Clamouring to become visible...

This is adapted from an article that appeared on the Write Stuff website on November 18, 2007. The original text can be found here.

Where did your novel come from?

If you write, then you’ve probably been asked the following question many times before - "where do you get your ideas from?" And as a general question, it is a tough one to answer. I get my ideas from everywhere. A news story, a conversation, another writer’s work, a dream - anything and everything is a rich source of inspiration for the writer.

But change the question, and ask about a particular idea, and then the question becomes easier to answer. And that’s what I’d like to ask; think of what you are writing just now - where did your idea come from?

(Now if you’ll excuse my self-indulgence while I wax nostalgic about my NaNoWriMo novel and my upbringing…)

The Long Watch is a story that has been stuck in my head for almost ten years now. Gideon Strangechild is a former British army officer, now field commander for a quasi-military organisation run by the Catholic Church. He is assisted by Maria (a 9000 year old vampire), Al (a demon controlled by a religious artefact) and Lex (an angel who has voluntarily exiled himself to Earth), as well as a host of former military converts who form the various field units around the world. Gideon is answerable to Cardinal Mancini, himself a former US Marine, and the second most powerful man in the Vatican.

In the dying hours of the Long Watch, his team is put on high alert by a breach between worlds, but upon investigation there is no trace of the breach. As further breaches occur across the planet, Gideon and his team must uncover the source of the breaches, and what connection there is to Gideon’s past. No easy task, when you aren’t even sure you can trust your own side… Or at least that’s the blurb on the back cover!

Where did this idea come from? The Long Watch owes a lot to my upbringing. I was born and raised Catholic, but grew up in a household which always had a high proportion of books on a variety of mythical, spiritual and mystical topics, which have always been of interest to me, and which saw me progressing from an unquestioning believer in everything I read, to the more considered, sceptical man I am today. At about the age of 18, I first began to conceive of a world where the Church not only accepted the existence of angels and demons in terms of doctrine, but actively engaged with them in day to day business.

That idea slowly germinated, and began to be fleshed out with a cast of characters. No group could operate within the Church without the knowledge of the Church hierarchy - hence the need for the character of the Cardinal. I needed a strong lead character - but not a priest, to allow a greater scope for action. So Gideon was born. To suggest the reality of the nature of the supernatural world they deal with, I populated the team with various entities. The original line up included a demon, an angel, a vampire, a ghost and a werewolf. As I developed the characters, the first three became Maria, Al and Lex - their characters grew stronger, more compelling. But the characters of the ghost and the werewolf did very little - they often replicated character traits and skills present in other characters, and so I wrote them out.

This story represents a fusion of mythical and spiritual concepts I find fascinating (but not necessarily true) - concepts that I grew up with, concepts that haunted my dreams, concepts I flirted with. The world I am building is a world that I would be endlessly enthralled by if it existed. Reality as fiction, conspiracy as fact, and the extraordinary as the mundane. And I’m delighted that so many people who have read snippets of it actually like it!

A few days ago, I looked back on some notepads from several years ago, when I first tried to write the story, but never quite got round to it. I had penned some outlines of the characters, and some plot points, and I was pleasantly surprised to see just how many names, character traits and events have remained constant. I think this shows just how the story has matured over the years in my mind. Now I just need to write it.

What are you working on at the moment? Where did you get your inspiration?