Week Three: The Impossible Idea

Novelists heading for the Pick 'n' Mix Ideas Counter at Woolies. 

(Photo credit: SecretLondon)

'Where do you get your ideas from?'

This is one of the most common questions writers get asked. Non-writers are constantly intrigued by the mysterious - to them, and sometimes to us - process that is novel-writing. My prolific mother, who in her lifetime published over 150 novels, was asked on a regular basis where she got her many ideas from. Deadpan, she would look people in the eye and say, 'Woolworths.'

But on a serious note, where do we get our ideas from as novelists?

Novelists work in many different ways, so there are multiple answers to this question: historical accounts, snippets of conversation overheard on a bus, a clipping from the newspaper or something seen on a documentary, a real-life experience, a close friend's story, an unusual anecdote told in the pub or office, meandering thoughts jotted down in a notebook, then perhaps forgotten about for months or even years, until something else comes along to light the blue touchpaper ...

The word 'novel' means 'new', of course. It always reminds me of the old wedding day rhyme:

Something old

Something new

Something borrowed

Something blue

There is something in this simple piece of traditional advice we can take away as novelists and re-use for our own purposes. Something borrowed, in particular.

Novelists are the ultimate Borrowers. (Thank you, Mary Norton.) Writers were recycling and re-using long before it become an important and necessary habit to save the planet. Chaucer lifted his impressive 'Canterbury Tales' structure from Boccaccio's Decameron, and Shakespeare kept a much-thumbed copy of Holinshed's Chronicles under his straw mattress. (Or so I like to imagine.) But don't get me wrong; I don't consider these to be instances of lazy writing. Borrowing is as much about the way our brains work, leaping at a tangent from idea to idea, as it is about needing impetus for a new story. We can all agree, I'm sure, that Shakespeare was no slouch in the imagination department. Yet he constantly borrowed - a far nicer word than 'stole' - story ideas from history or other writers so he could keep writing at what must have felt like an insane pace, feeding the insatiable monster that was the Tudor taste for theatrical extravaganza.

Shakespeare's imagination was caught by the fantastical suggestion, noted in Holinshed's Chronicles, that Macbeth was influenced by witches. "Ching!" Into his basket it went.

So borrowing an idea or two that's already been done can provide a shortcut to your own story idea, and even a shortcut to your own brain and the way it tells stories.

That's why we like some writers better than others. Some writers - however popular with others - may leave us cold. Others fire us with excitement. That's because we recognize something of ourselves in their work: the way they write, the way they see the world and tell their stories, connects to our own beliefs and identity on a deep level. We say, 'Yes!' when we read them, and feel they are speaking directly to our own experience. That mental click is what we reach for as writers when we begin to scratch about for a new novel plot.

This is not plagiarism, of course, which is something no self-respecting writer would do. You do not take work wholesale from other people. That would be theft and is against the law. Just saying.

 Death by Stickies ...

Instead, you might keep an 'ideas' notebook on the go, plaster a wall with Stickies, scribble on a whiteboard in the kitchen, or pack your own 'teeming brain', as John Keats put it, with possibilities. Then, when you're ready to write a new story, you cherry-pick from this chaotic jumble of ideas and images, and put them together in a brand-new way: that pub conversation about the successful businessman who jumped to his death - and no one knows why - may fit neatly with that drama you saw on television the other night where the wife accidentally intercepted a blackmail letter, and maybe your own loose floorboard may give you the hiding-place for those incriminating photos.

So we cobble things together. Our own ideas, our own lives, a mishmash of things we've seen or heard or read or experienced. We tear things up in our mind and stick them together again in a new order. We recreate Dr. Frankenstein's monster each time we plan a new book. We may take something that existed in another form or universe, and breathe fresh life into it, make it new.

There's room for everyone's novel: even yours.

And an idea may feel new to us. Flushed with the triumph of imagination over torpor, we tell ourselves a plot has come straight out of the ether, that it came clean and true and unrelated to anything else, that it owes nothing to anyone. But really? 

At the heart of it, there is something a little bit shady about the idea-generating business. The novel idea. Because 'novel' does actually mean 'new', remember? And we have been told since antiquity - Ecclesiastes - that there is 'nothing new under the sun.' So finally we have to turn and face the dreaded word we have been trying to avoid all along.

Originality?

As novelists, we are always told to make it new, to be original. Agents clamour for it - to avoid selling the same old stories to jaded editors. Publishers demand it - to avoid being sued. Readers hope for it - to avoid being bored. And we ourselves - to avoid professional embarrassment, if for no other reason - hunt for originality like the Holy Grail, even when writing in a self-limiting field like series fiction. In fact, novelists being grandiose types, we want our latest idea to be the most original idea in the history of novel-writing. (And if we can't quite stretch to that, then we will reluctantly settle for the best idea we've come up with so far.)

But here's the thing. The truly novel idea is impossible. So just do what you can, and don't sweat it too much if another writer - or indeed several other writers - have books out the same month that echo yours. (This happens uncannily often.) Novel-writing has a lengthy and respectable tradition, and your novel is adding to that, like one of those chain poems where everyone contributes a line. You cannot be read out of context and so should not feel you need to write out of context.

What can be original and new in all this borrowing and cobbling is you. Your narrative voice. Your treatment. Your unique way of seeing things and putting them together. You are the magic ingredient that makes it new. So when you're stirring the pot, don't lose confidence because there are thousands of other blackmailed husband and betrayed wife stories out there. None of those stories are like yours because they were not written by you. (Hopefully! I'll deal with writers who repeat themselves or have 'favourite' themes in a later post.)

Question: where do you get your ideas from? Answers in the comment box, please. Join the debate!

So yes, the idea for a novel is always impossible, because it is never simple, never original, and almost never turns out exactly as you intended at the planning stage. But just remember that your idea cannot be seen out of its context in the grand parade of novels that came before - and will come after - and that you yourself are the magic ingredient that makes your hotchpotch of characters and ideas into something novel, something new.

Week One: How I Began Life As A Novelist

My name is Jane Holland and I'm a novelist.

Put like that, being a novelist sounds like an addiction, like alcoholism or compulsive shopping. And perhaps that's not a bad analogy. Writing a novel is so hard, such an exhausting long haul, a back-breaking labour of love, that to embark on it - and finish - the writer must be obsessed with their subject. Or with the idea of writing a novel, at least.

To kick off this series of discussions how novel-writing, I thought it best to discuss how I got into the field myself. Not simply to lay out my credentials for droning on about fiction for the next 51 weeks, but also to demonstrate the often shocking vagaries of the profession.

Being the daughter of highly literate writing folk, I have written more stories than I can remember, starting at the tender age of about twelve with a novella about a time-travelling caveman that I called A Wild Magic or something similar. My efforts then were all children's fantasy, the genre I knew best, with a healthy dose of Tolkien thrown in. My parents read my books, but did not hugely encourage me, I'm unsure why. Perhaps because being a novelist is such a precarious profession, or because they held the view that children who are going to become novelists generally have to be stopped from constantly writing - instead of, say, doing their homework - rather than prompted to write more.

My debut (Sceptre)

Beyond these amateur efforts, and some poetry, I did little else of note fiction-wise until my late twenties, when I wrote a diary piece for the London Review of Books called Diary of a Hustler, via a circuitous route of poetry and snooker playing. It was spotted by various literary agents, and I was flatteringly head-hunted. I chose Curtis Brown as my first literary agency, and published my first novel about two years later under my real name of Jane Holland with the Hodder imprint Sceptre: Kissing the Pink.

A sports novel for women from the school of Nick Hornby, it was marketed as chick-lit and not surprisingly vanished without trace.

My agent retired, and I had fallen out of love with Curtis Brown - despite them selling the film rights for Kissing the Pink several years running - so I looked about arrogantly for someone new. Writers, take note: I did not manage to sign with another literary agent for ten years. During that time I published five books of poetry and wrote a fair number of novels, five rather disreputable ones published under a pen-name to scratch a living, the rest odd literary efforts sent on the merry-go-round of London agents.

No one wanted them. Or rather, no one wanted me.

My mother having died, I tentatively approached her agent. He was not interested in the first novel I sent and kindly suggested someone else, but I felt too despondent to chase that lead. I had some more children and brooded for a few years, picking at various stories, then was offered a job editing romantic fiction at a small independent publishing house. I did that for a year, and got my mojo back. I decided to take my fiction career in hand, wrote some historical romances - my favourite reading matter at the time - and approached my mother's former agent again.

The Queen's Secret, my first novel sold through LBA, went into both Asda and Tescos.

We met in London for a drink. I was horribly nervous. He wasn't interested in the novels I had written, but asked if I could write something else historical, in a more ambitious style, as fast as possible. I said YES, probably baring my teeth like a soldier going over the top, and my extraordinarily fruitful association with Luigi Bonomi Associates had begun.

Witchrise, the final book in my young Adult Tudor Witch Trilogy with Random House.

That was in 2010. I have just finished my ninth historical novel sold through LBA to my two publishers Random House and Hodder, and am starting a tenth with high hopes of finding a publisher for it. (I didn't, in fact, but self-published it and it became a bestseller! See GIRL NUMBER ONE on Amazon.) I also self-publish short stories and novels under various pen-names - such as Beth Good - when between manuscripts under contract.

In this series of blog posts I intend to wander loosely about the subject of novel-writing, and hope someone out there finds it helpful. I'm not a 'rules' person, so you are unlikely to find many prescriptive posts about the strict How-Tos of writing. My approach is more discursive, exploratory, questioning. That is, I may ask open-ended questions about fiction, and not necessarily expect to find an answer. Or I may look at how other novelists have done things, and of course consider my own thoughts and challenges as I edit and write my novel(s) over the course of the year.

I am particularly hoping for dialogue with readers and writers, so please feel free to use the comment box below, and/or engage with me on social media. Ask me questions, suggest issues I can consider in a future post, put your own views across on novel-writing.

Find my main writing account on Twitter at @janeholland1

I'm Victoria Lamb Author on Facebook and @VictoriaLamb1 on Twitter. 

This is my main website: Victoria Lamb Books.