Where do stories come from?
I’m sometimes asked where the ideas for my books come from. The answer is usually rather mundane – I’ll start from something I see on TV, or read in a newspaper. But sometimes it’s a bit more interesting. For one of my books, the idea came from a very strange moment that happened over twenty years ago, when I was in my late teens…
My parents had split up when I was sixteen, and I was by then living with my mum in rural Suffolk – a rather depopulated part of the UK. My brother meanwhile was staying with my dad, a couple of hours away by car. My brother is a bit older, and he’d just gained his driving licence (and the trust of my dad to borrow his car), and consequently we spent a lot of barreling through the empty countryside from one home to the other. It was while doing this, one dark Sunday evening in the winter, that it happened.
We were miles from any significant town or village, on a twisty narrow road that cut through the fields. It was late and quite foggy, and I’m sure we were driving too fast (but we hadn’t seen another living soul for ten minutes, so the biggest risk was us ending up in the hedge upside down). It was only the occasional glimpses of headlights, far in the distance, that reminded us us we weren’t alone on the planet. But then suddenly, a large animal ran out right in front of the car. My brother slammed on the brakes, locking the tyres and sending us into a skid, while I tensed for the impact. And then I noticed it wasn’t an animal that had run out in front of us.
It was a woman. Stranger, it was a naked woman. Since we were two teenage boys in the car, I should probably clarify that we didn’t consider her nakedness in any way sexual, then nor since. It’s just she had no clothes on. In the middle of absolutely nowhere. Around one in the morning on a winter’s night.
We didn’t hit her. My brother had the excellent reflexes, and calmness under pressure, of the sportsman he then was. So that we ended up slowed to a fast walking pace, while the woman half-walked and half-ran – crabbing somewhat sideways – right in front of us. Her white skin was illuminated by our headlights. She was so close she could have reached out and touched the bonnet of the car, and for a few seconds it felt like we locked eyes, hers staring and wild, mine shocked and not a little scared.
She wasn’t young, in those days I might have classed her as old, but now I’d call it middle aged. Late forties, early fifties. And she looked – respectable – other than the fact she was running naked down a country road in February. And thinking back, she was dirty too, with mud splashed up her legs and sides. She had dark hair, ragged, but curly, and clearly usually neat. She could have been a librarian, a schoolteacher.
She ran like that, in front of us, for ten or twenty meters or so, until she drew level with a gap in the hedge. Then she saw it and dived through, out of the glare of our headlights, and into the darkness. And that was the last we saw of her.
We were so surprised we stopped the car. I remember the sudden silence of being stationary, neither of us knowing what to say. My brother then backed up, so we were level with the gap where the woman had disappeared. Just a black hole in an otherwise black hedge. Eventually, cautiously, we got out of the car and peered through. There was nothing to see there, nothing but farmland. The only sound was the far-off drone of traffic on the main road.
We never found any explanation as to why a naked woman had leapt out in front of us, late on a Sunday night in the depth of winter. We considered that maybe she was being chased, or attacked, but we never saw any sign of an attacker, nor was there anything reported in the newspapers. We wondered if she might have escaped from an institution – it was the kind of empty countryside that would be a good place to site such a place. But if there is, or was, an institution there, I don’t know about it, much less know of any escape that night.
The weirdest thing about it – and the thing that really stuck with me – was how normal she looked. She wore a look on her face of almost indignation – as if she were thinking: how dare we witness her in this moment where she was acting so completely outside her normal character? Where her life had taken such an unexpected turn. Her a respectable lady with standards.
I didn’t do anything with this story for over twenty years. For most of that time I wasn’t a writer, but when I did come to write stories, I wanted to place this strange moment as the central point, and see what might emerge around it. What circumstances might lead a perfectly normal middle aged woman to be running naked through the countryside on a winter’s night? Where might she go from there?
I ended up giving her a name – Julia – and decided she would be an aspiring, but ultimately failing novelist, living in a small cottage, but with dreams of making it as a big London literary figure. This idea finally became a full novel, called The Glass Tower. It doesn’t take the incident exactly as it happened, in fact over the course of writing the book, most of the actual details ended up falling away, leaving just the core of something happening out on a country road in the middle of the night that becomes a turning point in the life of an otherwise perfectly ordinary woman.
Of my standalone thrillers I think it’s the one I like the most, and maybe had the most fun writing. With all I’ve learned over the years of writing books, I’m sure it’s also the closest I’ve come to a ‘correct’ story shape, and it’s definitely my favourite of the audiobooks, not least because of the wonderful job done by the narrator Jan Cramer.
If you’d like to read the book, you can buy it on Amazon from the link below, and it’s available in paperback, ebook and as an audiobook, and if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited it’s free.
I hope you give it a go, and if so, I hope you like it!
Gregg
