Where does a story come from?

Where does a story come from?

I often wonder if it is solely out of the author’s imagination or out of their experience? Unless it is a story handed down from previous generations, the answer must in most part be a combination of both imagination and experience. It certainly is in my case.

I think some authors start with a character they are fascinated with, real or imaginary or an event they want to relate. As you may know, Michael Morpurgo is one of my favourite authors and he so often takes an actual event and weaves a story around it.

I always start with a story I want to tell to which I add settings, characters and events – some of which are entirely fictional and some relate to places, people or events that I have either experienced or been told about.

Both Nick North books started with a desire to tell a story with a Christian undertone that dealt with the difficulties that can be inherited down generational lines. As I have written previously this is a topic dear to my heart. In Nick North: Blood Quest Nick deals with a generational curse that has affected his family for many years. Into this I added a section about witchcraft in the Middle Ages. In Nick North: War Zone the story revolves around Leone’s family and a tragedy from the First World War that plays out into the present day.

The next Nick North; still in the writing process will feature the work of SOE in the Second World War though continuing the theme of inherited generational problems.

 

Odette Sansom SOE agent

However there is much more to writing novels than the plot or storyline. You need convincing characters.  I can honestly say that unlike Basil Fawlty based on the real life Torquay hotel owner, Donald Sinclair, my characters are not based on real people.  I tend to have a fictional person in mind for whom I then create a character profile.  

Settings however are another matter. Aston Turnberry is a combination of two villages in Buckinghamshire and the church, central to the story in Nick North: Blood Quest, was based entirely on the church in a village where we used to live. The scarecrow festival in Nick North: War Zone was also placed in that village.

'My' Aston Turnery church

If I don’t have a mental picture of a setting I want to write about or have not experienced it like a First World War battlefield then I pore over pictures till I am confident I can place my story there. In my latest Nick North I needed a picture of a World War Two aircraft used for dropping agents in France that I found via Google.

Events that make up the story and carry it along come from all manner of places. The letters in Granddad’s diary in Nick North: War Zone were based on the letters my Great Uncle wrote to his brother, my grandfather from the Western Front. The scarecrow festival though came from photos that a friend showed me of a festival they had visited. 

One of the events central to the resolution of this story came about in unusual circumstances. It was important that Harry, the soldier terribly wronged in the War, had his name added to his local war memorial in Burradon. I will not divulge why his name was not on the war memorial as that might spoil the story for those who have not yet read the book. 

I got the idea for this small part of my story on, of all places, the bowls green. I was playing bowls and one of the opposition was telling me about a mate of his that was killed in the Suez crisis whose name had been omitted on our local war memorial. He felt so strongly about this that he contacted the Royal British Legion who have now attached a special plaque to the memorial with his friend’s name on it.

 

The actual war memorial. If you look carefully you can just see the plaque on the back panel.

My latest book, due out soon, about trafficking of children into domestic slavery relies on my experiences of visiting Romanian orphanages in the 90’s. I rather hoped my descriptions of life in the orphanages would be out of date but unfortunately, after checking with a Romanian friend and another who regularly visits Romania, the descriptions are still all too accurate.

Nowadays fantasy novels abound and I salute those authors who can create worlds, people, animals and situations that have little connection to 21^st century life on Planet Earth. However my favourite type are those where people from our time and place find themselves in another world such as C S Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia books, John White’s Archives of Anthropos and Victor Kloss’s The Royal Institute of Magic books.

What’s your favourite type of book?

Singing for Mrs Pettigrew

I have just finished reading Michael Morpurgo’s book Singing for Mrs Pettigrew. It is a lovely compilation of short stories and chapters about his life. Sometimes it is hard to tell which are stories and which autobiographical chapters.  He also gives a little bit of background into how he writes his stories.

I love Michael Morpurgo books because he is a master of the art of writing for children.  He says: I am a grower of stories. I farm them as surely as a farmer does his corn. I am a weaver of dreams: a teller of tales. I have, through my mother reading to me, through my own reading, through inspired teachers, through my great mentors, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ted Hughes and Sean Rafferty, through years of practice, discovered my way of doing it.

He certainly has. His books are so good that adults and children alike can enjoy them.  He can take a simple story and draw you into the event so completely that you are living it with the people. It feels like your life and theirs have become entwined.

The short story Singing for Mrs Pettigrew is a simple tale of the effect of building a nuclear power station on the village of Bradwell in Essex and the devastation it had on Mrs Pettigrew who was evicted from the railway carriage where she lived so that the power station could be built on that land.

Mr Morpurgo generates a great deal of sympathy for Mrs Pettigrew along with her supporters, the young Michael Morpurgo and his mother. You feel anger as one after another of the villagers who had initially opposed the building gradually come to support it and oppose Mrs Pettigrew. Finally you feel intense frustration that after building the nuclear reactors, they have all too quickly become redundant. Nevertheless the huge monstrosity will stand for centuries right by the sea, scarring the landscape because a nuclear power station can never be demolished.  The reactors have to be entombed in concrete for centuries till they are no longer radioactive.

What made the story all the more poignant for me is that I can recall the building of the Bradwell nuclear power station.  I went to a youth camp on the marshes nearby and remember being in awe of the enormous building and slightly frightened by the constant ticking noises it made.

Bramwell nuclear power station on the coast of Essex

I grew up in the era just after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.  We had seen the devastation that the bomb had caused not just to the landscape but the effect of radioactivity on survivors. My mother took me see The War Game at our church hall. It is a short film about the immediate aftermath of a nuclear bomb.  It was a shocking experience for a teenager in those days, already traumatised by the newly released daleks from Dr Who.

Nuclear energy was frightening, unpredictable and what if the nuclear reactor blew up?  Not only would I be wiped out but half of Britain as well. These were my fears most of which were groundless but as more recent events in Chernobyl and Japan have shown – nuclear power can be dangerous.

So I found great empathy with Mrs Pettigrew who is the one small voice silenced and overthrown by the march of new ideas and developments which in turn prove not be as amazing and ground breaking as at first thought.

Time and again, Michael Morpurgo has the genius of being able to write about great events from the perspective of just one small individual or animal whether that is Mrs Pettigrew, Joey the horse from War Horse or Sofia caught up in a massacre at her village in Bosnia or Adolphus Tips the cat left behind in the evacuation of his village in the Second World War.

Michael Morpurgo has written over 100 books. Which one is your favourite?