In this first post in the series, I’m going to talk about the idea, and how it developed, up to the point I started writing the first draft. (You can see the plan for the whole series of posts in the box above.)

The Idea Is Not The Book

As Mary Poppins sings upon her return, the cover is not the book – but neither is the idea. Ideas are easy – I can have a hundred story ideas a day if I really work at it or, often, if I don’t. Ideas come most often when I’m not paying attention. They’re the wondering what ifs at the back of my mind. Mostly, they pass by and fade away again. 

But an idea that sticks? That’s one that could perhaps become a book. 

If you’re stuck for your next book idea, this blog post might help:

5 surprising ways to discover your next big book idea

The idea for Seashell Island came to me when my parents were away on an extended trip in Australia. We stayed in touch on the family WhatsApp group, along with my two brothers. There were all kinds of weird and wonderful updates from them on the group, including photos of them with local wildlife, and a lot of family in jokes. Then they went off grid on a Great Barrier Reef cruise, and suddenly it was just me and my brothers messaging each other. 

I got thinking about how families stay in touch these days, and how different that is from when I was young and went travelling, with only the odd phone call home every week or two. I also felt the weight of knowing that I had all my parents’ bank details, itinerary, passwords and so on, in case anything happened to them while they were away. 

That wasn’t a thought I liked dwelling on, so I flipped it round. What if something happened here while they were away, and my brothers and I had to deal with it? Suddenly, we were the adults in this scenario, and our parents were the responsibility-lite, carefree adventurers – and that felt weirdly new and a little scary. 

So that was my starting point. A story about siblings left to deal with family problems – and their own issues – while their parents were off travelling the world. 

As you can see, that is not a book. 

Expectations can give structure

At this point, the other constraints in play gave me some structure. Seashell Island is the second of my island books for my publisher, Orion. After writing The Wedding on Mistletoe Island for last Christmas, I knew they wanted another island story, so that gave me the start of a setting. I knew it needed to be an 80,000+ word women’s fiction novel with multiple points of view, because that was what was in my contract. 

These may seem more like business decisions than creative ones, but writing is my business. And actually, I find that they give me a framework to write within, which can be helpful. 

From idea to book

Once I had agreement from my editor on these basics, I set about working up what the book was actually going to be about. How I do this can vary from book to book, but mostly it involves a lot of notebooks, and a lot of stream-of-consciousness writing, as I try to figure out what’s going on in my story brain. 

For Seashell Island, I started with the characters. Miranda, Leo and Juliet. 

I knew I wanted them all on the island for the summer, but also that I wanted that to be unusual. Which meant that they needed reasons to usually be elsewhere, and reasons to come back. 

They also each needed a love interest, because that was the sort of book I wanted to write. I gave them names too: Owain, Christabel and Rory.

And I needed to know a bit about my island, and a lot about what I was trying to say with my story. 

These notes (from March 2019) are the earliest ones I can find of this process, but I can tell looking at them now that the story must have been percolating in my brain for quite a while before this, as the details are already quite defined.

I often find this with my books; I have to do an awful lot of thinking before I can do any writing, even just notes like this. I need to be able to see the big picture before I can start figuring out the details. 

After that, the story percolated for another month or two, while I worked on other projects. Then, in May 2019, while on holiday in a caravan in Wales, I sat down to go deeper into my story. 

I started by going back to the characters again – thinking my way through who they were, what made them that way, why they didn’t want to change, why they needed to change, and what was going to force them to do it.

Things I Know Need To Happen

Save The Cat

I’ve been using the Save The Cat method of outlining for a couple of years now, and it’s really helped me hone the way I think about stories. (I’ve also found I get way less structural changes in my edits, which is always a bonus!) So the next thing I did was go through all the different stages on the plot and note down what I thought would be happening with each of the characters at each stage. 

It’s in pencil, because I knew it would change as I worked, and there are still a lot of blanks. But there’s the start of an outline here at last. 

 Which means it’s time to move off paper and onto the computer to start writing the first draft!

And I’ll tell you all about that next week, in part 2 of this Behind The Book Series. 

Do you do much pre-writing, or do you dive right into writing the story? Let me know in the comments!