What I do.

I am very grateful to all those who message me (mostly students and readers) asking to know how my creative process works. I thought of putting a post on here as it may help anyone interested.

I suppose it starts with my interests and upbringing.

I was raised on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Argyll, Scotland. We lived three miles from the closest village. The school had eight pupils. Five in my class, three in the younger class. Friends? I lived so far away that we never met up except at school. Kintyre was the garden of Argyll, and our farm was peppered with ancient monuments. Druid burial cysts, Standing stones, Neolithic hillforts. Kildonan Dun was on our land. Not far away (four miles or so ) lay Saddell Abbey. The only Christian abbey dedicated to the Celtic church. Catholicism had ravaged Scotland by that time, but the lord of the Isles commissioned the abbey and had it built. The one and only abbey dedicated to the church of St. Fillian. Its ruins remain to this day.

I suppose it is just a sample, but such things suffuse my thoughts.

My creative process is very simple. I have an idea, scribble it down and then mull it around in my head for a while to see if I can think of a good beginning, middle and end. Assuming I have an idea (however vague) of each of those, I will start writing a novel or short story. I find the mediums indivisable. For me, a short story is simply a short novel, and a novel is a long short story.

Others will disagree.

 

Whilst I enjoy a completely imaginative created idea, I think that for it to envelop readers, it must have a basis in the real world. So I try wherever possible to use fantasy and /or horror as a slight displacement from the real world, rather than doing a Tolkien-esque, complete other world that you then populate with "almost" humans.

No Fault on Tolkien and his ilk. I simply prefer my own ideas and wish to do something different. Lol- I never wished to be Terry Brooks, who just copied LOTR with a few subtle changes.

 

Almost all of my stories are set in Argyll, Scotland.  I was always a history buff, and there is so much Argyll has to offer the historian.  Some of the standing stones in Kilmartin Glen were placed there before the great pyramids were built.

I find this almost impossible to believe, yet it is a fact.

 

Humanity was formed in Africa (another fact), Erectus, Sapiens, Neandertalis and all other species of humanity at some time or another walked out of (what we now call) Africa. So you can easily understand why all the great early civilisations existed close to the equator. Mesopotamia, Sumer, Babylon, China, India, Greece. Yet at a similar time and far more rudimentary, Scotland and Ireland. In the far North, just after an ice age produced similar wonders.

This has always fascinated me. I suspect it will always fascinate me. A question without an answer.

I hope this helps all of you who keep asking and me reiterating the same things.