Writing a Story: Where Do Writers Get Their Ideas? (Free Kindle Book)
Please welcome bestselling author, Elizabeth Edmondson, who also writes as Elizabeth Aston. Today she shares the inspiration for her mysterious historical, The Villa Dante, in celebration of a special promotion: The Villa Dante is free as a Kindle download from August 1-3, 2012.
***
As a writer, the question I am most often asked is, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’
It’s an interesting question, and maybe not an easy one for authors to answer. Just how do books start?
For me they nearly always start with something visual, and that was the case with a book I set in Italy: VILLA DANTE
One day, I was walking along a road in the Italian countryside (a risky business, what with Italian drivers, mad motorini riders and wild boar, to mention just a few hazards) thinking about nothing in particular. I came to a pair of huge, ornate, wrought-iron gates, closed and padlocked. Looking through them I could see an astonishing villa, old and serene in the glow of evening sunlight. And it came into my head, Aha, that’s the villa dante.
I never did find out what the villa was called, or anything of its history, because that was irrelevant. To me, it was the villa dante.
The villa was stored away in the part of my mind where ideas go into hiding: down into the depths, into the sea of unconsciousness. There they stay and meanwhile, one gets on with other things.
Then, months or years later – maybe summoned by the conscious mind thinking, What am I going to write next? or maybe just of its own accord – the idea rises like a bubble to the surface and there is a story, waiting to be written.
What do I love about Italy? Everything from fountains and exuberant flowers and greenery and wonderful food and art and architecture and the sheer dottiness of life in that beautiful and infuriating country.
It’s a common theme for novels: a villa in Italy, landscape, relationships, food, wine, sun.
But that wasn’t what was lurking in my writer’s mind, nor was the story I wanted to tell a contemporary one, since in my mind’s eye I saw the people I was going to write about wearing the clothes of the 1950s.
And there was a mysterious Italian woman, Beatrice Malaspina, who had named in her will four strangers, three English and one American. whose spirit lingers in the villa. I like literary ghosts, particularly when there is such a strong association between a personality and a house as there is in the villa dante.
To find out about their inheritance, these four strangers, who don’t know either their benefactor or each other, are summoned to the villa dante. They arrive there as strangers in another land, transported out of their normal way of life, and, as in all the best novels, are changed by what happens there.
Don’t we all have an innate longing for transformation, to become more ourselves, to shed the parts of ourselves that make us unhappy?
When I told my editor at HarperCollins about the book, and I said there are four people, two men and two women, her response was, Oh good, they get paired off, lots of romance and sex.
Well, no. There is a romantic element to the story but it’s not what the novel is about, it’s just a consequence of the discoveries that the four of them make, about each other and about themselves.
Four grown-up people find out who they are, how and why the past has made them what they are, and what they can make of their lives in the future.
Which is of course the kind of magic that all of us long for, but in our messy real lives, it doesn’t often happen. We can look back afterwards and say, Oh that was transforming moment, but we’re not usually aware that we’re living through such times. Only in fiction can we lay it out like a tapestry, threads woven to complete a picture.
Did all this unfold into a neat outline? No. What I had was the villa dante, Beatrice Malaspina and a will, secrets, complex individual stories of the main characters and a wish for those characters to change.
Into the cauldron of the imagination they all went. Stir and simmer, and then, a hundred thousand words later, their story is told.
Meanwhile, back in those depths, other stories lurk, waiting to emerge into the light. . .
***
Elizabeth Edmondson, aka Elizabeth Aston, writes mysterious histories evoking a spirit of time and place and has sold more than a million books worldwide. More about Elizabeth and her many books, go to: http://www.elizabeth-edmondson.com/edmondson/
Elizabeth, really interesting article. Perhaps you can answer a question
that’s been on my mind lately: would you consider yourself a visual learner,
or are you more auditory or tactile? If you consider yourself primarily visual,
do you believe that this played into your finding the “real” Villa Dante was
the spark that led to your story?
I’m primarily auditory. One of the pieces of advice I’ve read about
science fiction world creation is to start with the geography. That
isn’t where I started, nor do I believe it will be in the future. I ended
up starting with the society and its values — and the main character
and an idea of the conflict. But this makes sense, in that visual is not my
primary mode.
I also do not see pictures when I listen to music. Do you?
That’s a really interesting comment. I am primarily visual and that’s why so many of my stories are sparked by a picture or a place.
If you listen to people talking, you get a clue as to whether they’re visual or auditory because of the words they use – I see, I hear you, Listen, Look, I see it this way, That sound good to me.
I don’t see pictures in music, but I do have a quirk with words and numbers, which I see in colour, as I have synesthesia.
World building for science fiction and fantasy is a real art, and you’re right, advice applies to some people and not to others. We all have our different starting points.