Inspiration from a Million Places, Moments, and People

By Karen Hawkins

The question readers ask the most often is “Where do you get your book ideas?” That’s a simple question with a complicated, sort of hard-to-explain answer. 

But here I go. 

To be honest, I get my inspiration from a variety of places, moments, and people. You see, it just takes a little, tiny seedling of a second or a thought that, if carefully watered with a ton of what-ifs and if-onlys, can bloom into a full book. 

Once, I was sitting in my car at a light when I saw a girl running down the street. She was very young and pretty, but a bit of a mess. Her hair was flying, her shirt buttoned incorrectly, her shoes didn’t match, and she was trying to carry one too many boxes. At the light was a guy who was a little older than her and who looked as if he’d just stepped off the cover of the Harvard alumni magazine. He wore a suit and glasses, carried a high-end briefcase, and kept looking at his watch as if he was on his way to the most important meeting ever. 

The instant the light changed, the girl bolted past this guy onto the street. As she did so, the top box fell right in front of the business executive who stumbled over it and was sent to the pavement, his glasses disappearing and his briefcase flying under the car in front of him. 

The girl was immediately apologetic, but the poor guy was pretty smudged by road dirt, his briefcase unreachable, his glasses nowhere to be seen, and the light was already changing which left him in a sorry state indeed. I doubt he made his meeting.

Later on, when I thought about that chance encounter, I started wondering . . . what if those two, polar opposite people were meant to be? What if, despite the fact that she’s obviously a mess and was living a seat-of-the-pants sort of life while he looked like a type-A complete control sort of man, fate had decreed they were supposed to meet?

That was the seedling. 

Days later, after much discussion with my author friends and several pages of “what-if” and “if-only” notes, I watered that idea and came up with the idea for a book I eventually wrote. For fun, I set it in the Elizabethan era and landed on the premise of: “What if the luckiest man in England, a man who’d never failed at anything in his entire life, suddenly found himself married to the unluckiest woman in Scotland, a mess of a woman he knows to be his mortal enemy?”

That was the first book I wrote and, to this day, I still get ideas for my work from moments or thoughts like that. 

While looking for the inspiration for my current works, the Dove Pond series, I was skimming through a local newspaper in North Carolina. That’s when I saw the name of a person in an obituary, Doyle Cloyd Something-or-Another. I don’t remember the last name, but those first two names intrigued me. They were interesting and screamed “fascinating Southern person” to me. I immediately knew who he was, what he looked like, why he was who he was, and how he’d died. It was so clear that I immediately began writing little scenarios in my notebook about Doyle Cloyd and his antics.

After a lot of what-ifs and if-onlys, I came up with this: “The week after Doyle Cloyd died, his daughter held the yard sale to beat all yard sales. People came, some from as far away as Asheville. They came to the yard sale, they poked through his things, and some of them even bought an item or two just to make it look legit. But none of them had come to shop. Not really. They’d all come for one reason and one reason only—to find out if it was true that Doyle Cloyd, the crustiest of old men and one of the least inventive too, had—as the rumors said—died in his bathtub wearing nothing but a long, curly, blond wig.” 

If you’re a fan of the Dove Pond series (the fourth in the series, THE BOOKSHOP OF HIDDEN DREAMS, just came out!), you’ll recognize Doyle, especially if you’ve read the two Dove Pond e-novellas where he plays a prominent part. 

So that’s where I get my ideas. They come from tiny slices of life that roll around in my brain until I can properly water and weed them into a bigger, better book plot. 

Thank you for letting me describe my process! I hope you all will check out my latest book, THE BOOKSHOP OF HIDDEN DREAMS, where a tattered and heartbroken historian, Tay Dove, returns to her hometown of Dove Pond NC to heal and discovers a century old mystery surrounding one of her ancestors, a famous journalist.

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Karen Hawkins is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. A native Southerner who grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee where storytelling is a way of life, Karen recently moved to frosty New England with her beloved husband and multiple foster dogs. The Dove Pond series is a nod to the thousands of books that opened doors for her to more adventures, places, and discoveries than she ever imagined possible.

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THE BOOKSHOP OF HIDDEN DREAMS

A brand new novel in the “sometimes whimsical, often insightful, always absorbing” (Shelf Awareness) Dove Pond series that follows a gifted historian investigating the mystery of a love story lost to time.

When an antique tin of love letters is found hidden in her family home, noted historian Tay Dove rushes home to Dove Pond to investigate. Tay is still reeling from a romantic betrayal, so she’s relieved to refocus her energies on her latest project: a biography of her great-great-grandmother Sarafina, a star reporter who began her career in Dove Pond in the late 19th century before abruptly leaving town.

Tay believes the letters could be the key in solving what happened, but they only add to her questions—especially when they reveal a forbidden love affair with William Day, a wild youth who took part in a notorious train robbery. Some answers might be found in eighty-year-old Rose Day’s bookshop, which doubles as a town archive, but Rose is curiously resistant to give Tay access. Just when Tay thinks she’s reached a dead end, she finds an unlikely ally in Rose’s grandson, Luke, a fellow puzzle lover. Together, they set out to uncover what really happened all those years ago…and find the truth behind a love story that could be more precious than gold.

Perfect for fans of Alice Hoffman and Sarah Addison Allen, The Bookshop of Hidden Dreams proves that adventure is always waiting to be found, especially within the pages of a book.

BUY HERE

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing