Rarely am I able to pinpoint precisely where a novel comes from. Patricia Highsmith once wrote, “ideas come to me like birds in the corner of my eye.” Until very recently this felt like an apt synopsis of my own creative process. An idea would appear, unbidden, on the edge of my awareness and loiter there, for months or years, ensuring I couldn’t focus on anything else. Worn down and exacerbated, I’d eventually get out my laptop and begin to write a book.Article continues after advertisement
My latest novel, Few and Far Between was a completely different beast. It had a precise and sudden genesis. I was on a residency in Eastern France, lonely and wrestling with writers’ block, when a friend sent me an email entitled, “this sounds like something you’d write about.” People are forever offering me ideas for stories. Mostly they’re just anecdotes. This email contained a Belfast Telegraph article about one-time prime minister Terence O’Neill’s 1958 proposal to drain Lough Neagh, the largest freshwater lake in the UK and Ireland. O’Neill planned to turn it into the seventh county of Northern Ireland. I was immediately taken by his madcap scheme. My friend knows me well; it was exactly the sort of thing I’d write about.
