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What triggered your novel
I'm doing a workshop with some 8-12 yr olds and will be talking about triggers for creativity. My trigger for Oy Yew was chimneys. Tolkien was triggered by a line of poetry: 'Hail Earendel, most bright angel'. I'd like some more examples, especially from children's writers.
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Sometimes, it will be a scene or vision in my imagination. In Glass Dreams, a circus mystery, I ‘saw’ a ramshackle caravan in the woods and wondered why it might have been there. Working it out led to a great idea for a story.
I think Salt was inspired by a trip to the Cornish coast, a place rife with legends of pirates and smuggling. I named the fictional setting Pirates' Cove.
In another book, Martha and Mitch, an idea came to me as I was washing dishes at the kitchen sink. It was a cold morning, I remember, and I glanced into the garden at my children’s wooden playhouse and saw that the windows had steamed up. Straight away, I thought to myself, ‘Imagine if someone is living there and we never knew…’
Mandrake's Plot came about when I imagined a grotesque-looking figure and decided that he would be the caretaker of a strange school. Then my job was to figure out why it was so strange. My next vision was of two girls meeting on a train, having missed the start of term, and that scene became the opening to the story.
With my most recent book, The Secret of Pooks Wood, I happened to catch sign of a painted wooden sign on an old gate as I drove past. I didn’t really get a good look, but I thought it said ‘Pooks Wood’. By the time I had finished my journey, I had the entire plot mapped out in my head and couldn’t wait to begin.
The character of Charlie Chumpkins popped into my head after teaching a poetry lesson at school where the children had to describe certain things whilst imagining that they were tiny as ants.
When I walked my children to school, we used to pass a house where a wheelchair-bound lady lived. She grew plants on the windowsill of her porch and I thought, 'What if she's a witch and they are all the magical herbs she uses to make potions...' and so became Song of the Moon.
Bottom line of it, the inspiration was to write a book that made someone feel how I felt when I finished every single one of Gemmell's books.
Helter-Skelter started out as a short story about an older couple falling in love, and when I'd written that I wondered what had happened to the man in his early life. In fact Albie doesn't reach old age in H-S but in its sequel!