even though I was working full time.
It’s not always that easy though. For my DCI Rachel Hart series, the first three books I wrote for Bookouture, I had to do quite a bit of research on police procedure. The first book in the series started as a short story entitled Pumpkin, but I realised fairly early on that the story line of Little Girl Missing was far too complex for a short story. I’ll always have a special place in my heart for this book at it was the one that earned me my first publishing deal. I don’t really remember what the inspiration for the second in the series, What He Did was, but the opening scene of Why She Died was inspired by something that happened when my daughter was studying at university. That incident was tragically a student taking her own life which turns out not to be the case in Why She Died, but it was an impactful start to the book.
I often use personal experience from my own life and that of friends and family to embellish a story and give it authenticity, but never in a way that might offend them. I’ve also been known to ‘kill off’ characters that have hurt my nearest and dearest – it gives me an enormous sense of satisfaction!
The inspiration for My Mother’s Secret, started when I watched a television report about a woman who had set up a charity to help mothers of stillborn babies pre 1980 locate their unmarked graves in order for them to grieve and thus achieve closure. This became the mother, Diana’s secret, but I then had to find a way for the secret she had kept for over forty years to be revealed. Alzheimer’s Disease is often found to be the cause of memory lapses prior to an actual diagnosis, but it can also dredge up long-buried memories as happens in this instance. I had to do a fair amount of research, but again I was also able to draw on personal experience. The scene near the beginning of the book where Diana is found wandering in the middle of the road wearing only her nightie, actually happened to a lady who lived on the ground floor of a house in which we were renting a flat about forty years ago. It’s funny how our brains store certain things which now, as a writer I’m able to draw on for authenticity.
So, as you can see, I get my ideas and inspiration from all sorts of places. Below I go into a little more detail about the initial idea for the Liberty Sands trilogy, my first foray into writing fiction inspired by a holiday to the beautiful island of Mauritius.
booked a car with a driver for the day as my main character, Holly, would have done in order to be able to write her blog in an informed manner. Even our beach walks were useful. One of my copy editor’s favourite lines from the book was inspired by a pile of coral we stumbled across… “She zoomed in to get a close-up but with a shudder realised that it looked like a desecrated graveyard with the bones of corpses piled high.”
We had taken a glass bottom boat trip on our holiday in Barbados during which the boatman had pointed out a house purported to be that of X Factor judge Simon Cowell – that little snippet of information made it into the book of course.
I’ve always fancied a beach wedding myself – maybe we’ll take the plunge on our fortieth anniversary of living together in January 2018.
A visitor in Barbados…
Quite appropriately, considering Holly’s job as a travel blogger, my first book was written in a variety of overseas locations which we had visited on holidays in the eighteen months it took from starting to finishing Life’s a Beach and Then… Conceived in Mauritius, ‘and Then…’ added to the title by my friend Denise in Dubai, 30,000 words written during a week in Corsica but finished and edited at home in Berkshire. Every time we went away my ‘baby’ laptop went with me and I dedicated at least two hours of my day to writing.
I prefer to write alone but this cute little sparrow, pecking at sugar grains from a saucer on the balcony of our hotel in Barbados, was a welcome distraction before I got down to the serious business of putting words on the page.
