Where Do You Get Your Ideas? (Cecilia Peartree)

When I speak to people about my writing, if they haven't felt the urge to write themselves they usually express either blank disbelief - 'why do you do it?' - or mild interest in how I've managed to think of so many ideas. Some of the stories have their roots in real life incidents or situations, though I have only rarely attempted anything that actually depicts real people, so I doubt if I will be bothered by any libel suits in the near future. Actually the only example I can think of is a short story called 'Murder at the Drama Group' that I dashed off in a fury after someone annoyed me at a drama group for young people that I was involved in ages ago. I definitely won't be publishing it as it started with a (real) local council employee being found stabbed in the costume cupboard.

I recently found myself using something that had happened in real life quite some time ago as the basis for a mystery novel. This isn't unusual, of course, though in this case it seemed to me more obviously based on real life because it was something that had happened in the same setting as I used in the story, a local nature reserve not far from where I live. The place is very popular with dog-walkers, and in fact I had my own dog with me at the time of the original incident, an arthritic black Labrador I had unexpectedly inherited from my brother along with everything else he owned, including two cats and a house, after he died suddenly in the USA. The dog couldn't walk all that far, but I liked to take her to interesting places, for my benefit too. For about the first year or so she could manage short uphill climbs but after that we tried to stay on the flat as much as possible. Not long after I had parked the car and set off on one of our less strenuous routes, I met a woman who was quite distressed. She told me she had in turn encountered another woman near the top of the hill, which is very steep and heavily wooded in places, and the other woman had been walking two dogs when one of them had collapsed and died suddenly. It was in the days before everybody had a mobile phone with them, and neither of the women could think what to do. I couldn't do anything either, particularly while I had my own dog to consider, so I don't know what happened in the end about getting everybody off the hill. 

It was the chance meeting with the first woman that really stuck in my mind, so the novel begins with the main character, already a seasoned amateur investigator because this is the third book in the series, coming out of the car park at one end of the nature reserve and encountering a woman who has made a grim discovery in one of the old quarries that are to be found at various places on the hill. In the story, both women set off with their dogs to walk up the very steep slope towards the scene, and the story develops from there. 

Just published - The Body on the Hill

I think the only other example of a novel in which I've set out deliberately to use a real life event was one of my earliest mysteries, which was based on an odd situation that happened in my mother's family when one of her cousins died intestate, with no closer relatives than her cousins, who happened mostly to have scattered from Scotland across the world. The lawyers took quite a long time to contact as many of the cousins as they could, and then the estate had to be divided up equally amongst them, much to the surprise of some of the beneficiaries. Fortunately no murders were committed in the real-life version of the event. 

In one case I was 'inspired' by a conversation I had with an old friend as we had coffee before going in to see a play at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh. I think it started with a discussion about the changes to the royal line of succession, but it ended up as an alternate history story speculating on how things might have gone if Queen Victoria and family had ceased to exist early on in her reign. I enjoyed writing this one so much that I am contemplating a sequel, though at the same time daunted by the amount of research I'd need to do.

What I really can't explain to anybody who doesn't write novels is the way that sometimes I have no idea or inspiration when I start on a project, just the feeling that I have to write. The plot comes to me as I write, guided by the characters I've invented.