FROM THE MINDS AND HEARTS OF OTHERS!
Best-selling British novelist, Helen Carey, talks about where she gets her inspiration:
The award winning novelist, Helen Carey, has lived in many different parts of the world, but now calls, Pembrokeshire, West Wales home.
She has, had a number of jobs and her varied experiences of working as a chalet girl, a waitress, a travel agent, an oil trader, a management consultant and in the British Army have all featured in one form or another in her books. She teaches Creative Writing at University level is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. Her aim is to entertain, and her sense of character, story structure, pace and humour all combine to create compelling, page-turning novels which attract fans from all over the world.
Ms. Carey's, Lavender Road Series, Is an exciting and tender look at London during the Blitz. She makes the characters come to life and shows us how they survived and came through this time, with strength and wisdom.
I am thrilled and honored that she agreed to do a guest blog post.
I hope you enjoy it and I highly recommend all her books.
She has, had a number of jobs and her varied experiences of working as a chalet girl, a waitress, a travel agent, an oil trader, a management consultant and in the British Army have all featured in one form or another in her books. She teaches Creative Writing at University level is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. Her aim is to entertain, and her sense of character, story structure, pace and humour all combine to create compelling, page-turning novels which attract fans from all over the world.
Ms. Carey's, Lavender Road Series, Is an exciting and tender look at London during the Blitz. She makes the characters come to life and shows us how they survived and came through this time, with strength and wisdom.
I am thrilled and honored that she agreed to do a guest blog post.
I hope you enjoy it and I highly recommend all her books.
Best-selling British novelist, Helen Carey, talks about where she gets her inspiration: |
Book 1.) Lavender Road.
Book 2.) One Sunny Day
Book 3.) On a Wing and A Prayer, Book 4.) London Calling.. 
Book 5.) The Other Side of the Street.
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People often ask me where I get my inspiration. ‘I’d love to write a novel,’ they say, ‘if only I could think of a good story.’
But it’s often not a story that starts me off. It’s more likely to be a theme, an event or a character that attracts my interest. The story comes later. For my wartime LAVENDER ROAD series, it was an old lady I met at a bus stop in Clapham. We fell into conversation and she told me she had lived in the area right through World War Two. As we waited for the bus she pointed out a couple of ugly 1950s houses built where previous Victorian ones had been destroyed during the London Blitz, some missing trees where a V2 had landed in 1944, and the now grassed-over bomb shelters on Clapham Common. Laura was a born and bred South Londoner and spoke of traumatic wartime events with a kind of rough and ready humour and breezy unconcern that transported me back to those extraordinary years. The bus came along then, but just in that short encounter was born the idea of writing a series of fun, readable novels exploring the day-to-day ups and downs, highs and lows, of people living in one south London street during the Second World War. Five novels (and quite a few years) later, I am now research the sixth in my LAVENDER ROAD series, and nowadays, of course, on top of all the histories, diaries, letters, museums, official reports, local history libraries, film footage and BBC documentaries I used for the first book, LAVENDER ROAD itself, there is also the internet with a million WW2 sites. But what there aren’t so many of now, sadly, are real live people who remember those eventful years. And it is people’s memories that I still find the most inspiring element of my research. Yes, historical records are great, but nothing compares with someone telling you at first hand what it was like to be caught in Balham underground station when a bomb severed the water main, or to crawl through the cellars of a collapsed building searching for a trapped child, or to take a tiny riverboat over the English Channel to rescue trapped soldiers at Dunkirk, or to be parachuted into occupied France. Last year I interviewed a ninety-year-old doctor who had been present in the Oxford laboratory where they developed the first penicillin cultures in 1940. They had to use old bedpans to grow the cultures in, they simply didn’t have anything else suitable. Later on, he casually let slip that in 1941 his ship was torpedoed when crossing the Atlantic to Canada and he spent several hours tossing about in the darkness on a makeshift raft in his dressing gown and slippers before he was rescued. That is one of the odd things about the war years, people who lived through it often look back as though it was all quite ordinary. But it wasn’t, it was quite extraordinary and it forced people to show extraordinary amounts of courage and resilience. That’s what makes it such a fascinating and inspiring period to write (and hopefully read) about. Sadly, my old friend Laura died several years ago, just after my second novel SOME SUNNY DAY was first published, but I am still grateful to her for that original spark of inspiration. Helen Carey’s latest novel, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STREET can be found at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06XYL4QJ2 Or follow Helen on her Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/Helen-Carey/e/B0066LDO96/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_ebooks_1 Helen’s website: http://www.helencareybooks.co.uk Or join Helen on Twitter or Facebook at @helencareybooks |
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