The most exciting aspect of a writing retreat for me is the meeting of like minds. A writer’s life is frequently spent in solitary confinement, hunched over a laptop, but the conversations engendered when two or three writers are together can inspire you for months.
What inspired me to write The Chateau on the Lake? I began with the vague thought that it would be interesting to write a love story set at the time of the French Revolution. I didn’t know much about it then but everyone knows that the starving poor rebelled against the greedy aristocrats and beheaded Louis XVI, don’t they? Except that, once I started to research, I quickly discovered that it wasn’t as straightforward as that.
The creative process isn’t always easy to pin down and put into words. Novels are a complex piece of work involving a juggling act between plot, action, characters, setting and so on. So how do they all come together to make a finished story?