This Is How It Starts — Suzey Ingold

I can never be sure where the next idea will come from. I’d love to say that it is predictable, or linear, or even in any way calculated. If anything, the ideas that are, are the ones that never seem to bear fruit nor grow into anything. The more thought I’ve put into developing an idea, the more likely it is to end up as a note scribbled somewhere, forgotten about or replaced by whatever else caught my interest.

I don’t quite remember where they all started. I know that my pirate book began from a conversation I had with a friend as we walked through Las Vegas on a spring afternoon as I bitterly complained about the fact that the once-nightly pirate show no longer existed – one of the few things I had been excited to see in that odd town, the opportunity no longer open to me.

“I should write a pirate book,” I mused and my friend, never one to discourage me in my varied pursuits, agreed.

Somewhere down the line, as with all good projects, it took on a life of its own. As I got soaked into the history and the stories buried beneath the stereotypes of swashbucklers and life at sea as presented to us in children’s books, it grew from an idea into a full-blown world unfolding in my head.

And though that particular book now sits, as so many do, forgotten I could still talk for hours on the unique democracy of a pirate ship and the passages through the islands of the Caribbean. No one will let me, for obvious reasons, but I could.

My next two projects were a little different, tied up in memories more deeply entwined with my own history and my sense of self. Worlds I felt I wanted to explore to get to the root of something so familiar to me and yet so unique; places I wanted to breathe life into, in my own way.

There were still trigger points: a black and white photograph I stumbled on by accident sparked the antagonist for my Finnish book and sent me diving into the folklore of the Kalevala for further inspiration. A drunk bumble bee dozing in a puddle of beer gave a name to the main character of my secret society book.

But for my current project, the spark was so visceral. It was the kind of prompt that reminded me why I write in the first place – for all of the rejection, and exhaustion, and sense of defeat, it was for moments like those. When I stumbled into an idea that I couldn’t let go of if I tried – that would hurt more to try and keep the story contained than to let it free on the page.

I mentioned it in passing some months ago, saying that it deserved its own story in its own time. I still don’t know if now is that time; the precise details of the memory still feel like a secret, even half a year later.

I will say it was in that dimly lit bar in a quiet corner of Florence that I came to the book I am now writing. I have the very first notes I wrote for it, sat in that bar, understanding as much of what was being said around me as I didn’t.

“I hope you’re writing nice things about us,” the bartender said to me with a grin.

“I am,” I laughed. “I promise.”

In the back of my notebook, I had tucked a postcard of a Botticelli painting – Primavera. I don’t much like to take photographs of paintings in museums; it doesn’t feel as though it does them justice. But for a painting I want to remember, I will buy a postcard.

I stared at it for a few moments, under the light of the candle sitting nearby. This bar, in this city, and this painting. That’s all I had, then. It wasn't much – it certainly isn’t enough to write an entire book on. But it was a start. And a start was all I needed.

The characters came in over the course of the summer and into the autumn. The thief. The painter. The spy. I always say that when an idea is really working, they will start to talk to me, guiding their own way through the story. I’m over a quarter of the way through the first draft now, and they are slowly starting to take over.

The funny part of it all is that I could have as easily not gone to Florence as I did. If my original plans had worked out, I would have only passed through for a concert, and wouldn’t have had time to find myself in this back corner of a bar as I did. When the concert was cancelled, I could have just as well stayed in Rome before continuing on to Vienna.

I can’t imagine that I would have ever come to this project without the night I spent there, and yet it doesn’t feel as though it is just chance. I hadn’t even intended to go further than a nice restaurant for dinner until I came across their bizarre opening hours listed online, piquing my interest immediately. No one but a sheer eccentric could set such opening hours.

I had to go. Just like I have to write this book.

It’s that that motivates me – that’s what gets me up at the crack of dawn to stumble through a couple of thousand words each morning this month before I go to work or get on with my day. Because it’s the only thing there is to motivate me. I have no guarantee that this book will ever see the light of the day; no guarantee, even, that more than four people in the world will ever read it. The pile of finished manuscripts gathering dust on my bookshelf can attest to that.

Late night writing sessions, wherever I can find a spot.

But I’ll keep writing them, anyway. Because I don’t know how not to.