CREATIVE WRITING

Author Norie Clarke explores the way Nora Ephron’s maxim of ‘every thing is copy’ transformed a spark of inspiration into her new novel, and explains how you can develop an initial spark into the foundations of your novel

When people learn I’m an author they often say to me, ‘you must have so many ideas’ and I do, but most of those ideas are lost to an email folder, lazily entitled ‘story related’, and never to see the light of day.

So, what’s the alchemy that turns an initial idea into a novel that an editor and their colleagues want to publish? The answer is probably different from every author and indeed for each book that they write, but the chemistry behind The Library of Lost Love was a series of reactions, of chance happenings, in which Nora Ephron’s maxim that ‘everything is copy’ turned an idea into a partial manuscript that, almost eighteen months after the first spark, would grab the attention of a very special publisher at Headline.

Ideas, gathering

In the winter of 2020-21, deep in the second Covid lockdown and having just moved house, I was sitting at my desk in the corner of our box-filled living room, reading an online article about how two women of very different ages had chosen to house-share to combat loneliness. In a period where half the world was suffering from acute loneliness and the other half seemed desperate to escape the confines of their family unit, this was the initial spark, the first piece of ‘copy’, that would later become The Library of Lost Love. Nine months on, when summer was turning to autumn and I was nearing the end of my previous book deal, I began musing on what to write next. The new, smaller house had become home and, living in closer proximity to my family, I’d become more conscious than ever of the amount of time we were all spending on screens. I was frustrated; the digital preoccupation was wearing me down to the point that I felt the need to explore my disquiet through writing, ‘everything is copy’ ringing in my ears.