From my imagination

When we lived in Lees, a small village so attached to Oldham that many people didn’t realise it was a village rather than an area of the town, we were very fortunate to have a splendid library, with helpful and friendly librarians. There was a book club there which I joined, the first one I’d ever been a member of, and it was a group of interesting and nice people. Mary, the librarian had a thing about mountain climbers – not climbing, but the blokes who climbed! We read books about it a couple of times, I seem to remember.  Then there was the man who may have been a head teacher, if not, he was a head of department, who told us  he’d once had to go to hospital on Christmas Day because he had stuck an orange pip  up his nose. I asked how old he was when he did it, imagining his mum being cross that she had to leave the family celebration. No, it had been the previous Christmas… I guess he was forty-ish, fifty-ish… curious!

Back to the library; I discovered many now favourite authors there – it was in the days before e-books and we weren’t well off at the time, so borrowing books was wonderful! What I’m bringing this round to, is that it was in Lees library that I first discovered Ann Cleeves. This was in the days before Shetland, Vera Stanhope and The Two Rivers. She had written a series about Inspector Ramsey, and another about Molly and George Palmer Jones. I read  them all! Since then, I’ve read all her other series, and enjoyed them very much.

At the weekend we were in Cornwall, attending events in the St Endellion Book Festival, and the star among stars this year,  was Ann Cleeves herself! I have heard her interviewed many times before, but to see her in person would be so exciting! The venue was in the lovely old church of St Endellion – Saint Endelienta was one of the children of the Welsh king, Brychan. We were sitting rather far back, but I was able to see Ann, and to hear her clearly thanks to the sound system which was working perfectly.

Ann spoke about her books of course, particularly her latest novel, The Raging Storm, third in her Two Rivers series, .  The talk was conducted by Patrick Gale, more of a conversation than an interview, and he led her to discuss how she creates her novels, how she thinks of her stories, and how she writes them. I must say, I was delighted to discover that she writes in the same way as I do! She has a sudden idea, and then wonders what happens next, and why whoever does whatever, and how they did it and the consequences – to put it simply, she makes it up as she goes along! Obviously it’s not as simple as that, but Ann has an idea and lets it run, wondering what happens next and imagining it; she ponders on previous events which the main character/detective has to discover and reveal to make sense of the puzzle and and find out who-dunnit! There’s masses of research, of course, and hard work writing, editing, re-editing and eventually completing the book.

I know every writer is different, some like to plan in intricate detail what happens, some have charts and biographies of characters, and draw lines of plot development, and lists of people and places – with descriptions – card indexes, files, computer programs – and more. I just sit at my laptop and write from my imagination. I research, of course I do, but the people and stories come from my imagination… and I’m smug to think Ann’s fabulous stories have the same genesis – but obviously out of her head, not mine!