Ideas by Paul May

People often ask writers where they get their ideas from, so I thought I'd try to answer that question by talking about one specific book of mine, Billy and the Seagulls. When I've been asked, I've often told people that it's not having ideas that's the problem for a writer, it's turning them into something. That's true of course, but not really an answer. The more important truth is, it's complicated, much too complicated to explain in a few words. 

I have ideas all the time, especially early in the morning and often in the middle of the night, but they usually evaporate in the cold light of day. Billy is (almost) the only book I've written which takes some of its inspiration from children I've taught and, most unusually, with this book I can trace back where almost all of the ideas came from.

Cover illustration by Kate Sheppard

Let's start with Billy. Billy is (in my mind at least) the small, round, smiling five-year-old who I taught for a year and who was almost invariably cheerful. Call him George. George actually did look a lot like the Billy in Kate Sheppard's lovely illustrations (it's her cover, too). It's a bit of a mystery how I came to graft onto him the fears and worries of various other people—both adults and children—that I've known. But I did.

So, although I always knew that I wanted to write a story with George as the main character, by the time I finally started to write he had morphed into someone who was really nothing like the original. He'd acquired my daughter's fear of earthquakes and wobbly bridges, and the fear belonging to a small, quiet four-year-old I knew who was terrified of flushing toilets. He'd also acquired some other random fears that came right out of my imagination, including the fear of toast made soggy by baked beans. And, of course, he was terrified of seagulls.

Herring gulls can be very scary. When I wrote this book I was teaching in a large Primary School in Lowestoft. As I drove into town there would often be a herring gull sitting on top of every lamppost, and when the children went in from playtime the gulls were always waiting to swoop down and clean up the crumbs from their snacks. The kids at our school weren't scared of the gulls. I guess they were used to them. But I thought someone who moved to that school from somewhere else just might be. 

As I remember it, I started off by writing the first paragraph of the book without any idea where it might be going, although it seems to me now that I must have very quickly decided that Billy and his brother had a mum and dad who had split up, and that both mum and dad had new partners, and that mum's new partner, Dave, was going to find a new job by the seaside. So, in this case, the idea was generated by the necessities of the plot. Boy must be scared of seagulls, therefore boy must move from elsewhere, therefore there must be a reason for the move . . .

That opening paragraph was set right from the beginning though, just as you see it above, but the next couple of sentences indicate that I must have written them a little later once I'd realised all about the family situation:

I reckon it was the earthquake that started it. It was just after our dad moved out, and Billy was only three.

I was quite pleased with the way I slipped that info in, but there was more back story needed here, so in the next chapter I had to do this:

I'd better explain about Dave. Mum said he was our new dad, but we already had a dad, even if he didn't live with us any more, even if Mum and Dave had got married. Everyone liked Dave except me. Nan liked him. Billy liked him. Mum liked him, obviously. I didn't hate him. I just didn't want a new dad, that was all.

Sometimes it's only by writing that you start to see new possibilities. I started writing a book about a little boy who was scared of everything being confronted by really scary seagulls, and then discovered I was writing about a couple of boys trying to come to terms with all the upheavals involved in their dad leaving, their mum's new relationship and moving to a new house in a new town.

Other ideas grew out of this. It didn't take me long to realise that although Eddie, the book's narrator, loved his little brother, he was already worried about how embarrassing Billy might be when they started their new school. I know a thing or two about starting new schools because I started new schools five times when I was young, so my own feelings fed into Eddie's at that point. And I knew that the boys would need school uniform and they'd have to meet the head teacher and make new friends. That was fun because I was able to put my real school secretary into the book as a fictional school secretary. I suppose you could call that an idea. She was alarmed when I told her, but I reassured her that all she did was take Eddie along to his classroom. I should say here that Kate Sheppard's illustration looks nothing like the real Mrs Gooch.

I also needed a class teacher (a good one) for Eddie, so I gave him my friend, Mike Ingham. You can read about the real Mike Ingham here. But Mr Ingham, and the project about recycling arrived about nine months after I started working on the book, and that was because I got stuck. It wasn't until I was cycling on the Isle of Skye that summer that it occurred to me that a peregrine falcon and a landfill site were the answers to my problems with the book, and that idea literally came to me in an instant. 

Mike Ingham was an inventive teacher

Where did the idea come from? I could never have thought of it if the school where I was working hadn't organised a visit to a landfill site as part of a recycling project, and if the foreman who showed us round hadn't explained that the council had someone who flew a peregrine over the site to keep the seagulls off, and if I hadn't happened to read about the problems caused by seagulls nesting on buildings. But in the months that I'd been stuck and unable to complete the story, all these things had happened, and they all fell into place that afternoon, more or less as I was taking this photo, on the road between Glen Brittle and Sligachan. But if I hadn't been trying to write the story those random bits of information would never have coalesced into an idea.

When I started writing, all I really knew about the structure of the book was that Billy would end up not being scared of seagulls. What I hadn't realised was that Eddie was just as scared as Billy and that the book would eventually be at least as much about Eddie overcoming his own fears. Those fears found a direct expression in Eddie's reaction to the awesomely fast plunge from the sky of the peregrine falcon, at which point Eddie discovers something about himself. I don't think I knew that was going to happen until I actually wrote about the peregrine.

Excellent peregrine!

The very first idea I had, to write about a little boy who was scared of seagulls, that never changed. But it's what happened during the process of writing that turned it into a book. I'm not sure if there's anything left in Billy of the original George who I taught. Maybe there's a kind of heroic magnificence about the hugeness of Billy's fears, and his ability to carry on despite them, and eventually to overcome them, or most of them, that owes something to George, but I definitely owe to George the original impetus to start writing. I put myself in here too, by the way. It's me who put the teapot in the fridge when I was distracted.

Having the ideas for this story took a few minutes, spread over twelve months. The 6,000 words or so that make up the 22 short chapters of Billy and the Seagulls took about a year to write, working two days a weeks for four or five hours a day as I tried to make the ideas into something that worked, and waited for the work itself to produce new ideas. And that's why I never really answer that question about ideas, because the question seems to imply that you have the idea and write it down and, hey presto, there's a book. 

What I can say is that, if you don't commit to doing the work, you are most unlikely to have the ideas you need to finish the book. And, amazingly after more than 20 years, should you want to read Billy and the Seagulls you can still buy it as a Kindle book.