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INTRODUCTION
The Author speaks:
The first question put to an author, personally, or through the post, is:
'Where do you get your ideas from?'
The temptation is great to reply: 'I always go to Harrods,' or T get them mostly at the Army Navy Stores,' or, snappily. Try Marks and Spencer.'
The universal opinion seems firmly established that there is a magic source of ideas which authors have discovered how to tap.
One can hardly send one's questioners back to Elizabethan times, with Shakespeare's:
Tell me, where is fancy bred. Or in the heart or in the head. How begot, how nourished? Reply, reply.
You merely say firmly: 'My own head.'
That, of course, is no help to anybody. If you like the look of your questioner you relent and go a little further.
'If one idea in particular seems attractive, and you feel you could do something with it, then you toss it around, play tricks with it, work it up, tone it down, and gradually get it into shape. Then, of course, you have to start writing it. That's not nearly such fun—^it becomes hard work. Alternatively, you can tuck it carefully away, in storage, for perhaps using in a year or two years' time.'
A second question—or rather a statement—is then likely to be:
'I suppose you take most of your characters from real life?'
An indignant denial to that monstrous suggestion.
'No, I don't. I invent them. They are mine. They've got to be my characters—doing what I want them to do, being what I want them to be—coming alive for me, having their own ideas sometimes, but only because I've made them become real.'
So the author has produced the ideas, and the characters —but now comes the third necessity—the setting. The first two come from inside sources, but the third is outside—
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