LEXIE ELLIOTT:
The Second Most Common Question
As a writer, the most common question I get asked is, What’s your book about? (For the answer, see above!) The second most common question is, Where do you get your ideas from?
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The idea was one thing. Writing it was quite another. Writing requires mental space, and life eats that up. Life (and student debt) required me to get a job after I’d completed my doctorate, and just figuring out how to become competent enough at that job to keep it took all my energy at first. Then I bumped — quite literally — into a man in a swimming pool who became my husband, and life gave me two children who are enormously wonderful but who are also sleep thieves, and time thieves, and attention thieves. I did write sporadically, in any time I could snatch for myself, but not The French Girl. That was too daunting a project to even start. So instead I wrote short stories, fragments of novellas, even a complete novel in a lighter tone. And once I was writing regularly I found I didn’t want for ideas. I could be on my way to work and I’d notice something odd, a little out of kilter, and my mind would start to lazily spin out a web of a story… It was like developing a muscle that had always been there, but had been allowed to waste away: nothing but exercise can reverse the atrophy. Through it all, The French Girl hovered in the recesses of my mind but I wasn’t yet ready to roll up my sleeves and get to work.
And then, somehow, I was. Perhaps I’d emerged from the fug of general exhaustion that very small children create, or perhaps I’d gained enough confidence to make a start on a more demanding project. Whatever the reason, I started writing The French Girl. And eventually, somewhat inconceivably, I actually finished writing The French Girl. In between I must have had hundreds of ideas for new projects. I keep a note of the more promising ones, and there’s one in particular which I’m a little scared to write. I’m not quite ready for it yet. But now I wonder if that’s the mark of a really good idea: something that’s a challenge, that worries me, something I’m not quite sure I can pull off. I’m guessing there will come a time when I’m ready to roll up my sleeves on that one too. At least I hope so.
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