Not being overly confident yet I take bits and pieces from situations I understand and then try and slot them into scenarios that interest or fascinate me. As my first love is crime things usually take a downward turn pretty quickly and then I try to put it all right again.
I keep all sorts of things from the newspapers and Saturday magazines too; they can jog an idea into being sometimes.
Good question.
Take care
Tracy

I don't know where my first novel came from. It certainly wasn't the book I'd planned to write. It was extremely organic and just sort of 'became'.

I want to spare myself that level of organicness stress in my second. I've stolen the story from history. I already knew broadly what I wanted to write about - the period and the characters and stuff - and then I was reading a true case for research and thought, 'Now, this would make a great novel.'

It's such a help when key events are sorted for you.

But that's only half the book. The other half I've gotta make up.

RD&T came from a (very small) mix of personal experience and also a growing feeling of women being unhappy with their lot when we are supposed to have it all.
I read an article in Cosmo which discussed the concept of "second best" or "not good enough" syndrome experienced by a lot of seemingly successful women and it resonated with me.

The second book, well I just had an idea and put myself in the position of two MCs who were going through two very different stages of life.

The third is still evolving, but the initial chapters were inspired by a shopping trip to Tesco when I was feeling particularly down in the dumps.

Ways to Live Forever I thought it would be interesting to write a book from the perspective of a child who was dying. I sort of though, OK, who is my child? how old is he? who are his family? what do they think about this? I went off and did a load of research and discovered loads of wonderful stories/emotional points. By the time I'd spent a fortnight fleshing sam and his life out, i realised i really had to tell this story.

Green Man i just fell in love with the legend of the green man and thought 'there must be a way to get him into a children's book'.

I keep hearing stories that i think would make great books. I want to do one about twelve dancing llamas, just cos i think it's a great title.

I have my mother to thank for a highly-developed sense of whimsy and a propensity for embracing the ridiculous.

I got the idea for my first novel after visiting Thorpe park a couple of summers ago. I was sitting in the carriage of a little theme park train, travelling from a petting farm to a rollercoaster, via a landscaped pliocene, replete with plastic ferns and dinosaurs. My unbidden thought was 'I wonder what docile farm animals must make of all this hubbub? Loops and loops of twisted metal overhead, carriages screaming by all day. Huge artifices for the purposes of entertainment and outlandish beasts that don't move. What must they think?'

Hearing those screams and seeing the way people are flung and spun around, an innocent creature's logical conclusion must be that these are places of punishment, for why else would someone come willingly to experience such torture?

From that time on, I began to think from the animal's point of view, and the germ of an idea for a story was born. Over the next four months, I began to make rough notes, as names and appropriate species of animals came to me. At the same time, movies like Madagascar and Finding Nemo were coming out, and they fired my imagination too. My story would be like those, but set uniquely within a theme park. We visit a lot of theme parks anyway and the research, I reasoned, would be fun.

I always knew the basic premise, that of innocent creatures in an alien environment, struggling to grasp their purpose and calling, was sound, and it helped me to lay the groundwork for a story which would eventually encompass 44 chapters, 185,000 words and contain such disparate elements as alchemy and time travel. I was frankly amazed at the volume and consistency of words that snowballed onto paper from that initial passing thought.

So I think if you start from the solid platform of an original idea, story follows naturally. The end product for me is rarely as I imagined it would be, but after the initial thought sings out, it tends to gather an impetus of its own. When this happens I know I'm not really controlling the story. It is, as cliched as it sounds, expressing itself through me.

Hi, for me it's about a scene or situation that i've imagined. One that moved me in some way. Then I think about the characters in that scene, how they go there and where they're going. I'm writing my third novel now and i can safely say that i can't remember what the original scene was apart from the grain of sand in the oyster.
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