Where Do Ideas Come From? Writing The Silk House
It’s a question that writers are often asked, and before I began writing novels I found it hard to imagine where I might find the inspiration for a short story, let alone something to sustain an entire novel.
However, once I began to think in a certain way, actively paying attention and looking out for ideas, the process became a bit like tuning into an old-fashioned radio – a few weeks of blind foraging around in the recesses of my brain until I hit upon a strong enough signal from which to fashion a story.
Inspiration can be a seed or seeds that lodge in a writer’s subconscious, sometimes for decades, before they begin to germinate. I occasionally experience a small frisson of interest when I see something or am told a particular fact, something that switches on the writing part of my brain, and I squirrel it away, hoping it might one day be of use.
For The Silk House, I was visiting one of my favourite exhibits in one of my favourite museums – the costume displays at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum – several years ago, when I came across an 18th-century silk gown with a curling pattern of leaves and flowers that seemed to glow from within and appeared to have barely aged a day. I took a photograph and noted the silk designer’s name, and later discovered that it was the work of Anna-Maria Garthwaite, one of the industry’s most respected and prolific silk designers, and one of the very few women working in such a role at the time.
Later on that same trip, I returned to my home town, in the English county of Wiltshire, and climbed up the tower of the local church, which affords a view of the entire town, including into the walled gardens of the headmaster of the private school that sits on the edge of the town.
I learned that one of the buildings on the wide high street was originally the home and premises of an 18th-century silk merchant and had recently been restored. It’s an imposing structure, with a sharp-toothed roofline and a brace of wide bay windows, though I paid it little attention when I lived there. This time, however, the coincidence of these two silk-related facts set my imagination churning when, a year or so later, I began to think about my next book.
As I began to research, I discovered that a number of women in Wiltshire had been killed when suspected of witchcraft. Often they were of low status, or foreign, or herbalists and healers, and this gave me another thread for the story. Herbal lore and medicine has long been a source of fascination to me (I explored this in an earlier novel, The Botanist’s Daughter) and I began to imagine what a fabric might look like if designed with a pattern of poisonous flowers, and what power it might contain.
I’m also very interested by the way in which past events can leave their mark on a building, leaking through to the present, like ink on a page. A few years ago, I went on a late-night tour of a Quarantine Station near to where I used to live in Sydney and there were several rooms where I felt such a sense of foreboding and unease that I had to leave them, certain that something awful had occurred within their walls.
This experience also fed into the book, and as I was writing I even began to scare myself with the unexplained noises I could hear in the old weatherboard cottage that I live in: footsteps thundering along the floorboards late at night, lights flickering on and off…
The Silk House is the result of these somewhat disparate threads of inspiration, and hopefully, I have woven them into a narrative that will not only captivate the reader but also send a shiver down their spine.
The Silk House by Kayte Nunn is published by Hachette Australia on 30 June 2020, and will be published in the autumn of 2020 by Orion in the UK.
Kayte Nunn is a former book and magazine editor and is the international best-selling author of five novels, published in 12 countries. Her latest novel, The Silk House, will be published on June 30 in Australia, and later in 2020 in the UK.
Facebook: Kayte Nunn Author
Twitter: @kaytenunn
THE SILK HOUSE
Weaving. Healing. Haunting. The spellbinding story of a mysterious boarding school sheltering a centuries-old secret…
Australian history teacher Thea Rust arrives at an exclusive boarding school in the British countryside only to find that she is to look after the first intake of girls in its 150-year history. She is to stay with them in Silk House, a building with a long and troubled past.
In the late 1700s, Rowan Caswell leaves her village to work in the home of an English silk merchant. She is thrust into a new and dangerous world where her talent for herbs and healing soon attracts attention.
In London, Mary-Louise Stephenson lives amid the clatter of the weaving trade and dreams of becoming a silk designer, a job that is the domain of men. A length of fabric she weaves with a pattern of deadly flowers will have far-reaching consequences for all who dwell in the silk house.
Intoxicating, haunting and inspired by the author’s background, THE SILK HOUSE is an exceptional gothic mystery.
‘The stories of three fascinating women weave seamlessly together in this atmospheric book set against the sumptuous backdrop of the eighteenth-century silk trade. The titular Silk House is at once eerie and evocative as it leaves its mark on its inhabitants – and as its influence transcends time to create a mystery that is so compelling I found myself racing towards the final pages. Utterly spellbinding’ NATASHA LESTER
‘An elegantly woven ghost story that both chills and delights… Set in an old house that is a character in itself, this evocative tale of mystery and secrets continued to haunt me long after I turned the last page’ JOANNA NELL
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Category: On Writing
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