Fizzy Pips, by Catriona

What hooks you into an idea enough so that you want to write it? Character, setting, plot, genre? Or …?

Definitely "Or . . ." for me. 

Well, genre is a given. I've spoken before about the unpleasant experience of not writing a crime novel: in short, I found out that my time-travel caper was women's fiction (because I was a woman, I think) except it wasn't quite there yet so it needed to be changed and softened and clipped and packaged until I was scared I'd end up publishing a book I wouldn't read. I fought back. Lost on the title but kept most of the humour.

If you know, you know.

So crime-fiction it is. But I often find myself casting around for a setting, so it's definitely not that that lights the spark. With Dandy Gilver, I study the map of Scotland for locations she hasn't been and try to find an interesting social or institutional background nearby: a school in Wigtwonshire; a hotel in the Borders; a publishing house in the city of Dundee ...

For the standalones, it seems I try to find the bleakest, grimmest, most depressed area of either poor agricultural land or post-industrial-decline towns and plonk my characters there. And then I make sure it rains every day. Unless there's a hailstorm.

Case in point. Pre-order here

The Last Ditch Motel setting is easy. Big clue in the name, right? Except that last time I sent them to Scotland for Christmas (where it rained every day, except when it was snowing). The new series - Can I say series when there's only one out and the second one is sitting in draft form on my desk? - is the same deal. It's set in about half a square mile of Edinburgh - a pretty grim bit with lots of smells. It actually didn't rain every day of book one, mind you.

Edinburgh is much less glam inside

Is it character? Sometimes a character comes along early and stakes a claim. Lowell in QUIET NEIGHBORS was based on a bookshop owner I saw once for about twenty minutes in Norfolk. He made a huge impression, mostly cardigan-based, and sprang into the book fully-formed. Other times, I've had to write numerous desperate notes to myself in my oh-so-swanky notebook. Notes like "Who is this though?" and "Yeah but who is it who does this?" and "WHO IS ANY OF THIS EVEN HAPPENING TO????"

Complete with left-handed smudge

Another kind of note I write to myself a lot during the first draft is "What's going to happen?" and "What is this book about?" and "Yes but where is ANY of this GOING????" So plot definitely isn't there in the beginning. Sometimes, plot is so late showing its face that I get quite panicky and have to remind myself that it always works out in the end if I just keep on writing. MAN, though, I wish I was a plotter. I don't think anyone ever wishes they were a pantser. You'd have to be clinically insane.

So what is it? Well, it starts with a pip, like a pebble in my shoe, something that keeps just sitting there, troll under a bridge, toad under a rock, doing nothing useful. This pip could be something like "It's not illegal to buy and sell skeletons in the US, except in three states" or "Could a dental hygienist tell if a severed head belonged to a right- or left-handed person?" or "Capgras Delusion - blimey!" 

None of those pips turned into this 

But then, every so often, one pip brushes against another. "People get married in graveyards?" or "Punch and Judy men are called Professors!" or "Cotard's Syndrome - blimey!" and together the two pips start to fizz and a story grows around them like something I can't quite remember from chemistry lessons at school. They attract settings and characters and - eventually - a plot.

Nor this - and check out
picture-postcard Britain, eh?

I wouldn't recommend it. I don't enjoy it. I certainly won't make my fortune running workshops that teach it. But that's the way it starts for me. Thirty-eight times and counting. 

Cx