Where do you get your ideas from? Part 2

Getting in the sausage mix

Last week I talked about where I get my ideas from, speaking as someone who really doesn't find it easy to have ideas. If you haven’t read the piece, I can summarise it for you as follows. I get ideas by: 1. By forcing myself to sit and have ideas, often with a brief attached, and 2. By smooshing together things I’ve read about or seen into a new creation. Very rarely (ie twice), an idea will actually appear fully formed.

But that’s not what happened with my first novel.

When it came to writing The Man In The Wall, I had to sit and do ::handclap emoji:: the :handclap emoji:: work :handclap emoji::. (Now that I’ve written all that out, I realise I’ve used this phrase in the wrong context, since it was about doing the literal work and not some metaphorical “work” on myself.)

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. The book. I started with a simple brief: come up with a crime novel. From there, I did a lot of smooshing. Luckily, I have years of reading way too many articles, as well as an early career spent doing some very weird temp jobs¹. I had plenty to work with.

To recycle the “how the sausage is made” analogy from last week (which absolutely no one reading this wants or deserves), here are some of the bits of pig gristle that made this particular banger.

The making of The Man in The Wall

One of the main protagonists of The Man In the Wall is Philippa “Phil” McGinty a young journalist who goes undercover at a company called Virtua Services to establish who killed her lovely father, Clive.

Which brings me to my first bit of pig extract:

1. I listened to the Private Eye podcast

Virtua Services is a business process outsourcing firm. Yes, snore, snore. Sounds thrilling, right? Well, stick with me. I’m convinced these companies purposely make their description dull so that everyone is asleep before you’ve finished saying the sentence. This means that despite the MANY pieces written by outlets like Private Eye exposing outsourcing inefficiencies and scandals, most of those companies are still going strong.

One particular episode of the Private Eye podcast stayed with me. In PF-Eye back in 2016, Solomon Hughes and Jayne Mackenzie detailed the many failings of an outsource firm that ran schools, including putting in fire doors that didn’t close properly and throwing up buildings that fell down. At one eye-popping point, Jayne talked about a school in Liverpool that was closed due to low pupil numbers. But because the council had a PFI contract with an outsourcing firm, they still had to pay for the maintenance of an empty school for YEARS.

I wanted to try to write about a scandal that isn’t at all sexy and, somehow, still make it interesting. The positive reviews I’ve had so far suggest I either succeeded, or I managed to make the outsourcing bits short enough that no one noticed they’d fallen asleep for a few paragraphs.

2. I read a story about a school wall that fell down in Edinburgh

Part of the detail of this story was that the wrong wall ties were used in 17 schools in Scotland under a PPP contact and the wall fell down in a storm. This happens in my book too. I thought, wouldn’t it be really grim if there was a body in there? But the true tale is a story of such ineptitude that I worried this would seem a bit unbelievable, especially as it didn’t really grab the nation’s consciousness. Luckily, another cock up wasn’t far behind, because soon enough along came the RAAC scandal and the whole country learned that the UK is lousy with unsafe school buildings. It’s kind of mad that we’re not all more furious about this.

3. I heard a really grisly story about a man in a wall

Avert your eyes now, sensitive people. This is where I talk about the dead people. The central story in The Man In The Wall revolves around two bodies being found in these badly built school walls. Even worse, Clive McGinty, Phil’s dad, was alive when he fell (or was he pushed?) down into a wall cavity. It’s a grisly part of the story, and it feels a bit grim to admit it was inspired by a true story. I hope you won’t think me totally callous.

Here’s what happened.

My builder (also called Phil just to confuse things), works as a Health & Safety Officer (HSO) on building sites². Phil likes to tell me really horrible stories about accidents he’s seen. He told me one story about a colleague who was discovered in a cavity wall on a building site around 17 years ago. At the inquest, no one could establish why this man was there – since builders are meant to work with at least one labourer on a site, and it was a weekend when the site was closed. How he fitted in the tiny space was a mystery. Did he fall? Did he kill himself? No one knows.

I looked for this story in old news reports so I could give you an original source, but couldn’t find it. I did, however, find some pretty unpleasant similar stories. Phil the builder is full of tales, so who knows what the truth is. He would say things like this happen all the time and are hushed up pretty quickly.

Phil the builder, by the way, is also the inspiration for the ever-moving, ever-grumpy Doug Graves (originally called Phil Graves before I realised it was the same name as my protagonist, duh). Doug Graves is the HSO who knows more about Phil the protagonist’s dad’s death than he’s saying. Phil the builder likes to say that all HSOs are grumpy, but when he’s round our house he’s a cheeky Welsh rogue, which is lucky because he might as well live with us at this point.

4. I worked in HR

Not content with expecting the reader to care about wall ties, outsourcing firms and health and safety certificates, I have also put in an awful lot of human resources. Having spent many years working with senior leaders in human resources, I should say that they're all delightful and did not inspire any of the characters. Just in case any of them are reading this. Actually the inspiration for Andrew, the ex-head of HR at Virtua Services, came from the kinds of people who write pieces on LinkedIn about the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion³, but who really only like making the right noises for the ‘celebrate’ emoji reaction. In this current climate those same people are probably all over there right now doing a swift one-eighty and talking about ‘masculine energy’. Brr.

5. I had some really dodgy jobs

When Phil foolishly goes undercover at Virtua Services, she finds herself doing some pretty mundane jobs. The first is sorting through customer complaint letters ahead of an external audit, and the second is working with the investigations team looking into damage done by rival contractors. (I’m really selling this book, aren’t I? It’s funny, honest.)

I once spent a summer sorting through letters for a utility company ahead of their audit (with the boss coming in regularly to extract the piles that hadn’t been responded to and, presumably, rehousing them in a skip). Six of us sat in a tiny room for six weeks, reading spidery handwriting and going slowly insane. I keep meaning to get my diary out and see if I kept an account of those endless days.

After that, I moved to a windowless room at a different utility firm and worked with the pipe investigations department. In the book, Mick from investigations is inspired by the only man on our team, who was actually very nice, but who was an older gentleman who had been in the army and struggled with the technology. He was also one of those tall, fit older men who could definitely take most people in a fight.

Incidentally, when I was offered my first job in publishing, I felt so guilty. The pipe lot had been so effusive in praising my work and asking me if I wanted to work there forever. I apologised profusely when I handed in my notice and my boss, who was lovely (and ate only chicken slices because she was on the Atkins), stopped me and said, “Katie, in this life, you’ll learn that everyone is replaceable.” Which checked my ego pretty swiftly and has stayed with me ever since. Lol.

6. I watched Veronica Mars and Beverly Hills Cop

I don’t know about you, but I’m losing steam now. I worry that I’ve started with far too much information about pipes and handwriting and left out the fun things that inspired the book. So let’s wind things up before I start negatively impacting sales and finish on this high note. Or three high notes actually: detectives Veronica Mars and Axel Foley, and Jo from Pembrokeshire.

Both Veronica and Axel are hugely important to this story, but Jo was where Phil the protagonist first began. Jo is an (at the time very young) woman I met at a comedy festival who worked as a local junior journalist and photographer and got all her stories just by knowing absolutely everyone in her town. She is cheerful, personable and easy to chat to. She’s the polar opposite of me.

I wanted Phil to be a character who could easily be a confidence trickster if she ever decided to use her powers for evil – ie Axel Foley or Veronica Mars (and maybe Jo too, if she fancied it). But when I wrote the first draft, I sort of forgot that. I got bogged down in the stuff about polystyrene ceiling tiles and HR and HSO reports (as I have in this email, I suppose). So I went back through the book and asked myself, ‘What would Axel Foley do here?’ Because the answer was nearly always more interesting than what Phil McGinty was doing in that first version.

Hopefully, that’s why people seem to have enjoyed the book – I cut out the boring bits. Unfortunately, I need to get this email sent out because I’m late for a local Substack writers meet up (Sorry @nikatalbot I’m on my way), so I’m going to have to hit send on it warts and all.

No time to do the audio, either, but check back and I’ll try to do it later today or over the weekend if you’d prefer to listen to me talking about brick ties rather than read about them.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend. I’ll be in touch again soon, and it’ll probably be a story about my family, so stay tuned!

Katie

PS. Book Two, A Star is Dead, is available for pre-order now. It’s a bit delayed, but it will be with you 25th March!

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1. One of which, by the way, was almost exactly like the work they’re doing in Severance, right down to the extremely retro computer, the windowless office and the absolutely no clue what anyone is doing. I think I lasted a day. I think it was something to do with checking out medication from the hospital supplies inventory, but I couldn't honestly say for sure. (Tech and Severance fans, click that link by the way. You’ll love it.)

2. He basically works on our Victorian money pit as a hobby because he can’t resist a lost cause.

3. Or EDI, which is a much slicker acronym than DEI, IMO.