The Surprising Sources of Inspiration Behind my Next Book

September 14, 2023 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

The surprising sources of inspiration behind my next book

There are some questions I get asked as an author that make my insides curl up a bit.

Why didn’t I find your book in [insert a particular bookshop or supermarket that happens not to carry it]?

Anything about money. Especially why I don’t have as much as Dan Brown or JK Rowling.

And, my personal anti-favourite, where do you get your ideas?

But in the case of The Short Straw, I can actually pinpoint exactly where I got my idea. And as is often the way with me, the ‘idea’ is actually a combination of moments, memories and interests that, when added together, create the foundation for the story.

So here are the three main influences behind The Short Straw… they may surprise you.

An abandoned asylum

Nine years ago, I took the kids “on a magical adventure” (my words, not theirs) to visit an abandoned asylum near where we lived at the time in Kent. I have since returned to visit, and it’s now been renovated into a fancy apartment block where residents gaze out over the garden that patients once tended, but back then it was very dark, spooky and crumbling.

Leybourne Grange had once been a grand manor house owned by Sir Joseph Hawley, a racehorse owner known as The Lucky Baronet. Then in 1936, it became a hospital or, as it was called then, a “colony for mentally defective persons”. It was a huge place, at any one time ‘treating’ up to 1200 patients, including children. But after it closed in the 1990s, it stayed empty.

By the time we came to snoop around, it was derelict but you could get a sense of the scale. An old clocktower loomed over us, rows upon rows of high windows out of which you could imagine hundreds of faces peering. At the time, there were outbuildings that seemed to have once been offices. Just before a security guard caught us, told me off and we all legged it, we spotted an open filing cabinet with paperwork inside. We made up stories on the way home about looking at the files and finding our own names.

Abandoned houses, especially those with dark histories, have always terrified and fascinated me in equal measure, and anyone who reads The Short Straw will be able to see traces of this place.

An episode of Community

You do not have to have watched the esoteric college-based comedy by Dan Harmon to understand The Short Straw. Even if you have watched it, you’d probably struggle to see the link. But one of the original ideas for The Short Straw came from watching an episode in season three called Remedial Chaos Theory. Even if you’ve never seen the show, chances are you’ve seen this Gif, which is from that episode.

https://media.giphy.com/media/zPOErRpLtHWbm/giphy.gif

In the show, one character rolls a die to determine who should go and get the pizza from the delivery guy at the door and, in doing so, creates six different timelines. I love this idea, and although my novel doesn’t involve multiple timelines (although in one early version it did, and I don’t rule that out for a future book…) the concept of drawing straws to go and get help can be directly traced to this.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

The Short Straw is not a musical (I’d kind of love a musical adaptation though!) but it does nod to this, one of the all-time greats and one of my favourites.

In The Short Straw, three sisters – the Kelseys – run out of petrol in the middle of nowhere in bad weather. In Rocky Horror, sweethearts Brad and Janet get a flat tyre in the middle of nowhere in bad weather. The Kelseys seek shelter in the abandoned manor house in which their mother worked. Brad and Janet seek shelter in the gothic castle of Dr. Frank-N-Furter. In both, the refuge is not as safe as the characters hope. In both there is a voyage of discovery/reckoning with the past. In both there are murders.

Okay, there are a lot of differences too, but this is as close a homage as I could risk without my publisher thinking I’d totally lost it.

Rosemary, the Kelsey’s late mother, is a fan of musicals, and little references to Rocky Horror and other musicals are woven into the sisters’ recollections of her, bringing it all full circle.

The Short Straw is published by Orion Fiction on 14 September 2023 in hardback, audio and ebook.

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Holly Seddon is the international bestselling author of TRY NOT TO BREATHE, DON’T CLOSE YOUR EYES, LOVE WILL TEAR US APART, THE HIT LIST and THE WOMAN ON THE BRIDGE. After growing up in the English countryside obsessed with music and books, Holly worked in London as a journalist and editor. She now lives in Kent with her family and writes full time.

Alongside fellow author Gillian McAllister, Holly co-hosts the popular Honest Authors Podcast. You can find her on Twitter @hollyseddon, Instagram and Facebook @hollyseddonauthor

THE SHORT STRAW

‘An addictive read. . . Patricia Highsmith meets Shirley Jackson’ GILLIAN MCALLISTER

‘Utterly gripping and unputdownable’ JANE FALLON

Three troubled sisters find themselves lost in a storm at night, and seek safety at Moirthwaite Manor, where their mother once worked. They are shocked to find the isolated mansion that loomed so large through their childhoods has long been abandoned. Drawing straws to decide who should get help, one sister heads back into the darkness. With the siblings separated, the deadly secrets hidden in the house finally make themselves known and we learn the unspeakable truth that will tear the family apart.