Introduction
The Author speaks:
The first question put to an author, personally, or through the post, is:
‘Where do you get your ideas from?’
The temptation is great to reply: ‘I always go to Harrods,’ or ‘I get themmostly at the Army & Navy Stores,’ or, snappily, ‘Try Marks and Spencer.’
The universal opinion seems firmly established that there is a magicsource of ideas which authors have discovered how to tap.
One can hardly send one’s questioners back to Elizabethan times, withShakespeare’s:
Tell me, where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot¹, how nourished?
Reply, reply.
You merely say firmly: ‘My own head.’
That, of course, is no help to anybody. If you like the look of your ques-tioner you relent and go a little further.
‘If one idea in particular seems attractive, and you feel you could dosomething with it, then you toss it around, play tricks with it, work it up,tone it down, and gradually get it into shape. Then, of course, you have tostart writing it. That’s not nearly such fun–it becomes hard work. Alternat-ively, you can tuck it carefully away, in storage, for perhaps using in ayear or two years’ time.’
A second question–or rather a statement–is then likely to be:
‘I suppose you take most of your characters from real life?’
An indignant denial to that monstrous² suggestion.
‘No, I don’t. I invent them. They are mine. They’ve got to be my charac-ters–doing what I want them to do, being what I want them to be–comingalive for me, having their own ideas sometimes, but only because I’vemade them become real.’
So the author has produced the ideas, and the characters– but nowcomes the third necessity– the setting. The first two come from insidesources, but the third is outside–it must be there–waiting–in existencealready. You don’t invent that–it’s there–it’s real.
You have been perhaps for a cruise on the Nile–you remember it all–justthe setting you want for this particular story. You have had a meal at aChelsea café. A quarrel was going on–one girl pulled out a handful of an-other girl’s hair. An excellent start for the book you are going to writenext. You travel on the Orient Express. What fun to make it the scene for aplot you are considering. You go to tea with a friend. As you arrive herbrother closes a book he is reading–throws it aside, says: ‘Not bad, butwhy on earth didn’t they ask Evans?’

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