Every now and again we run a column on the Lifestyle pages of the Sunday Times called “Jacket Notes”, for which we ask authors to write about the backstories to their books.
It amazes me that inspiration comes in so many varied forms — from events and crimes to dreams and nightmares.
One of the more famous origin stories, which gives me chills just thinking about it, is how Stephen King came upon the idea for The Shining. In September 1974, King and his wife, Tabitha, checked into the Stanley Hotel in Colorado; as King described it, a “grand old hotel”. He said: “When we arrived, they were just getting ready to close for the season, and we found ourselves the only guests in the place — with all those long, empty corridors.” He also states on his website: “Wandering through its corridors, I thought that it seemed the perfect — maybe the archetypal — setting for a ghost story. That night I dreamed of my three-year-old son running through the corridors, looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide, screaming. He was being chased by a fire-hose. I woke up with a tremendous jerk, sweating all over, within an inch of falling out of bed. I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in the chair looking out the window at the Rockies, and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind.”
This glimpse into King’s thought process is a reminder of why I don’t like to stay in old hotels and why I don’t like the smell of mothballs — because I always think of The Overlook Hotel, whether it’s King’s or Stanley Kubrick’s film version (which to me is the scariest movie ever).
Twilight came to Stephenie Meyer as a dream. As she writes on her website: “In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire.” So we have Meyer’s dream to thank for 50 Shades of Grey, as EL James was inspired to write the novel as Twilight fan fiction.
In 1885 Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed of the plot for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. His wife told his biographer: “In the small hours of one morning, I was awakened by cries of horror from Louis. Thinking he had a nightmare, I awakened him. He said angrily: ‘Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.’ I had awakened him at the first transformation scene.”
Joseph Heller was in bed when the idea for Catch-22 came to him. He told Paris Review: “I was lying in bed in my four-room apartment on the West Side when suddenly this line came to me: ‘It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, Someone fell madly in love with him.’ I didn’t have the name Yossarian. The chaplain wasn’t necessarily an army chaplain — he could have been a prison chaplain. But as soon as the opening sentence was available, the book began to evolve clearly in my mind — even most of the particulars ... the tone, the form, many of the characters, including some I eventually couldn’t use. All of this took place within an hour and a half.”
I read that due to us living such small, insular lives at the moment we are dreaming more vivid dreams. But it takes true talent and vision to convert these shining, sparkly dreams and “fine bogey tales” into something as substantial as these writers have done. Good luck if you are trying.
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