Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

‘Where do you get your ideas?’ is a question most writers get asked – and not a few find hard to answer. One feels almost superstitious about it – as if, by delving too deeply into the mysterious process by which stories are made – or found – one might lose the trick of it. One can have an idea for a story in a flash – or it may take many months of patient research, before the penny drops, so to speak, and one has one’s theme. In the case of my most recently completed novel, Variable Stars, I can pinpoint the exact moment when the lightning-bolt struck.

It was on January 15th, 2007, at about two o’clock in the afternoon. (With a novel such as this one, in which Time plays such an important part, it seems necessary to be precise.) I’d been spending the day in York – a city I’d never visited before. I’d just been to look at the Minster – very beautiful in the early spring sunshine, which cast spots of brilliant colour from the stained-glass windows onto the floor. There were some workmen putting up scaffolding at the far end of the nave – presumably to carry out renovations – and I started thinking about what it must have been like when the place was first built…with the same banging about of tools and people shouting orders (‘Left a bit! Up a bit!’); the same pleasing mixture of the ecclesiastical and the everyday.

Leaving the Minster, I was still thinking about the past, and the way that history and the present are intermingled, as I crossed the street to the Treasurer’s House. I was disappointed to find this closed, and wandered round to the front, to look at the building through the wrought-iron gates that face the Minster. It was here, on a black and white plaque, that I read the following:

From a window in Treasurer’s House near this tablet the young deaf and dumb astronomer JOHN GOODRICKE (1764 -1786) who was elected a fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 21, observed the periodicity of the star ALGOL and discovered the variation of ∂ CEPHEI and other stars thus laying the foundation of the modern measurement of the Universe…

I knew in that instant that I had to write Goodricke’s story.

A short walk away, in the mediaeval surroundings of the York Minster Library and Reading Rooms, was to be found further illumination. John Goodricke, it emerged, was born in Groningen, to a Dutch mother and an English diplomat father; he was also the grandson of Sir John Goodricke, a wealthy Yorkshire landowner, and at the age of eighteen ‘earned lasting distinction by his investigations of variable stars’. This was the first time I had heard the term ‘variable stars’ and it struck me as extraordinarily resonant.

Initially, I’d thought of focusing on John Goodricke alone – giving the novel that was starting to take shape the working title of ‘Demon Star’ (later to become the section-heading of the ‘Goodricke’ part of the novel). After all, there was plenty to write about, in the life of this brilliantly precocious young man, whose achievement seemed all the more remarkable when one considered that he was deaf from childhood. Subsequent research, in the York Archives and the British Library, revealed that the first years of Goodricke’s schooling took place at John Braidwood’s pioneering school for the deaf in Edinburgh. Later, on his return to York, Goodricke began the studies that would lead him to variable stars…

But it wasn’t quite as straightforward as all that. The more I found out about Goodricke’s life, the more it became apparent that – as any scientist would have told me – he hadn’t been working in a vacuum. Other people – one in particular – had played as important a part in the discovery of variable stars as Goodricke himself. Of those ‘others’, there were two, it emerged, who’d seen the potential of variable stars as a subject for investigation long before Goodricke himself had done so: one of these was Edward Pigott, Goodricke’s friend and collaborator; the other was Caroline Herschel.

That Pigott was a friend of William Herschel – discoverer of the planet Uranus and the most eminent astronomer of the age – I knew from their correspondence (part of the Royal Astronomical Society’s wonderful archive); whether or not Edward knew William’s sister, Caroline, was a matter for conjecture… that is, until I discovered Edward Pigott’s name, in one of Caroline’s astronomical journals. Edward’s name also appears in the Visitors’ Book which records – again, in Caroline’s handwriting – the names of all the people who visited the celebrated astronomer and his sister at their house in Slough. I found this in the Herschel museum in Bath – again, another ‘Eureka’ moment – although it wasn’t until some time later that I knew for certain that Edward’s and Caroline’s stories would also be central to Variable Stars.

That realisation came suddenly, and because of something someone else – my daughter – said. I’d been telling her about my latest findings to do with Caroline Herschel, and what a remarkable woman she was, when Anna said, ‘You know you’ve got to write about her.’ Next day I was on the train heading up to London Bridge when I saw how it might be done, and how I could interweave the story of my young astronomer with that of his two fellow star-gazers, Edward and Caroline. They would be, I thought, a bit like ‘variable stars’ themselves, which revolve around each other, temporarily eclipsing each other’s light… I knew then what the title of the book would be, and the structure it would have.

From then on, I was free to follow wherever the various strands of the story would take me. Where Caroline Herschel was concerned, this was quite far – both in distance and time – since she not only moved about a fair bit, from her native Hanover to Bath, and thence to Slough and back to Hanover again – but also lived to the age of ninety-seven (a lot more remarkable for someone born in the 18th century than it is now). She kept a journal, too – which, though invaluable as a source of information about what she was feeling and thinking, gave me almost too much material to deal with. In writing a work of historical fiction, one likes to have scope for invention.

Where Edward Pigott was concerned, I had the opposite problem. Apart from a few letters, and journal entries, there wasn’t very much of historical record about him at all. But a mention, in a book on the Fairfax family of York I happened to stumble across, of the terrible financial problems Edward suffered as a result of being disinherited by his father, gave me a ‘way in’ to his character. That, and the fact that he had a younger sister, Mathurina, of whom nothing else is known, was the only clue I had as to how his part of the novel would develop…

Before the book was finished, I was to get to know Edward rather well, and Caroline even better. I was to visit, not only William Herschel’s house in Bath, but the Cape Town observatory where his son, the astronomer John Herschel, lived and worked, and from where he (John) wrote his beloved Aunt Caroline long and detailed letters about his astronomical researches. I was to find out a great deal more than I had previously known about astronomy, that marvellous science, much of it through talking to astronomers and historians, who answered my – often woefully ignorant – questions with tact and generosity. Best of all, I was to observe Algol, the Demon Star, for myself, both through a telescope and without it, and thus place myself, if only for the briefest time, in the shoes of my eighteenth century star-gazers.

Even though I find it hard to say exactly where my ideas come from, I know how far they’ve taken me.