Anne McAllister | Where do you get your ideas?

The most common question writers are asked is: Where do you get your ideas?

Generally the people asking it are perplexed because they can't quite fathom how such ideas come or how they are different from other ideas or what writers can possibly do with them when they do turn up.

Usually I say, "Ideas are everywhere."

But that doesn't really help. So in case you're wondering how things come together, let me just illustrate with my January Harlequin Presents, Antonides' Forbidden Wife.

It certainly didn't come as a full-blown story. No IDEA (in capital letters) popped up in my head. In fact, it wasn't supposed to be a story at all -- because PJ Antonides is not what is commonly considered "a Presents hero." He was a surfer, for heaven's sake!

He made an appearance in an earlier book. As the younger brother of the uptight, determined, severely responsible hero, PJ was by turns annoying, misunderstood, breezy and charming. Pretty much everything his brother was not. He also didn't own any multi-national corporations on the side.

He was also, in that book, called Peter because that's my husband's name and I called him that because I wanted a name I liked but one that I wouldn't be using for a hero (one hero named Peter is all anyone is allowed, I figure).

But I needed a book (I'd just stopped writing the one I had been working on, due to circumstances beyond my control), and one of the higher beings in the Harlequin pantheon of editors suggested Peter's story.

I said, "What story?"

Long pause on the trans-atlantic telephone line.

"He's a surfer!" I said.

"I thought you left him running the company," she replied, "when Elias went off to build boats." There was a sniff of disapproval about Elias's behavior.

"Well, yes," I said. And already the wheels were turning. I had left Peter running the company. But he was pretty much an unknown quantity as far as the family went. They'd barely seen him in ten years. He'd gone off to Hawaii and rarely came back. He'd even left his old identity behind. He'd become PJ out there. (Tricky guy. He obviously had designs on becoming a hero).

I wondered what other secrets he might have.

No secrets, he told me. Just a wife.

A wife? Where did that come from?

I have no idea. I guess it was mulling over what shocking revelation might create an interesting set-up and provide a stepping stone for some conflict. Yeah, a wife would definitely do that!

But where did he get her? Hawaii, apparently, because that's where he'd gone. Who was PJ likely to meet in Hawaii?

And just when I needed her, Ally Maruyama waltzed into the book.

Ally was a combination of several girls I'd known growing up in California -- daughters of mixed cultural backgrounds who had to try to deal with "old world" expectations within the world they wanted to live.

But why did PJ marry her? And where was she now? And what had brought her back?

All these questions demanded ideas to answer them. They were questions that took a lot of thought -- a lot of playing around with who these people were, what mattered to them, what drove them.

And then, of course, I had to ask who was Ally now, so many years later?

There were, as I said, lots of ideas involved in discovering the answers to that.

And that's where another bit of my own background came in. One of my best friends, growing up, has become a talent fiber artist. Melody Crust has won awards, written books, taught scads of workshops. Her career informed Ally's. I read Melody's book, A Fine Line, trying to see it through Ally's eyes.

I didn't know a lot about fiber art. I'm not an intensely visual person. But one of the joys of writing, as Silhouette author Karen Sandler said the other day at the Harlequin Open House, is learning about so many different things in the course of research.

Melody's vocation was my starting point. Ally's career and Ally's personality grew from there.

That's what most ideas are -- they are beginnings. They are catalysts. But alone they are no more than sparks. They need to ignite interest, research, discussion, and ultimately they need to create more questions and more answers until the story begins to develop and, eventually, takes on a life of its own.

And when it does, the characters come up with their own ideas -- and it's all I can do to keep up with them!

Anne McAllister
www.annemcallister.com/

Anne McAllister | No Such Thing As A Loose End

Thanks so much, Fresh Fiction, for inviting me to come and blog with you today. I love reading all the various blogs and getting to know writers (and thus adding to my TBR pile) in the process.

I've been writing romance fiction since the mid 80s and am currently working on my 61st book. For quite a few years I would amuse myself on long car trips by seeing if I could name the books and the heroes and heroines in order. Then I started seeing if I could name them in any order. Now I just write the books and think fond thoughts about all those lovely men in my past.

Sometimes, though, there's one who doesn't get his happy ending in one of my books and he turns up, rather like a bad penny, demanding one of his own.

That was what happened with Flynn. Six years ago Silhouette published a single title of mine called The Great Montana Cowboy Auction. It was part of a series of books I'd been doing for them since the mid-90s called Code of the West. TGMCA ran to 97,000 words, which should have been long enough to give everyone in Montana a happy ending.

But sadly, the heroine's daughter, Sara, who had a brief life-shattering fling with a footloose Irish journalist called Flynn Murray, got pregnant in the book. But she didn't get her happy ending. She came back in a later book and we knew she was doing fine as a single mom, but there was no Flynn in her life. Nor was there anyone else.

I went back to writing Harlequin Presents and wasn't writing Code of the West books anymore (it's what happens when you write as slowly as I do -- they make you pick a place to be since you'll be spreading yourself to thin if you're both places. That's the theory anyway). So I wasn't doing those books anymore.

Try telling that to Sara and Flynn.

They wouldn't let up. They kept coming around asking when was it going to be their turn. I said, figure out how you can be a Presents, and you can have a turn.

They're nothing if not resourceful. They did. Flynn managed to stop being quite so footloose, got himself saddled with a 500 year old castle that is crumbling around his ears, and an earldom which he really doesn't want any part of, but is obligated to shoulder because, well, he is the earl. Sara, of course, knows nothing of this. She hasn't heard from him in six years.

And then one day, Flynn got a letter out of the blue. . .

That was basically the way they told the story to me. I told it to my editor. Said, "Sound like a Presents to you?" She said, "Give a shot." Of course I had to. I owed it to them. They were quite right -- they deserved more than to be a 'loose end' in someone else's book.

I'm delighted to have written it because it took me back to my roots. And I got to revisit places and characters I didn't realize how much I'd missed.

That's one of the really lovely things about writing so many books -- especially linked books -- there is a whole other universe out there with these people in it that I can dip into now and again, stop back in and check on. It's like getting Christmas cards from them -- only better. Every once in a while they invite me back into their lives and let me share them with you.

And if you haven't read The Great Montana Cowboy Auction and are thus worried that you won't have a clue about the people in One-Night Love Child, let me assure you that I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, so every book absolutely has to stand on its own!

How do you feel about linked books? What are some of your favorites? I never mind adding more books to my TBR pile, so suggestions for great reads, especially linked reads, are very welcome!

One-Night Love Child is a March 2008 Harlequin Presents and an April 2008 Mills & Boon Modern. If you want to read an excerpt, please click on the link.

Anne McAllister

http://www.annemcallister.com/