People
often ask me where the ideas come from for my novels. Some days they just seem
to drop into my lap. I usually have more plot ideas than I will ever be able to
use.
For
example, take the plot for my first published novel, The Dark Lady.
I was
watching TV one night, or I might have just been passing through the room, when
I noticed a head and shoulders shot of an actress. The first thing that popped
into my head was: she would be an excellent choice to play the part of an evil
queen. That generated another random thought: I wonder how evil queens get
their bad reputations. This was before Wicked.
Naturally I
started kicking around ideas. On my daily morning walks before breakfast I had already
dreamed up a setting that I might use someday and one that would be suitable for
any number of situations, a grim ancient castle that was the seat of a
once-mighty empire. It was built on an island in the center of a lake. That
sounded an excellent location for this project.
I started
off with the idea of let’s have a young girl who wakes up one morning to find
her parents dead and everyone wants to control her and the kingdom. Before I
got too far into the story I was thinking of another somewhat parallel situation,
that of the young Queen Elizabeth the First and how she was surrounded by
plotting nobles and how she had to struggle, and be quick-witted in order to
survive. I think that changed the direction of the story slightly.
Although I
liked the background idea of the evil queen theme, that became more of a
secondary feature. Eventually my heroine might not be all that evil; however
that was how some people, including her grasping neighbors, saw her. Some of
that was also defensive propaganda and I made her headstrong with a bit of a
temper to fortify her reputation.
Once I
became familiar with the heroine and the main characters surrounding her I had
enough on which to build my tale. When we decided to turn The Dark Lady into a
trilogy I had a firm base on which to continue: my heroine was still young,
while things had stabilized somewhat she was constantly in peril, and that gave
me the basis for the next two books, Dark Days and Dark Knights. By the end she
was old enough for me to add more than a hint of romance to the mix.
Am I
satisfied with how it turned out? Yes. While I drifted a bit from my original
question, my main character still retained enough backbone and determination
that if those around her were not careful she could still turn out someday to
be an evil queen, or a dark lady, whatever that might be.
One of the
main reasons I write is to find out how the story will end. Sometimes even I’m
surprised.
R.J.Horewww.facebook.com/RonaldJHore
The Dark Lady Trilogy (Volume 1,2,3)
The Queen’s Pawn (Volume 1)The Housetrap Chronicles (Volume 1 to 7)
Alex in Wanderland,
Knight’s Bridge
