I was trying to work out my process recently. I used to describe myself as a “pantser” on NaNoWriMo, before the scandals hit. A pantser is someone who flies by the seat of their pants; making it up as I go along. Because I didn’t have notes, I hadn’t planned it. But reflecting back, I had a sense of things, a scene, or a character, a feeling. Something. I think I just inhabit the world for a while.

I don’t write “properly”, in the romantic sense people seem to imagine, where a writer sits down with purpose, opens a pristine document and proceeds to pour forth a beautiful, coherent literary manuscript, pausing only occasionally to gaze thoughtfully out of a rain-spattered window whilst drinking tea from a beautiful mug. I do own many mugs and there is often rain involved, but the rest feels entirely too organised. I think I collect the parts of my new world until they’re strong enough to live outside me.

Ideas seem to arrive piecemeal. A conversation overheard in a café became two misogynists in The Black Book. A phrase written hurriedly onto a receipt because I know I won’t remember it later. A sticky note explaining a hierarchy, relating a psychotherapy concept like the Johari Window or the ball and button model of grief because I’ve shared it with clients so many times that it deserves its own permanent residence on my desk. A voice note muttered into my phone whilst walking somewhere because I’m out of time and my imagination has inconveniently decided now is the moment to produce a useful thought.

These fragments live everywhere. In notebooks. In the edges of diaries. On envelopes. On Basecamp. In browser tabs that I am definitely going to revisit and which eventually become archaeological layers documenting my interests over time. At present, there are enough open tabs to show I am simultaneously researching porphyria, French Resistance women, UK criminal law, agents, vampire mythology, UK consumer law, raspberry oil and ruminating whether a pigeon keeper on the roof of a brutalist tower block needs me to continue writing his story. He’ll wait a little longer but today I connected that he might be interwoven with a girl from another idea. It’ll percolate.

I don’t tend to begin with a plot, or a thesis, or even a half sensible plan. More often I begin with atmosphere, a feeling or a place. The smell of rain arriving before the weather itself or the sound of waves hurling themselves against Cornish cliffs. A particular quality of light through trees and how I know what it would feel like to walk beneath them. The internal film appears first and only later do I realise there might actually be a story attached to it. One day it was the brightness of balloons tangled in the winter-bare branches of trees and bushes by the side of a main road. A journey I travel often. That day it was the startling contrast of a bright, metallic blue star balloon, deflated and stolen of it’s glory in the dimming day and the road-polluted curb-side grey.

The Black Book arrived like that. Cornwall had altered the rhythm of my days, I began writing because the atmosphere was there. Not the story exactly, although perhaps stories are simply atmospheres waiting patiently for somebody to notice them. Nearly a year later, I know that fictional town intimately. That sounds faintly alarming when written down. Perhaps writing fiction is simply a socially acceptable way of carrying around an entire second municipality inside your head.

The same thing happens with articles. I found myself sat beside the Atlantic becoming deeply pleased that somebody else loved the sea enough to give me the word thalassophile, then I remember petrichor and an article began to form because enough small fragments had accumulated and eventually formed a recognisable shape.

Sticky notes became a manuscript in much the same way. I looked at my desk one day and realised it wasn’t simply clutter. There was a book there before I had realised there was a book.

Research behaves similarly. Most sensible people probably investigate a question and stop when they have the answer. I don’t appear to have inherited this trait. Instead I follow a thought about one thing and emerge several hours later reading about eugenics, Victorian trends or whether castle staircases spiral clockwise specifically to disadvantage right-handed attackers. It isn’t efficient, but it is endlessly entertaining. It also means I’ve the potential to be useful at pub quizzes, if only I went to any.

Ideas don’t arrive fully formed, I’m digging them out of my thoughts, or the internet. They’ve become buried beneath ordinary life. Beneath work, children, appointments and all the practical machinery required to keep adulthood functioning. Occasionally something catches my eye and I begin brushing away the dust.

Gradually a shape emerges. Some excavations uncover a complete Roman villa of a thought, a novel concept. Others produce only a single pottery shard, my pigeon keeper on the roof. Both feel satisfying.
My process perhaps resembles a magpie constructing a nest from shiny objects gathered over several years and then suddenly noticing the structure has become habitable. It took a while to recognise what I’m doing but I think I trust this process now. It suggests that, for me at least, ideas aren’t things we force into existence but things we discover, brushing away the debris of ordinary life until I can find the path.