The Question That Plagues All Authors…

What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.

Where do you get your ideas from?

Okay, so hate may be too strong a word, but it’s certainly one of the hardest questions to answer, simply because the honest response would be “which idea do you mean?”

Let me take my dark thriller, Badlands as an example.

Most stories can be boiled down to a “What if” question that is answered at the end of the story.

In the case of Badlands, the question could be phrased as “What if a young woman came home to search for her missing sister, only to stumble into the middle of a murderous conspiracy?”

That pretty much sums up the books premise.

Except, it’s way more complicated than that.

Below is a screenshot very first notes I made for the story back on 28th August 2017.

There’s the germ of two ideas that ended up in the final book in this short excerpt of notes alone; the guy investigating the friend/relatives death and the gang of bikers/surfers who rule the Badlands.

But what’s missing are the three main characters. The ideas for these came later.

The Reverend Richard Goddard was the first to take shape, inspired by a dream I had of a Fagin-like vicar running a gang of pickpockets in Newquay.

Willow already existed, having been a side character in an abandoned WIP in which she appeared out of nowhere and promptly stole the whole show. But I didn’t realise that she was the MC in Badlands (the character searching for answers in the notes above) until May 2019. And I started writing the book on June 3rd 2019.

And Raven? Raven didn’t show up until I was writing the book. I always planned for Goddard to have an enforcer, but I imagined the enforcer to be a big burly guy, your typical bad guy henchman.

The small, slight, yet psychotically murderous Raven pretty much appeared fully formed as I wrote the scene in which she first appears.

And, of course, the creation of Raven meant she had to have a back story. And that back story, linked Goddard, Willow and Raven in ways that took the plot to a whole new level.

That’s how the idea process works for me. Each new development offers new ideas, new avenues to explore and adds more layers to the characters and the story.

They become more real, the story grows deeper and those basic germs listed in the notes above take on whole new levels of complexity.

Which is why the question of where I get ideas from is so damn hard to answer. In truth, I don’t know. All I do know is that a story isn’t just one idea.

It’s loads of ideas that come from anywhere and then get stitched together to form stories that thrill, terrify and hopefully leave the reader wanting more.