There are all sorts of ways in which real life creeps into the stories I write: people can provide inspiration for characters, while places - sometimes years after a visit - influence decisions around settings. Events in both the wider world and my own life also have their impact. Here are just a few examples:

Here We Lie

Here We Lie

  1. A family trip to Rufus Stone in the New Forest, where King William II was supposedly shot with an arrow in 1100AD led to the setting for a showdown with bad guy Foster in Medusa Project series book two, The Hostage. In this case, the name of the location was what made it useful…
  2. …but for the Scottish settings in my latest teen mystery - All My Secrets - I drew on an old memory of the Isle of Skye as inspiration for the island of Lightsea and based a scene at the start of the book in Rose Street in Edinburgh, which I know through regular visits to the Edinburgh Book Festival.
  3. When it comes to people, I've only once deliberately tried to base a fictional character on a real person: that was Lorcan in Close My Eyes. It was a bit of an experiment and I learned a lot from the attempt. Mainly that the twists and turns of a story influence the behavior of a character as much as the other way around… we're all a product of the events that form us, after all. The more Lorcan worked his way into the story, the less like the person he was based on he became.
  4. Ironically, when I wasn't consciously trying to depict my own family it kind of happened anyway! In Six Steps to a Girl, sixteen-year-old Luke, his older sister Chloe and their long-suffering mum have a similar family dynamic to mine as a teenager. Indeed, like Luke, my younger brother fell for a girl in my class at school and tried to get her to go out with him…
  5. Sometimes people provide material for characters in other, broader ways… I watched footage of Hitler working a line of supporters and giving each one a long, meaningful look in the eye to help write the evil (but charismatic) leader of the English Freedom Army in my teen thriller Split Second.
  6. And sometimes the inspiration is very small and specific: I was having coffee with a friend a few years ago and I realized her green-gold eyes were exactly the colour I needed for bad boy Flynn's amazing eyes in my teen romance, Falling Fast.
  7. Also in Falling Fast, the school production of Romeo and Juliet, through which Flynn meets main character River (auditioning to play Juliet), is central. The way the play is discussed and rehearsed in the book was definitely informed by the many school plays I acted in when I was younger.
  8. Though none of its characters are in any way based on actual people, my new psychological thriller for adult readers, Here We Lie, is crammed with step-family relationships that I was able to depict after all my experiences as a step-daughter, step-sibling and, more recently, with the children of my partner.
  9. The cloning of Dolly the sheep, together with my viewing as a teenager of the film of Ira Levin's book, The Boys from Brazil, led to a fascination with human cloning that, in turn led to the main storyline of my teen novel Blood Ties.
  10. And, finally, there are many horrific moments in my adult thriller, Trust in Me but perhaps one of the nastiest is when the killer writes about a childhood experiment with his family's pet cat. It sounds really extreme when you read it but, ironically, is the only part of the book that comes from real life - in this case a psych report written about a child showing psychopathic tendencies that I found online.

As you can see, from the general to the particular, real life shows up in fiction in all sorts of peculiar ways, hopefully helping to develop, enlighten and deepen the story as it's planned and written.