'Where do your ideas come from?'

It’s probably the most common question every writer gets asked. But I never tire of hearing it. Because it goes to the heart of the creative process. And the answer is different for everyone.

A few weeks ago, a friend had just read the first couple of pages of Just Kernow, and she asked: ‘How do you actually do that? How do you get in all the details and build the scene believably and know that they’re right, and they’re going to make sense in the big picture later? How do you know which word comes next?’

The truth is, I don’t. I don’t think anyone really does. In conversation, we rarely actively think about the next word we’re going to say. It just comes out in a flow, semi auto-pilot. We have the big picture of the point we want to make in the back of our mind, but the micro details of how we say it aren’t planned. 

The same is true of writing on the scene level, and even more so on the granular, sentence-by-sentence level. The results, however, are variable. Beginning is often terrifying - that infinite white blank page on my laptop screen stares back at me, lighting my face, challenging me to do something. So I stab a few words, black marks to populate the nothingness. Then delete them. Then try again. And delete again. Sometimes it stays like that until I go and do something else that suddenly seems more appealing - ironing socks, checking for ingrowing toenails, collating my multiple to do lists in various notebooks into one can’t-be-ignored uber-list. Anything but that endless, accusatory void..

But on good days, magic happens. The big idea at the back of my head, the story itself, is peopled with characters not yet fully formed, in a world only lightly sketched, but I see a starting point for a scene and I get lost in it. I’m like an observer as I write. A drone’s-eye view, that can zoom in and out on a whim. It’s a flow state, not intentional. It can last five minutes or five hours.

When I come out, it’s like swimming up to the surface of the ocean again, out of a trance. While it’s happening I don’t know line by line, but I’m in all the characters’ heads and I can see and feel the place they inhabit. I write as though I’m actually there in the conversation. 

Making it smooth line by line, ensuring no repetition and believable dialogue - that happens in the rewrites. Often the end product is very different from the first draft - but the energy and the feel at the core of the scene, is preserved, enhanced even.

That was my answer to my friend. I don’t know exactly, but when it works this is what it feels like and it’s one of the greatest buzzes in the world.

But that’s not where ideas come from. That’s the realization of the idea. The micro ideas which make up the macro story. 

The idea for a story comes from multiple sources. Real world events, a chance overheard snippet of conversation, a dream that I actually remember - the world around us is brimming with untold stories. I’m a people watcher - from a distance I see a couple sitting on a park bench quietly whispering to each other as they hold hands and I wonder what they’re saying, what brought them to this bench, what will happen to them next. I walk down the Banjo Pier on Sunday mornings and I see a group of swimmers in headcaps bobbing between the waves - but one lady is striking far out to sea on her own. Why? Sometimes it’s a constant stream of inquiries and I have to tell myself to give it a rest,

But often these questions boil down to a ‘What if?’ In my fiction, I love placing everyday people in extraordinary situations, which is what happens in Just Kernow. But the kernel of the book started 10 years ago when I’d just finished reading Kipling’s Just So Stories. I thought ‘What if I did that for Cornwall?’ Only one title immediately came to mind. How the Pasty Got its Crimp. As my brilliant co-author Louise Dunne will testify, I sat on that for years, and I only ever originally conceived of it as a collection of fun short stories exploring Cornish mythology and tropes and giving them a twist.

Louise had other ideas. She thought it might actually be beneficial to start writing rather than endlessly discussing over another glass of wine. She cajoled me, and when nothing happened, she just said to me, well I’m going to start writing them. She loved the concept and ran with it.

I caught up eventually. But not before she was six stories in. I dipped my toe in the water by editing her work first, then that grew to me contributing stories of my own, then heavy rewriting. And that really is how our creative partnership formed. 

Then one day, about five years ago we were discussing the themes that ran through our now ten-strong collection and it boiled down to versions of truth, history personal and public, who owns it?; who can reclaim it?; different interpretations of the same facts and events. And I thought - this whole thing isn’t just a collection of stories, it’s about storytelling. So surely these stories should be told, in the book, by someone, a storyteller, to an audience. Who would be the audience? How about a group of old friends who meet up once a year on a Cornish beach on Midsummer Night’s Eve? 

From that, the next question was - well, what are their stories? The audience can’t just be receptacles to hear the Just So stories for Cornwall. They have lives, loves, secrets and heartaches all their own. So then we asked ourselves: What if we created one big story about the group of friends? And what if somehow everything was linked?

Everyday people plonked into an extraordinary situation.

What started out as a collection of themed short stories turned out to be a novel with stories hidden within stories. That was never the idea at the start. But we’re glad it happened because it turned into something we hope is much richer and more layered than we originally aimed at. Whether we’ve succeeded is for you to decide. 

So if you were to ask, well how did you come up with the idea for Just Kernow? I’d say ‘It’s complicated. One thing led to another.’

Louise, however, would say: ‘I get all my ideas from Bob, my dog.’

But that’s another story.

Jim Rickards - 24/10/2025