The question writers get asked most frequently is ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ We no longer credit that writers are beholden to their muses for literary inspiration, though a higher level answer is probably not possible either, since we remain in the dark on many processes in the brain, including that of creativity. The creative imagination may be built from an incessant curiosity, to ask questions about the world around us and an ability to make connections between things that are not handed down as part of our conceptual templates. But that is about as much as we can say at this point through the understanding afforded by neuroscience. A novelist asks questions and makes associations that are sustained over the length of a two hundred page book. That is an embodiment of the creative process, but not really an explanation of it. The author would prefer that the book speaks for itself and reveals its ideas, rather than have to explain it in interviews and essays.
The act of writing is a prosaic (pun intended) one, banal even. Sat at a desk typing on a keyboard, is no different from the action for an accountant or an actuary going through claims reports. It contains no magic. The accountant has their books of tax tables, the actuary their volumes on statistics and probability, while we authors have dictionaries and thesauruses. Of course, for all three of us now, these are available online in a mere extra window on our browser, thus streamlining and decluttering our desks and workstations further. On the wall of a writer’s study may be further evidence of the mundane; sticky notes, handwritten lists, graphs or diagrams plotting relationships or geographical choreography. Perhaps red twine, held by pins, links characters visually there on the wall as a mnemonic for the writer. Such a display has echoes of a police incident room, only lacking for photos of persons of interest.
I can trace back the origin ideas for my latest novel. My conscious mind was musing (unintended pun) on the abstract concept of justice, which does not exist in Nature, codified into laws and how those laws are examined in instances of infraction, by recourse to fragments and traces of material evidence. Moving from the abstract to gross matter in such manner, seemed to me a mirroring of phenomenology’s ongoing inquiry into the balance between the materialist and the idealist conceptualisations of the world. My unconscious mind came up with the image of a particular staged crime scene in vivid detail, but no associated notions of how it fitted with anything else, such as a victim or a detective’s inquiry. When I brought the two together, there was the launch pad for the novel. One from curiosity and questioning, the other from heaven knows where, possibly from some remembered dream imagery.
I am an author who likes to show his workings. Not merely as some afterword in the end pages of a novel, but embedded into the structure and form of the novel itself. In this case, I have an author character doing exactly what I talked of above. Having finished the previous sections of the book, including the mystery thriller/ police procedural element and an exploration of why that halted suddenly and unsolved, this author is taking down his notes from the wall of his study and tidying up his pens. His mind ranges over speculations such as the book’s critical reception, likely interview questions and whether the notes he’s removing should form part of a notional literary archive. There is a tension between him preserving the mystery of the dark arts of writing, versus not over-explaining his novel and taking the artistry out of it by relaying where his ideas for the book came from. It is in this tension, that the process of thriller writing is itself demystified. From the mundane act of sitting typing at a desk, to a book that thrills a reader in their imagination, is no less of a leap as that of the abstract concept of justice is from the material evidence that underpins it.
My new novel “The Death Of The Author (In Triplicate)”
Available direct from the publisher Corona\Samizdat
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