Ah yes, that old chestnut!
Writers hate being asked where they get their ideas from, don’t they? That’s what the common consensus seems to be. Maybe it’s just that they are asked it so often. Maybe they just cringe at how mundane the truth is. Perhaps they worry that if they reveal how the sausage is made, it will spoil the hot dog.
And when they do answer, it’s often the same stuff. They will talk about how they carry a notebook everywhere. How they read a lot. How they go for long walks. They’ll usually keep it vague and try to move onto the next question.
Not me, though. If you ask me, I will tell you in precise and possibly quite dull detail where I get each of my ideas from.
So, at the very strong risk no one gives even a slight hoot, I’m going to take this moment to give you the full recipe for the sausage.
1. Doing the work
First I should say, I am not very good at coming up with ideas. I have lived my entire adult life1 with children’s author and illustrator Alex Milway, a man who has ideas just pop into his brain willy nilly. It’s really annoying. It’s like living with a human ChatGPT – except he’s capable of original thought.
This irritating quality of his made me assume I could never do what he does. But one day, I was asked to write a script based on a silly self-help ecourse I had written, and I discovered I could actually do it when given a brief. In that particular case, however, I basically just mined ideas from my own life and plagiarised jokes from myself and friends and situations we had been in.2
I realised I need a brief and I need to actually sit and do it. I can’t just expect creativity to hit me like a lightning bolt. So one day, in desperation, I went to a cafe with a notebook and told myself to come up with six ideas for stories. And I did. Turns out, if you’re not a bubbling spring of ideas, you can actually dig your own well.3

2. Magpieing
Very occasionally ideas DO actually pop into my head fully formed. It’s SO exciting when this happens: you get to sit and write with fervent energy and imagine you are Keats or something. This happened with a script I wrote just before lockdown called The Lost Tapes of Roxy Jones.
The initial concept blurted out of my brain like a fever dream. And, because the idea was so creepy, I genuinely freaked myself out as the words appeared on the page.
I am terrible at the elevator pitch for this show, but in short, it’s about a mother and son moving to a remote cottage in Shropshire and discovering a trove of audio diaries left by a girl called Roxy Jones whose spirit has been trapped in a well by a 17th century woman accused of witchcraft. (It’s a lot, I know).
But, of course, the idea didn’t really spring from nowhere. Like Aphrodite, the idea only emerged fully formed from the foam because my subconscious metaphorically castrated Uranus and threw some genitals into the sea.
What the hell am I talking about? Well, the fact is, for me, number 2 is the same as number 1, it’s just hidden under more layers of subconscious activity.
At the risk of ruining that hot dog, a metaphor I appear to be unwilling to let go of, here is a possibly TMI breakdown of the genesis of this particular Aphrodite. The timeline is loosely chronological and happened over many years, culminating in a highly productive writing session in a shed in Penge that was 25 years in the making.
I grew up near Mitchell’s Fold in Shropshire, a Bronze Age stone circle where, according to local folklore, villagers imprisoned a witch who milked a cow into a sieve
I read a lot of Shropshire folklore about the Wild Hunt and other stories (including actual historical figure, Mad Jack Mytton), and spent my childhood walking up to the Devil’s Chair
I watched (and rewatched, and rewatched) the film Pump Up The Volume in which disaffected Gen X slacker, Christian Slater, starts a pirate radio station and calls upon his fellow students to ‘Rise up in the cafeteria and stab them with your plastic forks.’
I listened to a lot of grunge music and hung around in midlands recreation grounds
I read an article about a man who spent his whole life recording pretend radio shows on a tape recorder and giving them out to a handful of friends. I cannot find this article now and it makes me wish I’d been better at bookmarking stuff.
From this was born the idea of Roxy Jones at home bored in the 90s, recording her fake radio show onto tapes before being drawn into the story of a witch trapped in the well in her garden. She hears the witch calling to her and is never seen again. Years later, a teen and his mum move to the same cottage and unearth those lost tapes and are slowly driven mad as Roxy tells her tale. Will the witch take control of them too?
Roxy was shortlisted for the Bafta Rocliffe writing award and was optioned by Black Dog Television. It wasn’t picked up by any channel, but never say never! Maybe one day we’ll find out if Roxy is ever saved from that well.
As I say, writing this all down in a fever dream really gave me the willies. Where did it come from (Answer: from those Uranus genitals). I wonder if I’m the first person who has written a TV show they would be too scared to actually watch. However, if anyone does want to commission it, please get in touch with Will Ing at Black Dog Television.
I’m going to leave it here for now because I spent longer than I should writing contrarian comments about Insulate Britain and damp (yes, damp again what is wrong with me?) at the bottom of James O’ Malley’s newsletter about Just Stop Oil. This is the kind of person you have chosen to read emails from and, I have to say, it reflects very badly on you.
Next time, I’m getting into the weeds about the ideas that inspired my first novel, The Man In The Wall, including some really grisly stories that are almost certainly in poor taste.
Who’s watching Unforgotten then?
I’ve been looking forward to the new series of Unforgotten, so imagine my delight when I tuned in and discovered that my mate Elham Ehsas was one of the main characters!
As well as being a gifted actor, Elham is a brilliant writer and director. He has a BAFTA nomination under his belt for his short film, Yellow about a young Afghan woman buying her first full veil under the Taliban.
He also directed a one-minute film called Your Hand Found Mine, which I wrote and which won best drama at the Berlin Flash Film Festival. It’s a film about loneliness, written and filmed during the pandemic.
This is the longer, 3-minute cut.
His new film, There Will Come Soft Rains, is currently on the festival circuit and will be hoovering up awards any day now.
Until next time!
Katie
PS. Oh, I nearly forgot! I’m speaking at a local Hastings networking event about escaping the algorithm on Wednesday. If you can make it, please come along. If not, I highly recommend just subscribing to The Social Media Escape Club from Seth Werkheiser who is brilliant on this subject.
In a terrible case of “Do as I say not as I do,” I am now desperately trying to finish off the website for KJ Lyttleton before the talk.
Literally – we met as teenagers
The script, Mum-life Crisis, got shortlisted for the Funny Women writing award but never got optioned – partly because it wasn’t fully formed enough, and partly because, as I soon learned, commissioners didn’t want comedies about motherhood once Motherland and Catastrophe existed. And producers actually say that. If I had a quid for every female writer I’ve met who has had the rejection of their comedy about motherhood blamed on Sharon Horgan I would have at least twenty quid. I wonder if she knows she’s used a scapegoat.
The theme of this newsletter seems to be weak metaphors
I loved that short film, thank you
I need to know if Roxy gets out of the well 🙈