Eileen Cook's FIVE TIPS FOR FINDING INSPIRATION

HALLIE EPHRON: Eileen Cook writes creepy (YAY!) young adult psychological thrillers. Her most recent ones, With Malice (Entertainment Weekly called it a "seriously creepy thriller") and The Hanging Girl, were huge bestsellers. Now she's just out with You Owe Me a Murder. I file her writing alongside Megan Abbott's, only for teens.


I get to hang out with Eileen every year at the Surrey International Writers Conference in Vancouver, and she's not only a super-talented writer, she's an inspired teacher. Which is what she's here to talk about today: Five Tips for Finding Inspiration.

EILEEN COOK: One of the most common questions a writer is asked is: Where do you get your ideas? I always dread this question as I want to have a witty or clever comeback and I never do. If I was being honest, I’d have to admit:  I have absolutely no idea, oh dear God, what if this was the last idea I ever get?  Then I would to crumple into a fetal ball on the floor and rock back and forth until the fear of idea drought slips away.

Ideas for books are tricky things. Sometimes they sneak up on you whispering in your ear, showing up in dreams, slipping out of sight until you finally can trap them on the page. Then there are the times where you are minding your own business and a great idea comes up and whaps you upside the head and screams in your face until you agree to tell the story.

Ideas are everywhere. There are more ideas than you could write in a lifetime of typing. It’s recognizing a good idea when you see it that can be a tricky process. Here are five tips that may help you spot them in the wild.

Personal Interactions: This one can be hard for introverts, but at times we might need to venture out into the world and interact with other people. Be brave, some of them might even be strangers. Listen to conversations in coffee shops or take notes when a friend shares a personal experience. The risk people run when they’re friends with writers is that we reserve the right to put them in our novels.

The News: The saying that truth is stranger than fiction is an understatement. When you read the paper or watch the news keep an eye out for interesting characters, odd events, or possible plot twists. You might discover the perfect way to hide a body, pull a con, or identify a character that would pop off the page. Pay special attention to things that leave you with an emotional reaction, that make you angry, or cry, or curious to know more. Strong emotions often lead to strong stories.

Keep Your Eyes Open and Soak It In: I was once on a ferry and saw a missing child poster where there was an age enhanced photo showing what the child would look like now. I turned to a friend and said: Wouldn’t it be weird if you looked like the picture and that was the way you ended up discovering that your parents had abducted you? In an instant the idea for what would become my novel The Almost Truth popped into my head. I’ve known writers who have had ideas come to them from looking at a painting or from seeing a couple across a restaurant interact in a way that struck them. Be curious about the world around you. Expose yourself to art and music. Occasionally stop and look around you, notice what you see and maybe what you initially overlooked.

The Classics: My most recent book, You Owe Me a Murder was inspired by the Patricia Highsmith classic—Strangers on a Train. I’ve always loved Highsmith’s books for their complicated and morally grey characters. I thought about how the story would play out in modern times with teen characters and before I knew it I was at the keyboard. Consider using classics or fairy tales and look at how they could be twisted, retold, or inspire a new story.

Combine the Top Four with The What If Game: Whenever you get the glimmer of an idea, don’t be afraid to play with it or build on it. The best question a writer can ask herself is: What if? What if A happened instead of B? What if this experience was had by teens, or a single mom or included aliens? What if the conflict was made worse? What if it happened in a different time? What if these two ideas combined? I used to get an idea and then scramble to the keyboard as fast as possible to hammer out an outline. I was afraid if I didn’t write it down it would get away from me. I’ve now come to believe that the best ideas should be allowed to percolate. The more I turn them over in my head the more likely I am to let them build into a richer experience.

How you keep track of these ideas are up to you. Some writers jot them down in journals, many keep an idea file where they store torn articles from newspapers and slips of paper with notes that would make homeland security raise an eyebrow. You never know when an idea will strike and it may sit in a file for a while, but store them like your own personal imagination survival kit.

Now I’m curious- where have some of your best book ideas come from? What’s inspired what you’re writing? 

HALLIE: What's a little scary is what inspired Eileen's new book also inspired mine. Strangers on a Train is just one of those amazing books that is so original and mind-blowing. And it just goes to show you how the same spark of an idea will take two different writers galloping off in very different directions.

And for the record, I keep a file named COMPOST. Every time I get the teensiest idea I dump it in there. It's a couple of hundred pages long and I still go back and forage about when the well runs dry.

Don't Believe A Word I Say

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Remember that game show To Tell The Truth? It was on too late for me to watch when I was a little kid but I could hear the TV in the living room as I listened from bed. I didn’t really need to see., right? Just listen. The key, remember, was to guess which of three contestants was “the real” chicken-plucker or Nobel prize winner. In fact, it had some amazing contestants: Hunter Thompson, and Garry Trudeau, and Orville Redenbacher and Gene Roddenberry. Wrong-Way Corrigan and Caroll Spinney.

ANYWAY. That show was all about lying. About being unreliable. And we loved it!  Now, we put liars in our books. Or, are they really lying? Maybe they are just telling us the truth as they perceive it.

  

Our Obsession with Unreliable Narrators

By Eileen Cook

Unreliable narrators are more popular than ever, appearing in novels from Gone Girl, to Pretty Baby, to The Girl on the Train. We enjoy having someone lie to us- at least on the page. In some cases we doubt them from page one, and in others there’s a twist in the narrative that stops us in our tracks and forces us to rethink everything that came before. It’s that uncertainty that keeps us turning pages.

Reading is the ultimate voyeur activity. You have the opportunity to crawl inside someone’s head. Reading allows you to try out, even for just a few hundred pages, what it is like to be someone else.  You can imagine what it must be like to be a spy, to survive the French Revolution, or having to hide a body after an unexpected murder. But what if you can’t trust the person whose head you are in? There’s something fascinating about being inside someone’s point of view, yet still uncertain if you can put your trust in him or her.

All first person narrators have an element of unreliability. I’ve worked as a counselor and one of the first things you learn about human behavior is is that reality is always filtered through the lens of the person telling the story. There is what objectively happens, but as anyone who has read comments on Facebook knows- almost more important than what is said, is how it’s interpreted.

Narrators are often unreliable because they can’t (or won’t) admit their real motivations to others, or in some cases, even to themselves. They want to control the story so they can manipulate how they’re seen.  Part of the appeal of an unreliable narrator is seeing how they twist events to fit their view of reality. As readers we recognize at some level how we’ve done that in our own lives and we want to see how the character will make sense of their actions and justifications.

Stories with unreliable narrators provide us the opportunity to “Nancy Drew” the situation, looking for clues to the real story. We pride ourselves on being able to see through the character. We filter details and weigh their importance- ultimately deciding what’s true or false.  In the same way that a reader of mystery novels enjoys putting together the clues, racing to solve the crime along with (or even slightly before) the detective, readers of unreliable narrators like trying to resolve the mystery of why people do what they do.

Even if we remove the potentially sinister aspects of an unreliable narrator- the fact remains they’re fun. They’re the wild girl you knew in high school who might do anything at any moment. They’re the politician who says something and then denies ever having uttered that comment a second later with their eyes wide and innocent, leaving you questioning your own sanity. They leave you off balance, and while you may not trust them- they’re never dull.

Writers love creating these characters.  It’s an opportunity to create an individual who can’t be taken at their word, who requires exploration.  And if that exploration keeps readers turning pages long into the night, promising themselves just one more chapter- then I can live with that.  

HAK: Yup.I just read I LET YOU GO. Whoa. And it totally got me. (Have you all read that?)

What do you all think about this “unreliable” thing? Is it new? Or is it as it has always has been--and must be?

 Eileen Cook is a multi-published author with her novels appearing in eight different languages. Her books have been optioned for film and TV.  She spent most of her teen years wishing she were someone else or somewhere else, which is great training for a writer. Her newest book, WITH MALICE, will be out in June 2016. You can read more about Eileen, her books, and the things that strike her as funny at www.eileencook.com. Eileen lives in Vancouver with her husband and two very naughty dogs and no longer wishes to be anyone or anywhere else.

WITH MALICE

In the tradition of Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train and E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars, this gripping, addictive thriller will blow you away.

Eighteen-year-old Jill Charron wakes up in a hospital room, leg in a cast, stitches in her face and a big blank canvas where the last 6 weeks should be. She comes to discover she was involved in a fatal accident while on a school trip in Italy three days previous but was jetted home by her affluent father in order to receive quality care. Care that includes a lawyer. And a press team. Because maybe the accident...wasn’t an accident. Wondering not just what happened but what she did, Jill tries to piece together the events of the past six weeks before she loses her thin hold on her once-perfect life.

Two friends, an exotic foreign location, the potential for revenge and jealousy, and an accident that looks like it might have been murder. It didn’t matter what the truth was - what mattered was that it was fun to talk about.

A gripping and addictive read that grabs the reader and yanks them into a world where nothing is what it seems and where everyone is a suspect. You won’t believe how it ends.