There are those who argue that they come out of real life experiences. You go through it as a writer therefore you are able to best tell the story. Others recoil from that approach, arguing that that the key is in the word fiction, that stories should be made up and come entirely out of imagination.
The anecdote below will, hopefully, show where I stand and it involves The Secrets Man, published by Hale.
For me, stories come out of experience and The Secrets Man had its germ (literally) in one of the most difficult experiences of my life, the serious illness and resultant problems experienced by my father.
As the illness, and the dementia that accompanied it, took control of his mind, he disappeared into another world, one where nothing was as it seemed.
As I sat at his bedside night after night, watching him suffer, I started to look around the ward. Six beds, six patients, each of them in a world of their own.
And the idea came to set a novel in the world of dementia, weaving the worlds created by unwell minds in with reality outside the hospital window.
John Dean
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