Where Stories Begin

People often ask me where a novel starts. They picture something orderly: an outline, a corkboard of index cards, a tidy three-act structure I sat down and mapped out on a quiet Sunday. I always feel a little guilty disappointing them, because the truth is far less orderly. A book never starts on the page. It starts with a feeling I can't quite name yet, or an image that simply won't leave me alone, long before I have any idea what it means.

Finding Ruby Draker began that way, long before I typed a single word of it. I was a teenager watching my father cry in front of the television as the Berlin Wall came down, and I didn't understand why. He never talked about what he'd lived through, so that moment was the closest I ever got to it. Years later, the question surfaced on its own: what happens to a spy after the war everyone agrees is over? Do the secrets simply retire with them, or do the lies follow them home, into the lives of children who never asked for any of it? That question sat with me for years, quietly, before it ever became a plot.

That's the part of writing nobody sees, and honestly, it's my favourite part. Long before Shadows in the Aftermath or Reinhardt had titles, or even a shape, they were just a feeling I couldn't shake, or a single scene playing on a loop in my head, over and over, until I finally sat down to find out why. I've come to trust that instinct completely. If an image or a question refuses to leave me alone, it usually means there's a novel hiding inside it, waiting for me to catch up.

Underneath the Fireflies started differently, with a feeling rather than a memory. The specific unease of a place that looks peaceful but isn't. Maybe that's fitting, ideas tend to show up the same way fireflies do, flickering into view for a second before you're even sure they were there at all. I wanted to write about someone whose gift is also her burden, a woman who sees the truth whether she wants to or not, and what a gift like that really costs a person who never asked for it. That premise turned into Grace Walker's story, one that's gone on to earn some genuinely humbling recognition since it was published. It still catches me off guard sometimes, that it began as nothing more than a question about what it costs to see too clearly.

I think that's what I love most about this stage, before the research, before the outline, before the difficult second draft where you have to make good on the promise you made yourself in the first. There's just curiosity. A spark. My truest pleasure has always come from turning the ordinary into the extraordinary, and that transformation always starts small: one question, one image, one feeling I can't yet explain.

Which brings me to the one I'm sitting with right now, the one I probably shouldn't be telling you about yet, but here we are.

This time it started with an image, not a question, and I still don't fully understand it myself. I won't tell you what it is yet, partly because I can't, not really, and partly because half the fun is watching it reveal itself to me one draft at a time. All I know is that it showed up uninvited and hasn't left since, and it's brought a jumble along with it, like several conversations happening at once before one of them finally rises above the rest. That's all I'll say for now, because at this stage it's still more questions than answers. But it has teeth. And something tells me you're going to want to be here when it becomes something more.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, curiosity and half-formed questions and all, this is where it actually helps to have you close by. My newsletter is where the more personal side of all this lives. If you'd like a seat for that part of the process, I'd genuinely love to have you join.

That's where stories begin, at least for me. Not with a plan, but with a small light that flickers on somewhere in the dark, long before I know what it's showing me. This one's still just a flicker, but I'll follow it until it catches.
Until then, watch for whatever's glowing at the edge of your own attention. That's usually the good stuff, waiting to be noticed.

- Marianne