The inspiration engine behind The Book of Thunder and Lightning

Just what is it about writers and their characters? For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by how good authors create them. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson became the template for so many future horror films centering on character transformation and the axis of good versus evil. However, academics have said that the story is just as much about the act of writing itself. The writer becomes the character, while he is also ‘himself’; an act of induced schizophrenia. David Morley writes that when in the flow of writing, it is almost as if the writer has gone native with their created personae or characters, like an actor staying in role to explore their stage or movie character to its fingertips (2007).

For James Joyce, inspiration came from the people in his mother city. In Dubliners, Joyce’s daily walks around that city’s streets were meticulously recorded on paper and stitched together in short, snappy chapters of modern life; the Eastenders of their time, gritty and unvarnished. These characters were then expanded alongside the Greek myth of Homer’s Odyssey to form Joyce’s sprawling masterpiece, Ulysses. The combination of these two ideas (real life with Homeric myth) created one of Modernism’s greatest characters, Leopold Bloom, the everyman we can all relate to. The book is moving, entertaining and downright confounding in equal measures; everyday life can sometimes feel like an epic pain in the (insert noun) and we are all in it together, in case you hadn’t noticed.

So, with the alchemy of self (or various selves) combined with that magic ‘second’ element (or a second story, like Homer’s Odyssey) there is potential to make an interesting new story. For The Book of Thunder and Lightning, my inspiration engine was a 2021 walk to a neighbourhood called The Boundary Estate in London’s Shoreditch. The epigraph from the novel sets the scene:

Arnold Circus
In 1889 the demolition teams came.
They levelled The Old Nichol, only leaving fragments of the past behind -
Boundary Passage, Old Nichol Street, Chance Street. Some others.

By 1900, The Boundary Estate was built.
Tall orange-bricked flats sprang up, with shared stairwells
and large windows that let in the light from wide tree-lined avenues.

A round central park, Arnold Circus, was built in the estate’s centre.
It was constructed on a six foot mound
using thousands of bricks from the old torn down houses.
For some reason, the architect had insisted that precisely six trees be planted in a circle.

They remain there to this day.

What followed was a year of historical research that unearthed all sorts of characters that had been lurking in wait behind dormant lumps of grey matter; the main character Tom Baxter, tricked into a life of crime; the nasty old Fence, Theodore Hush; Arthur Snipe, the toxic east end king pin, slithering up the greasy pole of respectability. The only exception was Simon Beaver, resident of the Boundary Estate and hack journalist who becomes an unlikely hero. This was autobiographical (kind of) and his life of buses and private tutoring is very much a part of my day to day existence. But apart from him (or me), all the characters seemed to unfurl from that first visit to that neighbourhood and were a result of that magic formula (unexpected place + real history = new characters).

However, I am cheating (ever so slightly). If I was to point to a third element, it would be A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison (1896), the sad story of a young boy from ‘The Old Nichol’ who gets caught up in crime and (spoiler alert) culminates in him being killed in a knife fight. This book was my first port of call after I discovered that the Nichol was buried beneath what is now The Boundary Estate, and was without a doubt a massive inspiration. It’s just that, for me, it wasn’t enough to simply re-visit the story of a boy being dragged into a life of crime and leave it at that. My character had to have this additional dimension; he was obsessed with electricity, which surely must have seemed like a type of magic to a working class boy growing up in the 1800s:

“Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C Clarke

So there you have it. My path to creating interesting characters; a good walk to a new place followed by a whole load of historical research, combined with a little bit of electricity...

The Book of Thunder and Lightning by Seb Duncan is available for pre-order from Roundfire Books.

Reference
Morley, David, The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2007.