Where It All Began
In the fall of 2012, I was fortunate enough to travel to two of my favorite cities: London and Paris. While in London, we stayed at a hotel that was situated along the River Thames, just north of Blackfriars Bridge. Not only was the hotel gorgeous in a modern sort of way, but you couldn’t pick a better location if you tried. Within walking distance (or quick ride on the Tube) were all of the major tourist attractions: The Tower of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the London Eye, Big Ben, and Westminster Abbey. For a travel fanatic like me, it was pure ecstasy.
Fast forward a few months to the spring of 2013. I had just decided to do something I’d wanted to do for a long time: I was going to pursue a career as a writer. So I sat down and attempted to piece together my first novel. To be honest, I found it hard to settle on a plot, and I know now it’s because I was trying to think from the top down. In other words, I was trying to come up with the big picture first, the events that would comprise my plot, and once I did that then the other details would likely just fall into place—the setting, the individual scenes, the characters, and so on. Why was I doing it that way? I guess it just felt intuitive. I had also read that it’s the way most authors do it, although there are notable exceptions. There was only one problem: it didn’t work for me. Apparently, my mind doesn’t work that way, or at least it didn’t the first time around. Instead I came up with a different approach that ended up jump starting my imagination: I decided to come up with a great opening scene and go from there.
Which brings me back to my trip to London only a few months before: while there, we visited a classic British pub that was right across the street from the hotel. Everything about it screamed coolness: the wood beam ceilings, the Gothic archways, ale taps galore, and murals of jolly friars doing the various and sundry things that monks do. That place had such an effect on me that it just began to pop into my mind over and over as I sat there trying to come up with the genesis of my novel. At some point those persistent thoughts are hard to ignore. So I began asking myself some rhetorical questions: What better place to open a book than at a pub in the heart of London? And why not have it take place in the midst of a snow storm? And better yet, why not have something take place that is so shocking it will draw the reader in right away?
All writers are inspired in different ways. For me, once I wrote that opening scene, everything else just fell into place.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
Anticipation…