The Moment(s) of Inspiration
To misquote William Faulkner wildly and wilfully, I only write when inspiration takes me. I just make sure that inspiration takes me every morning at nine o’clock.
This article is about the ‘moment of inspiration’ you get as a writer. The only problem I have with that is that I find it very rarely comes down to that one moment of inspiration. Instead, for me, it’s several mini-moments of inspiration that I might not necessarily realise at the time, until they somehow end up finding their way to each other to mould themselves into an idea. Perhaps that’s the moment of inspiration, although it never really feels like it. You see, I find that I have to go out and track my inspiration down rather than let it come to me. The secret you slowly learn over the years is how to go about finding where those moments of inspiration are lurking, how to lay a trap for them, and how to shepherd them all together into one small, manageable corral so that you can then do something with them.
To take my Eddie Giral series as an example – Eddie, in case you haven’t met him, is a French police detective in Paris under the Nazi Occupation – ‘inspiration’ was just one stage in a flow of moments, many of which had lain dormant in the back of my head for over thirty years. The idea for the series – and the character of Eddie although I didn’t know it – goes back to when I was a student, writing a thesis on the French resistance movement in the Vercors. One of the things that struck me the most at the time were the factions and rivalries between the various groups, not just the Communists and the Gaullists, but a whole spectrum of political beliefs from the far left to the far right that were never going to get on with each other. They all had their own interpretation of what constituted resistance – to some it meant nothing other than taking up arms, to others it meant taking up a pen, to yet others it was any stage in between.
This led to my own lifelong fascination with the concepts of resistance and, by extension, collaboration. What constituted each one? If you worked in a factory to put food on the table, but the factory where you worked was forced to make lorries for the German military, did that make you a collaborator? In every sense, it was a grey area. Perhaps in some part of your life, you collaborated, while in others, you resisted. But maybe that resistance was not what others saw as resistance. It wasn’t just what constituted resistance and collaboration that fascinated me, but what it was that drove an individual into one camp or the other – and, within that, into one set of actions or another. That helped create the character of Eddie, a police detective forced into collaborating with the Occupiers to keep his job, yet resisting in the sense of working to see justice done, often against the wishes of the Occupiers.
What that does to Eddie’s character and how far he finds himself willing to collaborate or resist as the Occupation grinds on plays an important part in the series. Eddie himself is complex. While I was researching for my thesis, I met two former Resistance fighters, who were two of the most deeply unpleasant people I’ve ever met. As a young man, I was disappointed – I wanted them to be heroes, and of course, they were heroes, they were just not the classical image of the hero. But that moment of inspiration – hidden from me for over thirty years – was fundamental in my vision of Eddie. The notion of the hero as not always and necessarily being the nicest of people turned out to be key to me as a writer in trying to create characters that were nuanced and believable. The same holds true for the villains – I didn’t want the moustache-twirling baddie in the black hat, but people who saw themselves as doing the right thing. Villains sometimes with redeeming features, but always with a justification to themselves for what they say and do.
To bring these moments of inspiration down to individual stories, and to reiterate my earlier comment about going out and hunting down your inspiration, this is where being a historical crime writer becomes a huge bonus. It all comes down to the research. The hours of finding out the real history, of checking facts, of making the most unexpected of discoveries, of reading about people’s lives in that place and at that time. They all come together to whisper inspiration in your ear. But they won’t do that if you don’t do your part in going looking for them.
To draw these ramblings to a close, I’m going to contradict myself ever so slightly. Everything I’ve said above is not to say that those moments don’t happen. It’s just that they’re not to be relied upon, either because they don’t give you the whole idea you’re looking for, but mainly because I will always maintain that you have to go out in search of inspiration for it to be effective.
The contradiction is that I was walking one day in the Pletzel area of Paris, which was a poor quarter on the Right Bank where a lot of the city’s Jewish population lived in the inter-war years, when a plaque on a wall pulled me up short. Part-hidden, it was a grey slab on a grey wall inside a gloomy gateway into a school. Any other day, I would have missed it. The plaque listed the names and ages – six, seven and eight years old – of the children from the school who had been sent to Auschwitz and who never returned. It was one of those moments, if not of inspiration, then of enlightenment. I write crime fiction. Its purpose is to entertain, but that one moment showed me that my purpose was also to inform, to be respectful, to keep alive the memory and the voice of a generation who increasingly no longer have one – or who ever had one in the first place. Perhaps those are the moments when we have to let inspiration come to us.
