GYDO: Imogen Howson

Imogen Howson, Author of Linked

The magical thing about writing fiction is that you’re creating it from scratch.  It feels as if it comes from nothing—from imagination and pen on blank paper (or pixels in an empty Word document).  From scraps of dreams you had months ago, and weird pictures in your head, and times when the sun got in your eyes and you looked at something ordinary and saw it, just for a moment, as something else.

Except that, although it feels like that, actually it’s not true.  Fiction doesn’t come from nothing.  Those dreams and weird little scraps of interesting thoughts and all the stuff that rises up through the swamp of your subconscious—they all come from stuff in your real life, filtered through, not created by, your imagination.

It’s easy to forget that, as a writer.  You get one awesome idea, and it becomes a book.  And you kind of think all you need to do to write the next book is hook onto the next awesome idea.  And it’ll come along, right?  Because they always have before.

But writing a book doesn’t use up just that one awesome idea: it uses up a whole store of different ideas you’ve been accumulating, sometimes for years. 

The main idea of LINKED was its original title, Telepathic Twins in Space.  But that wasn’t the only idea I used for it.  I used a version of an idea I’d written about in an as-yet-unpublished short story years ago, and I used a collection of images that had been swimming in my head for ages, and that I hadn’t yet been able to turn into a story, and I used an area near my house that, if you look at it the right way, looks like the landscape of an alien planet.  And I used bits of how I felt as a teenager at school, and bits of stuff that I’d read about abuse victims, and cognitive dissonance, and human rights issues, and politics.

So, once I’d written LINKED, plus its sequel, UNRAVEL, I’d used up not just one or two ideas, but most of the whole stock of ideas I’d been accumulating for ages.  And when I came to start a new book I felt kind of…sucked dry.  Like I’d used up my whole store of imagination, and (the writer’s worst fear) maybe I couldn’t do it any more.

So I took a break.  I read a lot.  I picked up running again, which I hadn’t done for years.  I baked, and read recipe books, and had a spa break with friends, and went to two writers’ conferences, and bought a language course in basic (very basic) Arabic, and had a day’s sightseeing in Berlin.  I’m planning on booking myself onto a falconry course in the next couple of months, and possibly doing some rock climbing (despite my fear of heights).

Partly because it’s good to do stuff that’s not just staring at my laptop screen.  And partly because all this stuff—whether it’s directly to do with writing or not—is restocking my ideas bank, refilling my creative well.

I am writing again now (25,000 words into my next book), and I have plenty of ideas all over again.  And if my next heroine ends up going to a planet that’s like a huge sauna, or takes up baking, or has to run a marathon, or fight Nazism, or speak Arabic, or fly birds of prey…well, you know where it came from!

Linked Blurb
Elissa used to have it all: looks, popularity, and a bright future. But for the last three years, she’s been struggling with terrifying visions, phantom pains, and mysterious bruises that appear out of nowhere. 
Finally, she’s promised a cure: minor surgery to burn out the overactive area of her brain. But on the eve of the procedure, she discovers the shocking truth behind her hallucinations: she’s been seeing the world through another girl’s eyes. 
Elissa follows her visions, and finds a battered, broken girl on the run. A girl—Lin—who looks exactly like Elissa, down to the matching bruises. The twin sister she never knew existed. 
Now, Elissa and Lin are on the run from a government who will stop at nothing to reclaim Lin and protect the dangerous secrets she could expose—secrets that would shake the very foundation of their world. 

Author Bio

When Imogen Howson was a child, she loved reading so much she not only read in bed, at the table and in the bath, but in the shower and - not so successfully - on her bicycle. She enjoyed books in a slightly unorthodox way, too - many of her childhood books still have ragged edges where she tore paper from the margins in order to eat it.

When Imogen and her younger sister became bored on family outings, Imogen entertained them both with stories about fairies or, in defiance of biology, "the people inside your body" who made everything work.

Imogen's favorite stories are still those that ignore biology, reality and the known laws of nature. She writes romantic fantasy and science fiction, and makes liberal use of the substance known as handwavium. She is the winner of the 2008 Elizabeth Goudge Award.
Imogen lives near Sherwood Forest in England, with her partner and their two daughters. She still reads in most places, but nowadays she prefers Cheddar cheese and endless cups of coffee to paper.

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