Ideas and where I get 'em

I complained yesterday that no-one had asked me this, and you lot came up trumps and several people asked me the question, so yay, I feel like a proper writer now. (Where can I get one?)

The answer is pretty simple, I suppose, they just attack me out of the blue. Mostly they come to me when I'm in the car and I'll be listening to the radio and someone will say something that sparks me off. Sometimes the best ideas (or they seem so at the time) come in the middle of the night, and I ALWAYS think I'm going to remember them, but sadly I never do. I understand that driving and that in-between sleep phase is similar in the brain and that the creative mind gets to play while the motor skills go into automatic.

Muffled Drum came from some radio person just mentioning La Dame Aux Camelias and I had to stop the car as an entire plot landed in my head and I had to write it down. The original plot included the abandoned hero having to go off to be a prostitute but I erased that line of thought pretty quickly. Standish (as most of you probably know) came from me looking through a 1966 Oxford Concise Dictionary and finding all these lovely words I didn't know and I came across the word standish which meant ink and pen holder. Transgressions was mother's idea—she thought the whole "lovers on opposite sides" would be interesting. I heard the words "Heston Services" recently on the radio (an infamous truckstop/cafe on one of the motorways in Britain, God knows where, oop north probably) and have an idea for a 17th century romp.

But I'm also inspired by things I see as well as things I hear—there's a lovely lighthouse in Happisburgh (pronounced Haysborough) in Norfolk and I have a lighthouse story started because of that, although it's an offshore lighthouse in my story, rather than a coastal one. I heard a name today (of a Trollope book) and that got me thinking if I called a book a certain thing, (not the name of the Trollope book, but simply the name of the character) what it would be about… But as I said yesterday, I have more ideas and plots than I'll ever get written. I am so jealous of writers who can do six projects at once, or who are writing one book a month. It's taken me a long time to realise that I'm never going to be able to "keep up with the Joneses."  At this moment in time, I'm thinking I'll writing one novel a year for submission to a specific publisher—so it will comply with genre guidlelines, and one novel "for me." which means I'll take a risk selling it.

Plotwise, I'm a mess, and "pantzer" is a massive understatement. I'd be happy to be a  pantzer. There should be another word. An accretor, or something. Generally, I get the name of the book first, then I just start writing and see what happens. Or I'll have a character, and I'll start writing about him and see where we go. I Knew Him was a bit different, I knew I wanted to explore the Hamlet theme, but not rewrite Hamlet, so a lot of the ideas fell into place because of that. (could also explain why I'm having trouble moving along with it)

This progression rather than plotting probably explains the reoccurring (which I've only just realised) cinematic panning scene in a lot of my books: Standish, we zoom in on Ambrose writing in his study; Transgressions, we pan across a riverbank to see David lying naked in the grass; Tributary, there's nothing more than a little grey car driving up a steep Italian landscape and so on. Junction X, we pan up a suburban street commenting on how normal everything looks on this side of the lace curtains.

On that related subject of BEGINNINGS - I know these beginnings aren't necessarily what editors/publishers want. They want immediate action, but as a reader I don't, and I hate doing it as a writer. You don't start a film with a hugely violent action scene, because you'd be running to keep up, your brain couldn't cope with it.  If it's necessary to start a story with action, I'll probably do so, but so far I haven't felt the need. Possibly because I don't write books that have action in? I don't know.  I'm sure that if I were ever to write Age of Sail (never going to happen, because OMG far too much to get wrong) I'd start a book in the middle of a sea battle because that would grip the reader better than a fancy filmic pan over the sea and eventually landing on a tousle haired lieutenant.  Muffled Drum begins with more action than some of the others, that is to say you are flung into a conversation without any description as to where you are and who we are looking at—I could have started the story in the battle itself, but if I'd done that I'd have had to have had some backstory, and backstory in the midst of battle? Not a good idea. I just like filmic beginnings, I cannot help it.