‘How did you know it was coming?’ That’s what one reader asked me on reading the final book in my REBOOT series. What prompted her comment was the subject. REBOOT is about a pandemic. Sadly that’s a very topical theme at the moment, and my reader credited me with being a prophet. Not surprisingly I am no such thing. The first book in the series, ‘Paradise Girl’, came out three years ago and had been conceived two years before. So what was it that gave me this idea?
It was simple, and sudden. At the time I was living in the country, my closest neighbour a long way away. I was alone in the house struggling with an idea that wasn’t going well. I went out into the garden and was struck by how still everything was. Even in the country there’s always some noise - birdsong, sheep bleating, a dog barking, a distant tractor, but this time there was nothing, and it felt as though I was the only living thing. Suppose I was? I thought. What might cause that? What would happen and how would I cope? It soon dawned on me that it would be a great theme for a story. But the main character shouldn’t be me, a grown man with a lot of miles under his belt. It should be someone much younger, a teenager with their life and all its promise before them. I went indoors and started to write and Kerryl, the heroine of Paradise Girl walked onto the page.
A story about a pandemic isn’t an original idea. There are plenty of books and movies based on this theme. That’s not surprising, because actually there aren’t many plots at all – it’s been suggested less than ten – and there are certainly no new ones. What are they?
1. Rags to riches, and maybe back again;
2. Boy/girl meets boy/girl, wins them, and maybe loses them too;
3. The hero/heroine sets out on a journey to find something lost or achieve a goal;
4. Somebody with the world at their feet makes a mistake, often because of a fault in their own character, and loses everything;
5. Somebody who has been wronged looks for – and takes – revenge;
6. The hero/heroine has to cope in a challenging environment, often alone – e.g. marooned on an island, in space, quarantined;
7. A character is so consumed by jealousy that their personality becomes distorted and they act in ways that would have been inconceivable before;
8. The hero/heroine confronts a person or organisation much more powerful than they are, and has to draw on all their resources to survive;
9. A character or event from the past suddenly appears and overturns the status quo.
It’s fun to go through books you’ve read and movies or tv dramas you’ve seen and match them to this list. Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Love Actually, Skyfall, Mars, Hamlet, Normal People, you name it. I’d be surprised if you find one that isn’t based on one of these ideas. Of course, many incorporate more than one, and various elements are brought in to add drama or facilitate the plot – for example dreams, prophecies, chance, an order.
What does that mean for the writer? It doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to say, because every time one of these plots appears it’s in a fresh context brought about by a new telling. What it does mean is that we always have plenty to write about. If you’re stuck for ideas for your next novel, try this. Take a character – newspaper reports are a good source – pick one of the numbers above and develop a story involving your character and the theme you’ve chosen. Pick another number and incorporate that. Write your best seller.
teacher, and from this he went into education advisory work. He left to start with Sally, his wife, a company publishing educational materials. It was not until this business was sold, after ten years, that he found the time to give to writing. Paradise Girl, book 1 in a trilogy about a pandemic (the REBOOT series) appeared in 2017. Book 2, Aftershocks, came out in 2019 and book 3, Jericho Rose, in 2020. Phill has also written The God Jar, a mystery set partly in the present day and partly in Elizabethan times. His fifth novel, A Summer of Dreams, is due in the spring of 2021.
When he’s not writing, Phill enjoys the theatre, galleries and museums, walking, and playing the saxophone.
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