The Inspiration behind Burnt Paper Sky

It took me many years to get around to writing my novel. Years of dabbling with one idea or another, and never really taking my ambition seriously. Years of letting life get in the way.

So by the time I wrote that first sentence, I was in my early forties, I’d lived quite a lot, and learned a thing or two, and many of the experiences I’d had came together to inspire the book in a way that was both surprising and powerful. It was as if, once I’d begun something that I was really writing from the heart, a whole cocktail of ideas and influences cohered around it, and gave me that momentum you desperately need to get from one end of a novel to the other.

I had tried to write two other books before this one, and both failed for different reasons. One was just too personal, based as it was on a family story, and the other required so much research that I feared it would take me a decade to complete it.

So, for Burnt Paper Sky, I decided that I would try to write the kind of book that I love to read: a page-turning psychological thriller in the domestic noir genre. In particular, it was reading a novel by Linwood Barclay that inspired me to make that choice. I had recently finished ‘No Time for Goodbye’ and had found the simple, disturbing premise so compelling that I raced through it in one setting. I longed to be able to create that feeling for a reader.

With that in mind I had to choose a story for my own book. My years of motherhood gave me the solution swiftly, because my personal worst nightmare would be the abduction of one of my children. I had no experience of this in actuality, except for cases I’d observed in the media, but I did know well what it feels like to live day by day with the fear that you will lose a child, as one of mine had been through treatment for cancer as a baby. That desperate fear of loss is not something you forget, and I tried to use it to help me imagine some of what my main character, the mother of the lost child, might be feeling.

I chose the child’s mother as a narrator (there are two, the Detective who runs the case is the other) because I have to confess I’d built up a bit of anger after watching reaction in both traditional and social media to missing child cases. That was because it sometimes felt to me as if, at what must be the worst and most vulnerable time in a family’s life, society was also judging these people, and judging them harshly.

A series of questions presented themselves to me: What must it really be like to be at that press conference where you appeal for help when your child is missing? What does it take for the press to turn against you? What does all that judgement feel like when before the event you were just another person going about their life normally? As a mother myself, my sense of outrage at the treatment of some of these families, even if individuals were subsequently found guilty of some kind of wrongdoing, was strong. It certainly inspired me.

It wasn’t just the content of the novel that needed inspiration. Getting from one end of a book to the other is a bit of a test of endurance, amongst other things, so I needed to take inspiration in very practical ways as well.

To get me through the day to day word count requirement, I was inspired by my writing partner, who was also working on her first book. We would meet every fortnight and share material that we’d written so that we could critique it for each other. It was a fantastic system. It gave us deadlines to write to, and also somebody to write for. Each week I was also inspired by what she had done and that me the impetus to get on with writing the next section of my book for the next meeting.

I was inspired by a healthy dose of pragmatism too. I knew that I had one shot at writing this book, because the reality was that after years of combining childcare with sporadic and very part time work I needed to get a permanent job sooner rather than later. With three kids and a busy family life, I knew it would be near on impossible to write a book once I had taken a job so it was now or never. It’s perhaps not what people starting out on a creative writing life, and hoping for a visit from a muse might like to hear, but in my experience nothing inspires you to write more than a good, solid reason to get on with it!

I had something to prove, as well. I’d been out of the workplace (apart from some part time teaching positions) for such a long time that I’d lost confidence in that arena, as many women do when they’ve taken significant period of time out to care for their families. Deep down, I wanted to show everybody that I could write, and I could write a whole book, and I could write it well. That feeling of determination inspired me very much too, because I wanted to set a good example to my daughter and to my sons. I wanted to show them what their mum could do, and that probably inspired me the most.

So, for me, inspiration didn’t arrive like a bolt from the blue one day. Instead, it was a combination of many things in my life that already tugged at me in various ways, the things that mattered to me, and that were already woven into my life, sometimes in complicated ways.

As it evolved, Burnt Paper Sky became the perfect place to explore some of these ideas and feelings. I wrote it from the heart, as honestly as I possibly could, even when the subject matter sometimes made this painful and I had to remind myself to hold my nerve, and keep going. And I found that as I got into it, the book gained a momentum of its own. The story and characters mattered to me more and more, and I became yet more determined to finish it, so it was a very big personal moment indeed when I finally typed those words that all writers long for: ‘The End.’

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Gilly Macmillan grew up in Swindon, Wiltshire and also lived in Northern California in her late teens.  She studied History of Art at Bristol University and then at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.  She worked at The Burlington Magazine and the Hayward Gallery before starting a family.   Since then she’s worked as a part-time lecturer in A Level Photography and a full-time mum.

Find out more about Gilly on her website: http://www.gillymacmillan.com/

Burt Paper Sky

 

Tags: Burnt Paper Sky, featured, thrillers, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing