People sometimes ask where ideas come from. It’s an innocent enough question, but one I’ve never found particularly easy to answer. It would be lovely if I could point to a notebook organised into stories, articles and novels waiting patiently for their turn. Instead, ideas seem to arrive in a much stranger way. Long before I know what a story is about, I know what it feels like.

Sometimes it’s the concept, sometimes a feeling, or a wish. It’s a sense inside me, a sort of internal knowing that exists before language catches up. The closest description I’ve ever found comes from psychotherapy, where we sometimes talk about the felt sense. It isn’t quite a thought and it isn’t quite an emotion. It’s that curious feeling that your body already knows something, even though your mind hasn’t worked out what it is yet. The phrase was brought into common parlance by Eugene Gendlin and is impressed upon many psychotherapists as an integral part of the psychotherapeutic process. I’ve seen many therapists who cannot integrate it and the process can still work brilliantly, but when it is organically found within a session the opportunities are more broad and potentially of greater depth.

And that’s what I realised is how I write. Most of us experience it every day without giving it much thought. We’ve all walked into a room and somehow known we’d interrupted an argument. Nobody says the words and there are no raised voices or red eyes. Yet something feels different. A pause that’s fractionally too long. A smile that doesn’t quite reach someone’s eyes. The air itself seems to have changed.

Or perhaps you’ve met somebody who was perfectly pleasant. They smiled, asked all the right questions and yet something inside you remained unconvinced. You couldn’t explain why if someone pressed you. You just knew.

We’re noticing far more than we realise. Indeed the complexities of communication tell us we notice tone of voice, the tension in the face or posture, the micro expressions which cross people’s face, the real response before it is moulded into whatever they want to be seen socially. The woven story of body language, where several aspects shown at once tell us, usually with great accuracy, what a person is hiding. And we process all of it without concious thought.

When I’m writing, I often know a scene is wrong long before I know how to fix it. The dialogue might be perfectly reasonable. The plot works. Everything happens in the correct order. Yet somewhere inside me there’s a small, persistent resistance. It feels awkward, like wearing someone else’s coat. Eventually I realise it isn’t the scene that’s wrong at all. It’s the person. They wouldn’t have said that, they’d have reacted differently, noticed something else, done something else.

I’ll be making a cup of tea, or in that beta state when driving somewhere and suddenly I know exactly what someone needs to say. Not what I want them to say. What they have been trying to say all along. They grow until they feel comfortably real. The curious thing is that this doesn’t only happen with writing. It happens with people.

Years of sitting with clients has taught me that we often know things before we can say them. Someone pauses halfway through a sentence. Their breathing, voice or position changes. They look towards the window or laugh in entirely the wrong place. They insist everything is absolutely fine whilst every visible part of them says otherwise. I don’t hear conversations as collections of sentences. I hear hesitations and interruptions or someone changing their mind halfway through speaking. The sentence that almost escaped but didn’t. What wasn’t said often feels just as important as what was.

We say one thing and mean another. We tell ourselves stories that help us survive. We become experts at explaining our behaviour whilst simultaneously hiding the reason from ourselves. We notice tiny changes in people we love without consciously registering them. And the nervous system seems to keep the score.

I think writing asks us to listen to it. Looking back, I wonder whether that is what I’ve been doing all these years without quite recognising it. I don’t think I invent people so much as wait until they begin to feel real. Once they do, the words usually follow. Not immediately. Sometimes they take their time. But eventually they catch up with something my mind already understood in a language I couldn’t yet speak. I can see them, sense the way they might feel inside their body when something happens, how they might respond. Sometimes lending them something from my work, or a client. The foot tapping of one client, the protective cover of the suprasternal notch from most of my clients.

Perhaps that’s why I never panic when an idea takes a while to develop. I remember having written a character into a tight spot. She had dropped through a hole into a cave which happened to open out onto the side of a mountain. She couldnt climb back up through the hole. The cave was just a natural feature carved by time and history into the mountain but there was no way out. I could change the writing or work hard on how to get her out of there. I went to bed every night for months imagining her there. Feeling the weather and the temperature. The thoughts which would go through her mind. The desperation which would increase as time passed. After about three months it all fell into place and I knew what would happen and how it would feel. And I’ve learned to trust that.

Because more often than not, if I leave them alone for long enough, they stop feeling like an idea altogether. They start feeling like real people and I can write them with familiarity.