Saturday Review: Paperbacks: Paperback writer: The best book ideas come from an open mind and the British Library, says Gillian Slovo
By GILLIAN SLOVO

The Guardian – United Kingdom;
Apr 09, 2005

Having started my novelist’s life as something of a librariaphobe,
I am now one of the British Library’s most enthusiastic converts. It
works for me: its climate control, padded desks, wide chairs and,
most importantly, its conveyor belt of books that rarely falters.

In fact my criticisms are restricted to the catering. Not just of
the food, but those echoing, scrabbling, ill-lit corridors that pass
as adequate places in which to sit and digest. And there’s a space
problem. At peak times, the hunt for somewhere to rest a plate becomes
particularly frenetic. The only remedy is the very unBritish one of
sharing with a stranger.

Which is how I found myself the other day, having coffee with a
man I didn’t know. It had been a slow day and my mounting stack
of reservations felt increasingly unappealing. Looking for serious
diversion, I asked my table companion his life history.

I had lucked out. His was a fascinating story, particularly his career
trajectory: he was a former elite civil engineer who had become a
successful actor. The caffeine was thick in both of us by the time
he’d told me how he’d made the leap from one such seemingly diverse
career to the other.

Then he returned the compliment by asking me what I was doing in the
library. Looking for an idea for my next novel, I told him; without
much success – or so it felt that day. He asked how I was going
about the search. I muttered something about Armenian genocides,
flu pandemics and Suez crises. It sounded even odder than it had
felt in the reading room. Not, however, to my companion. He nodded,
and then, in an apparent non sequitur, told me that the reason he had
been able to make the transition from engineer to actor was because
he had understood that, no matter what the discipline, the creative
process is similar. Part is knowledge and experience, he said, part
hard work. But the final and most important part is to allow your
subconscious free rein. Which means that you, he concluded, are going
about the search for an idea exactly the right way: the only thing
you’re doing wrong is that you don’t trust that it will work.

Sweet words from a stranger. After he left I continued to sit,
thinking about what he’d said.

“Where do your ideas come from?” That’s the question that always dogs
me when I give talks. Since I am a writer to whom ideas come hard,
I can only answer it in hindsight. Take my last, I say: Ice Road
. A novel set in the Leningrad of the 1930s, it was born out of my
admiration for the film director Sergio Leone.

I’d always loved Leone’s spaghetti westerns, but those opening
frames of Once Upon a Time in the West , with its hard men, their
fawn dusters and the machine soundtrack, made me a lifelong Leone
fan. When I was writing my novel Red Dust , set in a desert town,
I kept in mind Leone’s structure of a seeker-after-justice riding
into town. And then, searching out an idea for the book to follow,
I heard that, before his sudden death, Leone had been planning to
set his next film inside the Leningrad siege.

Leningrad’s heroic defiance of the German encirclement had always
fascinated me. This, along with the Leone connection, was enough
to send me to the library. I became fascinated, not only by the
city’s war-time years, but by the period leading up to the siege;
by the way ordinary people survive tyranny. I read and read, giving
myself permission to follow instinct. Which is how, having taken that
all-important decision to set my novel-to-be entirely within the city
perimeters, I ended up following an intriguing footnote into the
Arctic – many hundreds of miles from Leningrad. Conscious planning
sounded out a warning note, but instinct and, I guess, my subconscious
told me to persist, a decision I was never to regret. And so finally,
out of an age-old admiration for a dead film director, I had found
the book that would keep me occupied for the next few years.

So where do ideas come from? Beats me. But if you happen to catch me
in the library corridor, chatting with a stranger, don’t for a moment
assume I’m not working. I’m actually doing the hardest work I know:
keeping myself open for the onset of the right idea.

Ice Road is published by Virago. To order a copy for pounds 7.99 with
free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.