A question all writers get
a lot: Where do you get your ideas?
A question I asked myself:
How do you write about Arthur Conan Doyle
when the only thing people
really know or care about is that the guy created Sherlock Holmes?
This was the problem I
faced when doing the second book of my DARK
PASSAGES series, The Dickens
Mirror. Contrary to what you’d
think, Dickens never shows up because the book’s about his mirror and a whole lot more.
An aside: The idea for the
mirror came because I was an English major; Dickens was one of my favorites;
and, in a bio, his daughter talks about playing quietly as her dad works and
then, all of a sudden, the guy jumps up, runs to a mirror, and starts making
faces and talking to himself. Turns out
this was during the writing of Oliver
Twist, and he was creating Fagin.
What Kate, the daughter said, was that her dad stayed in character after that, dashing back to the manuscript and
scribbly furiously, all the while mumbling to himself as Fagin.
Anyway, I just took the
conceit further in the first book, White
Space. But that’s another topic for
another day, and I digress. (I do this a
lot. It is, in fact, how your mind
works, by making connections you might not otherwise make.)
I gravitated to Doyle for
two reasons: a) he was alive at the right time and b) he was a physician first
before he became a writer. Me being a
doctor, too, I understand the mindset; I get medical school; I pretty much have
lived that life. So I thought, okay, go
learn about Doyle before Holmes.
There is where having a
magpie mind comes in: reading widely about a whole range of things and then
picking up pretty bits and pieces for the brightly colored mess that passes for
my nest . . . er, brain
because you never know
when something will come in handy.
Turns out that Doyle was,
well, pretty interesting. Grew up very
poor in a very bad section of Edinburgh; got into a lot of fights; had an
alcoholic for a dad who ended up in an asylum; all that. He was also a little bit of a nut,
gravitating to spiritualism as he grew older but only after his son was killed
in World War I. (IMHO as a psychiatrist,
since I know that Doyle suffered from depression earlier, losing a son only
made that worse, so it was natural that he’d drift that way to cope. A lot of people did.)
Did he want to become a
doctor? No; his mom wanted that and
since he WAS poor and had a lot of sibs and his mom to try and support (Dad
being, by now, in an asylum . . . so, nu,
he went to medical school.
Did he like it? He liked parts of it, but it wasn’t REALLY
his passion. Doyle was into proving his
manliness and wanted adventure. So, to
supplement his income while in school—since he had to pay his way—he took a job
as a ship’s surgeon on a whaling vessel.
Young doctors in training
did this all the time. Captains liked it
because they were generally better-educated than their crew and so needed
someone to talk to who wasn’t completely illiterate or only interested in
stereotypical sailor-things. (Go read
the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brien or simply see Master and Commander, a terrific film based on several books in the
series, and you’ll understand how important that relationship was/could be. You will also then understand if I ever make
a joke about the lesser of two weevils.)
Anyway, while he was on
the whaler, Doyle kept a journal.
Read that, and you
understand that he loved the adventure of it all: the killing of the seals, the
nearly getting killed himself on the
ice, the other guys . . . it made him
feel more manly than just studying all the time.
What caught my eye in this
journal, though, were some of his sketches.
They’re crude and all, but one thing he sketched twice was the ship’s big black dog.
And something went ding in my brain and I thought . . . wait a second.
We all know that one of
Conan Doyle’s most famous works—and, frankly, the only one I actually really
like—is The Hound of the Baskervilles
which is, as we know, all about a big, black, demonic dog.
The story is, in turn,
assuredly based on Richard Cabell, probably mixed up with Devon folklore about
yeth hounds . . . I’m telling you, I did a lot
of reading about all this stuff.
Well, along with all this
other stuff I’d learned about Doyle . . . his crummy early life, those fights,
that he was a bit of a hoodlum . . . that all just clicked. There was the black dog. I knew that Doyle was into spiritualism and
the supernatural. He would’ve known about demon dog stories. He used to fight a lot, and he’d been around sailors, knew sailors . . . and that was where
that final, bright shiny piece came from.
What do you think of when
you think of sailors? Me, I think of
tattoos—and why? Because in Doyle’s time
(actually a little before this), sailors were one of the only class of people
(other than criminals) who had tattoos.
And some, which I’ve seen in the flesh
as it were because people collect some weird stuff—such as these from London’s
Wellcome Collection—were what you might expect:
Tattoos only became
fashionable for the upper crust when George V—Victoria’s son and quite the
party animal—got a dragon tattoo while on tour in Japan. (This was in 1881 and so right around the
time period I was thinking in terms of my alternative London.) After George got one, everyone who was anyone wanted
a tattoo, although most were tasteful and discrete. (For example, Churchill’s mother, Jenny, had
a tattoo around her right wrist that she kept covered up with a sleeve most of
the time. Lady Churchill was a wild and
crazy woman in her time, with scads of lovers.
But I digress again.)
I thought, okay, I got all
these elements:
Doyle was a gangsta
type. When he was a kid, he ran with a
Catholic gang (which is probably the basis for his Baker Street
Irregulars).
As a doctor, he knew about
cocaine and doctors experimented on themselves all the time back then. In fact, Doyle wrote a paper, which I’ve
read, about the effects of an extract of gelsinium (made him numb; no great
find there), and cocaine is, of course, the monkey on Holmes’s back. (As it was for Sigmund Freud, who
experimented with the stuff on himself and
friends, and got horribly addicted until he finally weaned himself off . . .
but, again, I digress.)
Doyle knew sailors.
He sketched that dog.
In sum, for a strait-laced
Catholic boy, Doyle was kind of a wild guy.
So . . . I decided to make
Doyle a drug-addled constable and give him a tattoo of a black demon-dog
And then, in the context
of the world of The Dickens Mirror, I
decided . . . you know, I think I’ll just have that tattoo come to life.
So, where do writers get
their ideas? From everything and
everywhere, so be flexible. Be curious. Trust in serendipity and the workings of your
imagination and the unconscious to make connections. Above all, never stop learning and read
widely. Go live life and pay attention
because everything—everywhere and every day—has value and, many times, when you
least expect.
THE DICKENS MIRROR: Book 2 in THE DARK PASSAGES Series by Ilsa J. Bick:
The Dickens Mirror
Ilsa's Running a Giveaway on Her Website for WHITE SPACE: Book 1 in her DARK PASSAGES Series:
Website Page with Giveaway
Links for Ilsa J. Bick:
Amazon Author Page
Important Information About the YA Scavenger Hunt Contest
Don't forget to enter the contest for a chance to win a ton of books by me, Ilsa J. Bick, and more! To enter, you need to know that my favorite number is 4242. Add up all the favorite numbers of the authors on the purple team and you'll have the secret code to enter for the grand prize!
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