'Where do you get
the ideas for your books?' 'How do you start?' I've been asked
these questions frequently, especially by my Creative Writing
students, and they are tricky questions to answer. The starting
points are so varied and so hard to pinpoint; not to mention that the
starting point of the book in First Draught can often be moved
further back in the editing process or even be eliminated altogether.
In About the
Children, the first inspiration came to me in Paris, in a garden
near the Seine, where I saw a young couple kissing on a bench. The
girl was kneeling, straddling her partner, and it was only when they
moved apart that I realised that they were both women. A little while
later, a different girl walked past me, wearing jewelled tear-drop
make-up. The two images combined and (after a period of thinking
'nice little scene, what are you going to do with it?')
they became Sophie and Colleen, embracing in a suburban English park.
In the first draught, the book opened before the shootings and there
were two chapters of description leading up to the deaths. There was
some nice descriptive writing in there but I'm pretty certain that,
if it had stayed, I'd have lost 75% of my readers before the first
shots were fired. I realised that I'd been using the first few
chapters to write myself into the book, and that was fine. Some
people plot meticulously, I go with the flow of the writing.
Sometimes I hit the right starting point at the first shot, sometimes
not.
Talking of shots,
let's get back to About the Children. I found myself with an
opening scene of two children shot in a suburban park. 'The two
boys lay sprawled and broken, like fledglings that had fallen from
the nest.' The moment I wrote those words I knew that they were
right and they haven't changed, whatever else has.
And who was the
Senior Investigating Officer looking down on them? His name came
quite easily... Tyler... Kev Tyler, usually referred to by his
surname and only ever called Kevin by his ex-wife and his mother.
Everything I knew about Tyler could be summed up in two words:
'intelligence' and 'integrity'. I soon
discovered other features: his ambition and single-mindedness; his
love of good literature, which he kept concealed from his colleagues;
his deeply hidden, basic insecurity. One thing I was certain of:
Tyler's personal life was empty but he wasn't going to destroy all he
had achieved by going off the rails.
Tyler's instinct to
recall lines of poetry when he is under stress was great fun to
write. What better excuse to read through lots of well-loved poetry
books? However, I had to tread carefully, that sort of quirk can
become irritating or farcical if over-used. In the end, I chose all
long-dead poets. With the short quotes I was using I should have been
okay but the last thing an Indie writer (or any writer) needs is to
fall foul of copyright laws.
Detective Inspector
Gill Martin, Tyler's temporary second-in-command, was harder to get
to know than Tyler. Possibly she stood in his shadow, or maybe
because she's a private person who didn't wish to be known. However,
as soon as I got inside her head, she was very easy to write.
The rest of the team
were fun to write, especially Detective Sergeant Kerry Buller, loud
and opinionated and always one step ahead of everybody else with the
gossip. Detective Sergeant Luke Warden was even easier to write.
While Tyler was in the US (before the start of About the Children)
he'd been seconded to another team and joined Scene of Crimes Officer
Mia Trent to play a part in an investigation in a nearby town, which
is told in The Terminal Velocity of Cats.
For several draughts
of About the Children I had an insertion between every
chapter, which told the story in the First Person Viewpoint of other
characters. In many ways it worked: I certainly got to know my minor
characters and their motivation very well; but it slowed down the
pace, and possibly gave too much away. I removed all the central
inserts but left the beginning and end ones as a very short prologue
and epilogue, because I felt it was essential the disempowered
children had a voice.
Titles are very
important to me and I struggled for a long time with the title for
this book. The story addresses the deepest fear any parent can have
and I drew my fundamental, emotional inspiration from The Death of
Children, Richard Burns' harrowing poem about the holocaust. In
the end I heard Tom Paxton singing a song about divorce, with the
chorus, 'No worries any more about the children.' I
thought, 'Of course, that's the central theme of this book, it's
About the Children.'
I absolutely love the cover, designed for the book by my colleague, Chris Hammacott of the Art of Communication. We'd already agreed that all my contemporary crime would have a yellow Crime Scene tape across them to set the brand. I gave Chris a very out-of-focus picture of a child walking away and said, 'Sort of like that, please.' She found a much better picture of a younger child and worked her magic with colour and style. It's such a joy to have covers that I can feel proud of and I love it when people stop and comment on them because they're so eye-catching.
I absolutely love the cover, designed for the book by my colleague, Chris Hammacott of the Art of Communication. We'd already agreed that all my contemporary crime would have a yellow Crime Scene tape across them to set the brand. I gave Chris a very out-of-focus picture of a child walking away and said, 'Sort of like that, please.' She found a much better picture of a younger child and worked her magic with colour and style. It's such a joy to have covers that I can feel proud of and I love it when people stop and comment on them because they're so eye-catching.
