Burrough on the Hill July 2023; part 2

Photographs by Jonathon Bridgland; commentary by Irma Writer.

One of the most common questions I am asked about my own writing is how I get the ideas.  Sadly this is not normally because the person asking is full of admiration for the merits of whatever it is of mine that she or he has seen, but because the individual can’t imagine any sort of human mind coming up with “all of that stuff” as they so generously call it.

There are many answers, but one of the most common approaches for me is gazing at photographs, and it is a method I offer to all those people who on hearing what I do say, “I’ve always thought I should write a book.”

Actually, my truthful riposte to that comment would be,”it’s a damn site harder than you might imagine,” but instead I offer a method that I find helpful, and that is gazing at photographs and starting the story therein.

Take the first picture in today’s sequence above.  The empty churchyard, slightly overgrown, the church dark and uninviting.

Or the second picture of the barbed wire and behind fencing from earlier days.  Your hero approaches and ponders both, and if based on me would immediately fall over and cut his hand.  But perhaps not your hero!

Of course opening scenes in novels don’t actually have to have anything to do with what happens thereafter – they can just be where your character starts.  The Leicestershire Heritage plaque shown here commemorates the club (now once more languishing in the Championship) winning football’s Premier League (although it doesn’t say with the lowest number of goals since the first ever season of the league).  But then they probably couldn’t get that all in.

But then here, the wild growth of the unfarmed land that we so often see as we walk.  It could be in any one of a thousand places, but now, being on the first page of the book it is important because herein lies something which starts the tale.

But what?  Having a good idea at that point will probably decide if you’ve got a real winner of a story for a book or not.  Which is what makes the opening of novels so troublesome.

Although I must admit if it were me starting a new volume at this point I would be more inclined to the open landscape picture as a starting point.  Finding something seems a little too obvious as the start of a novel… being lost?  waiting for a mysterious appointment?  trying to recover?  In fact most writers will say that it doesn’t matter because by the time you get to the end, that opening scene will have long been scrapped.  But it does get one started, and gets those all important letters and words on page one.

But I have to admit out of the collection of pictures here that Jonathan kindly sent me (without any commentary) this last is the most intriguing.

Who, what, why?   There are 1,900,000 entries for Ladysmith Villa in Google (according to Google), so there’s lots of evidence.  But I just like the heroine standing by this building, waiting, pacing, sighing, walking up and down, consulting her watch until suddenly she is shot.