Seeds of a book - from life

Over on her brand new Writing Diary on her fabulous new revamped web site, my friend and fellow Presents writer Susan Stephens is talking about the 'where do you get your ideas from' question and the way that sometimes real incidents in an author's life is a way of starting off a story - a launching pont.

Not that the book then becomes about that real icident because that just wouldn't work - the incident is real - it happened to a real person - to Susan or to me or whoever. It's not a story. It's just the beginning of one. It's a seed.

I talked about this back in March 2006 when I was talking about Growing a Book. Funnily enough, the book I was talking about then was the one that's out this week in America - The Italian's Forced Bride. And I remember very, very clearly just when the 'seed' for this book was planted in my mind.

There I was, getting dressed one morning. When I get dressed I always have the radio on – BBC Radio 4 - there’s always someone talking about something on there. Sometimes I listen with a lot of attention, mostly I wander in and out and pick up bits here and there, snatches of conversation. And that’s how I heard my ‘seed’.

A man was being interviewed. He was an athlete (I think!) You see I missed the beginning of the interview and if I heard who he was I’ve forgotten (my apologies to him – it’s not that he wasn’t memorable, but once I’d heard this line, I wasn’t listening any more, I was planning, thinking, dreaming.)

He was talking about his baby son. And he said: “I looked at him and I thought – that child is the one and only person in this whole world who has my blood in his veins.”

Which is what set me off – the questions just kept coming:
Why would that be the case that the baby was his only family?
How could that have happened?
Why?
When had it happened – that he had lost the rest of his family?
How would it make him feel?
How would he react?
How would he behave towards women?. . .etc . . .etc . . .

By this time, my mind was buzzing with ideas. The what ifs were coming thick and fast – what if he found out that an ex-lover was pregnant with his child? How would he behave then?And what if . . .

Ah, but that’s the bit I’m not saying because it gives away too much of my plot. But it’s where my own life experiences came into the book and I wrote about something that made me feel very emotionally involved with what I was writing. I must have put that emotion into the book as well because as soon as she'd read the book another friend and fellow romance writer, Michelle Reid sent me a note that said ‘You made me cry in the middle’. And since then so many other readers have written to say that I made them cry too.

So that’s how this book got started – that serendipity factor. If I hadn’t switched the radio on that morning, or if I’d got up half an hour earlier – or later – or I’d walked out of the room to get something from the bathroom and I hadn’t heard that line, maybe this book would never ever have happened. Which is quite a scary thought. Because as I write this, it’s sitting on my desk, 53,000 words of a story I’m proud to have written. People are always asking me that question – the ‘Where do you get your ideas from’ one. Most of the time I just have to reply ‘life’ because it’s life and people and their stories that inspire me. But this book, I could very definitely date from the moment of its conception and the second that that ‘seed’ was planted in my brain.

But the other bit was the personal experience that I brought into it.

It's as Susan says in her blog

Sometimes . . . I’m taking something from my own experience and making it much much bigger- the tragedy greater, the likely consequences far more dire- and then I base a story around it.

I think that taking a plot point that has its seed in reality can give it an edge, a sharpness that comes from the reality of the emotions behind that point. It adds depth and dimension, a truth that readers can recognise even if they don't know for definite that it really happened. As writers we're used to using our imaginations, to putting ourselves into the places of our characters, thinking of their responses, imagining their feelings. Other times we go deep into ourselves and draw out what's actually there - and then we fictionalise it.

Some books are overloaded with trama and darkness so much so that they read as melodrama, with characters given way too much to cope with - the sort of things that you feel they'd never come out of whole in the end. Sensation and trauma isn't emotion. And emotional intensity is the true trademark of a Presents novel.

I think it's fascinating that both Susan and I have books out together that spring from personal experience - and that, perhaps inevitably, we've both been thinking about the way each book grew from a simple seed into something that has now taken on a life of its own. I think I've mentioned before how often my fellow writers and I end up working along the same lines of thought - it happens all the time - and here's another example of it.