Posts Tagged ‘The Girl on the Bridge’

What’s the Big Idea and Where Did It Come From?

Tuesday, June 26th, 2018


One of the questions I get asked just about every time I do a library or bookstore reading is where in the world did I get the idea for the book.  The simple and honest answer to this question is that there is no shortage of ideas for stories. Seed ideas for great stories are all around you. The would-be writer just has to be alert to the possibilities and be willing to plant that seed and let it sprout into something original.


For example the seed idea for my first McCabe/Savage novel The Cutting came from a movie I saw called Dirty Pretty Things.  The film tells the story of an illegal immigrant from Nigeria who is living under the radar in London and working as a clerk at a third rate hotel.  When the owner of the hotel discovers he was a surgeon in his native country, he blackmails the doctor into performing illegal kidney transplants. The hotel owner gets the money from the transplants. The doctor avoids being deported back to Africa.  After seeing that movie I let the notion of illegal transplants roll around in my mind until I eventually found myself wondering if it might be possible for an accomplished surgeon in the US to provide illegal heart transplants.  The recipients would be octogenarian billionaires who, given their age and the shortage of healthy hearts available for transplant, would never qualify for a legitimate transplant program.  The novel that grew out of what-if idea was very different from the movie.


To offer another example, the what-if seed idea for my most recent McCabe/Savage thriller, The Girl on the Bridge, came from reading all the news reports about sexual assault on college campuses and also from reading Jon Krakauer’s excellent non-fiction book Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town.  Krakauer’s book tells how members of the University of Montana’s football team were getting away with rape and other forms of sexual assault.  After reading it, I started thinking about basing a book on that subject and began reading other books on the traumatic psychological effects of rape on young college age victims.  A number of them were helpful but one in particular struck me.  It was a memoir titled After Silence: Rape and My Journey Back written by a woman named Nancy Venable Raine.  In her book, Ms. Raine wrote movingly about how the experience of violent rape became a singular traumatic event that changed her life in deeply personal ways.  Jumping off from that point I came up with the idea of creating a young woman named Hannah Reindel who suffers from severe PTSD after having been the victim a violent campus gang rape.  The book begins with Hannah taking her own life twelve years after the event and goes on to tell story of how justice is finally meted out to those responsible for the rapes.  The seed idea for my next book, A Fatal Obsession, which comes out this August 21st grew out of stories I read in the news about  how repeated concussions can damage the brain and produce a condition called  Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy or CTE which doctors suspect led the former New England Patriot’s tight end  Aaron Hernandez to commit multiple murders.


Seed ideas are all around you.  You can find them in newspaper stories, movies or TV documentaries and in even in stories written by other authors. To give you a recent example there was an opinion piece in last Sunday’s Washington Post that caught my attention.  It was written by a woman named Rene Denfeld and carried the headline The Other Missing Children Scandal: Thousands of Lost American Foster Kids.  The core of Denfeld’s piece was not about the children recently separated from their parents at the Mexican border nor about the vast public outrage that surrounded the separations. Rather Ms. Denfeld writes about the thousands of kids who disappear from foster care every year.  Many are never found again. Others are forced into sexual slavery.  Imagining the fate of just one of these kids and his or her struggle to survive find might provide ample fodder for a very exciting novel.  If you want to, you can take that seed idea and plant it in your brain.  Ruminate about the possibilities and sooner or later the Muse will strike and you’ll find yourself with an idea for a very exciting novel.   Here’s the link to Rene Denfeld’s piece in the Post if you care to read it.




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