Inspiration

People often ask where I get my ideas from. For me, it begins with a very small seed. With Come Back to Me it was a newspaper report, just a few lines tucked away in the corner of the West Australian. And for Beneath the Shadows it was the character of Grace who evolved first – this daunted but determined woman who faces an internal and external battle to uncover the truth of her husband’s disappearance. The rest of the story – the desolate terrain of the North Yorkshire moors, the ghostly stories and folk tales, the influence of other gothic novels – all came later.

My next step is letting these themes germinate in my mind, and seeing if they grow. Plenty of story ideas fall away, but a few stick with me and start to take a stronger hold. This feels like a natural, spontaneous process, as I begin to linger on characters and plotlines, drawing them out, examining them, asking questions, trying to ascertain and understand the heart of them. Sometimes this process moves me away from my original ideas, but there is always an unshakeable core of my story, some question or character that forms the underlying theme I want to explore.

Then I begin to write. Usually I don’t worry about the plan too much to begin with, I just concentrate on encouraging the story to life on the page, and as I go along I intersperse planning with writing, figuring things out as I go along, trying not to wander too far off track, and encouraging myself to make the necessary cuts if I realise I’ve gone wrong. Little by little, the first draft comes together, and there is this fantastic moment of realisation when I realise I’m no longer looking at chapters, paragraphs and snippets of writing, but at a whole book.  It is a moment I thoroughly recommend basking in, before the small matter of editing begins…!