Inspiring ideas, amazing chance encounters

People often ask ‘where do your ideas come from, what makes you want to write this particular story?’ And it is interesting to remember that there really is a moment when the story was sparked off by a chance encounter, conversation, newspaper article or even a holiday visit to some intriguing place full of atmosphere that begs to be the setting for a historical tale.  Sometimes the original inspiration reincarnates as something quite different.



St George's cabinet


Many of the books I’ve written had a definite moment like this. The Crimson Bed was inspired when I came across a beautiful cabinet with William Morris designs painted on it which led to a Pre-Raphaelite setting about Victorian artists and their lives and loves.  The cabinet eventually turned into an Elizabethan bed, but the PreRaphaelite theme stuck.

Old Islington

One of my as yet unpublished stories, Gisla’s Hill, was originally set in the London area called Camden Town when I first began the story in the 1960’s. Later I moved the story setting to Islington, a more historically fascinating part of London. 'Gisla’s Hill' is the ancient Celtic name for Islington and this later became a village, progressing to an elegant Georgian suburb as Londoners began to build further and further out of the city during the rapidly expanding Industrial Age. This change of setting was due to the fact that a dilapidated Georgian house sparked me off and became a major feature in the story.


Start Point Lighthouse, Devon UK


In the case of my latest novel, Middle Watch, the beginning came one day over a cup of coffee with a local friend who often regaled me with fascinating and highly dramatic tales of her life. As a child, she contracted the dread disease of the Fifties and Sixties - polio - and still had problems with her leg but had overcome the disability to a great extent.  Now she was able to walk, drive, had even been surfing. This lady had already related how she had been fostered as a very young baby by a naval friend of her father’s, when his suicide left her an orphan, her mother having already died in childbirth. On this coffee occasion, she mentioned that eventually, her foster father left the Navy and they went to live in a lighthouse in the South of England for a while. This, together with other descriptions of her peculiar childhood – which was anything but a happy one – led to my starting Middle Watch.


Stormy sea with Lighthouse
Karl Edward Ferdinand Blechen



The character of Bridie O’Neill, my young heroine, is nothing like that of my friend except, perhaps in a determination to overcome all odds, face up to what life throws at her. They are both strong ladies in this respect. I also know that this friend has an especial love and regard for the sea. So yes, in this respect, she is also Bridie. But, apart from this, the character and the subsequent story evolved out of my own unconscious mind and my own love of the sea, the coasts, the lighthouses and the wonderful men who once manned them often risking their own lives to help rescue shipwrecked sailiors. To quote Bella Bathurst, (author of The Lighthouse Stevensons) sadly the job of the lighthousekeepers was ‘the first profession ever to be made wholly redundant'



 The only story which began so long ago that it's ulitmate inspiration is lost in the mists of time is The Long Shadow.  This just evolved from my own peculiar psyche and the sense of alienation that arises in those of us who are from mixed cultures, in my case half Greek, half English.  So I turned myself into Andrew Cassimatis-Clarke and wrote from a male point of view.  Perhaps this inner cultural split is the reason that all my stories seem to have a woman or a man caught between two loves in their lives!  Or maybe it's something deeper than that, who knows? I've come to the conclusion over the years that we are all split personalities and trying to 'marry' them is a lifetime occupation.

Numbers are what life is all about

I was just lying in bed and contemplating the dire state of our personal finances. Life, I decided was all about numbers. No one actually has any real money, nothing solid. They have numbers that open an account, numbers written on bits of paper sent by the bank, numbers they write on bits of paper to give someone or numbers on a plastic card which can only be used when you remember the numbers that unlock them. Yet, strangely, this is no safer a method of commerce than the days when you had copper, silver and gold to trade with. Nice solid, round heavy cash you could put in a box and hide under a bed. So robbers could steal the lot. Robbers can steal numbers too.

As it was a Sunday morning, my husband and I sat in bed with a cuppa and listened to the Point of View slot on the radio at 8.45am. It was Professor Liza Jardine's last one of the series and in life's synchronous manner she spoke about numbers too. But her main drift was about history and how periods of art and culture often seem to occur in times of depression and apparent decay in society. These waves of creativity do not arise from happy times and joyful spirits but rather from the opposite.

Historians of the past delighted in battles, conquests, and recording the deeds of those famous men and women who brought about sweeping changes from greed, desire for power or pure madness. They were the movers and shakers and the masses were shaken and stirred, moved hither and thither as if at a whim. However, beneath these waves of well recorded events lies a huge flowing sea of the unrecorded events of ordinary people and their lives. And from this sea of fear, anxiety, humiliation, suffering came forth the occasional person who was able to voice what this silent majority thought and felt. The poets, artists, musicians and writers.

We are now entering a dark age all our own. Perhaps this is why so many people are taken with fantasy writing, fulfilling a need to turn away from life's anxieties and escape into Tolkien worlds of their own making. Writing sites such as the Harper Collins site, Authonomy, are awash with writers writing fantasy,YA and erotic romantic fiction set in some golden past of happily ever after. Writers have generally recorded their times through their works so what can we say about our own times filled either with fantasy worlds or else with horrifying darkness and violence? Our many crime writers fulfil this latter role as they explore the shadier side of our modern societies. Ruth Rendell, who has written almost a novel a year for some decades, has recorded the various moods and problems of English society through the 70's to the present time through her often disturbed and strange characters. Ian Rankin has probed the underbelly of elegant Edinburgh. Stieg Larsson explored Scandinavian darks and seaminess, and so forth.

In the Middle Ages the fantasy was perhaps fulfilled by myths, fairy tales,superstitious and religious thoughts while the violence and horror of battles, plagues and torture were all to real. Nowadays, in our 'civilized societies' most of life has become virtual, interior, explored through film, books, computers.
But as Liza Jardine said, it is the masses who now need to record their feelings,fears,ideas,loves and passions. We ordinary people make history now, not the great battles or the sway of Kings and Queens and generals whose days are past while the unwashed masses lived and died in obscurity. The tide has turned and swept us all up onto the shore of conscious existence with all our flotsam and jetsam. After all, there's nothing much left to be conquered in the outer world. We all must now learn to conquer ourselves from within. And writing, art, poetry and music is the way we can do this and speak of the times we now live in. A strange world of the mind, regions within, lands to be explored and conquered inside our own hearts and souls.

Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer?




Writing is considered to be a solitary pursuit and so it is while one is in the throes of creation. But it is no more solitary than any other creative work such as painting, sculpting, embroidering and so on. Anything that requires concentration, thought and effort has to be solitary because in that moment one is totally centred upon the work in hand and all else must be shut out both literally and metaphorically. In fact through writing books, I have made dozens of amazing and wonderful friends and aquaintances who have kept in touch with me for many years. Many live abroad and I will be meeting up with a fellow author in the States later on this year after many, many exchanges of e-mails and cards and gifts. This lady has helped me with her support, belief in me and useful criticsm.

However, it has to be said that most writers are reclusive at heart.
We love to sit in a study, stare out of the window and dream and then plot and let characters begin to take shape on the page. Some like to work out their plots in full detail. I cannot do this and if I do it never works. The moment I start to write the characters take over and began to interact, talk amongst themselves. I'm just the hands on the keyboard, they exist in their own right. Are they people who live within me, my own sub-personalities? They must be. Where else would they come from but within my own psyche?

It makes me understand something, very, very dimly of what the Bible must mean when it says that the Creator made Mankind in his own image, from His own substance. Creative people are pulling forth from themselves and fashioning from their own clay.

The time draws near for my book launch at Goldsboro Books in Cecil Court London. Lots of wonderful people have promised to come along for a glass of wine and a nibble and will, I hope, buy a book or two or three. Even if they slink away without so doing, it will be such a pleasure to have gathered them all together to discuss books and writing and other joyful pursuits.

Writing about Ghosts

Writing books is a strange thing to do. Inventing worlds of one’s own to live in. My very first novel at the age of 16 was called My Little World and that happened to be in Camden Town for some reason. Maybe because a lot of Greek people lived there and one of my characters was a Greek girl. Maybe because I'm half-Greek myself . Some people live in very strange worlds if their books are anything to go by. Don’t tell me anyone invents the characters from thin air or mere observation of others. That may play a part but then one has to ask…what is it about a particular person that intrigues, interests, captures your imagination? Is it not a resonance with something in yourself? These people reside inside the psyche and are like voices or like ghostly presences that float around in the mind all one’s life. Writing is actually a form of exorcism…the ghosts have to be given life and form, they have to speak out.

I once went to a past life workshop run by a Jungian therapist called Roger Woolger.
(see http://www.rogerwoolger.com This took place at Runnings Park, a beautiful venue that once existed in West Malvern. It was my very first visit to Malvern and I fell in love with the hills and the quaint Victorian town, once a healing spa, still famed for its pure springs and waters. Little did I know I would come to live here one day but I suppose deep down the pull began at that very first view of the ancient Malverns from the train. The sight of them actually made me weep with some sort of soul yearning. It seemed the only place to be at peace.
Now I look out from my window and see them every day. They never fail to soothe my spirit.

At the past life workshop, I encountered a lot of strange people, some inside my own soul, some around me in physical forms. I do believe in reincarnation but to this day don’t know if what I experienced so deeply was memories of past lives or bits of my psyche telling their story. Writing is just like this. One writes almost in a trance state sometimes and the characters begin to speak. They know exactly what to say to one another and where they are going. The conscious "I " hasn’t a clue half the time. The plots take their own twists and turns and refuse to follow any pre-ordained notions of what is going to happen.
I still keep re-writing My Little World and it changes plot every time. It’s all summed up in my favourite quote from Ignazio Silone

‘ I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book…that one book every writer carries within him…the image of his own soul’

If you are interested in writing tips take a look at Neil Whiteland’s blog. www.writing-a-book.blogspot.com