If you ask a writer where they get their ideas from you’re apt to get a hollow laugh. One reason is that it is a much too frequent question and the other is that we often have absolutely no idea. Things get scooped up and jumbled together in the subconscious and sometime later a book results. Or a bit of a book. Or a few lines. Or something.
Take the very new and hardly fledged WIP. I have no clue why I decided that it would feature Egyptology. I mean, why Egyptology? Like I know anything about that? Fun finding out though – and it is getting modified a bit to make it more manageable – I’m not totally daft. I just have this creepy scene in my head – in the dark with a lot of sarcophagi looming out of the murk and this ominous creaking noise …
It has occurred to me though that, Egyptology aside, things can get absorbed – like grit in the oyster – and end up re-appearing in a modified form. I’ve got two of those so far in said WIP. When I was a guest on crime writer Lorraine Mace’s blog a while ago she asked about sites for dead bodies – crime writers have those sorts of conversations all the time – it tends to make for nervous spouses on occasion. I mentioned that I’ve always felt that the carrels in an academic library had distinct possibilities. In the evening with low lights on the quieter top floors. It hovered for a while and now, what do you know, there in the first chapter of the WIP …
The other idea came out of an off the cuff exchange over Facebook with my favourite Cardiff jewellers about a hand over of some family opals in a cinema car park. (They have now been turned into a gorgeous brooch) The idea appealed to me and we joked about putting it in a book. Then the grit began to work. The WIP features a spectacular necklace. I am now pretty sure it will also be featuring some sort of exchange in a car park – although it will be on the Riviera, not a local cinema. I’m looking forward to explaining to a tour guide, when I finally get back to research trips, that deserted car parks are high on my list of “must visits”
So – that’s how two bits of grit might have got into the oyster. It remains to be seen if they emerge as pearls …