Where do you get your ideas?
By Diane Perkins (who also writes as Diane Gaston for Mills & Boon)
My books usually start with just a glimmer of an idea and not a very big one at that. When I first decided to write Regency Historicals, I was determined to make the first chapter as attention-getting as possible. I figured if I could capture the attention and interest of contest judges and editors, it would be the same for readers. What would be surprising enough? I asked myself. A sex scene! was the answer, but, of course the sex scene would have to be with the hero and heroine and both would have to be sympathetic. Hard to do in the Regency time period when a respectable woman was not allowed to be alone with a man. I didn't want to have the hero and heroine married, so I had to think of another reason they would make love. If she were a prostitute they could have sex, but I also wanted them to make love. And she'd have to be a prostitute readers could root for. What if she'd been forced into it? What if she'd been very young? That is how the heroine in my first book and 2003 Golden Heart winner THE MYSTERIOUS MISS M (by Diane Gaston for Mills & Boon) began life. Then, of course, I had to figure out a hero who would love her in spite of her past. The rest of the story grew from there.
Initially editors were not as thrilled with my prostitute heroine as I thought they would be. Warner Forever did say they'd be interested in seeing a rewrite, so I went back to the drawing board. If I could not have a love scene in the first chapter, what would be equally as dramatic and equally as emotionally binding for the hero and heroine? Childbirth!! I could not quite give up on THE MYSTERIOUS MISS M, though, so I wrote Warner a whole new book, THE IMPROPER WIFE, my American debut. Both these books became my 2004 debut releases.
When I turned to the next Mills & Boon historical THE WAGERING WIDOW, I had hit upon the idea of having a marriage ceremony as my excitement in the first chapter, sort of the opposite of MISS M. But what I really wanted to do was make both the hero and heroine gamblers. Again, I had to devise a situation that would make them both likable gamblers.
Sometimes that glimmer of an idea comes in a less calculating manner. I read COURTESANS by Katie Hickman (HarperCollins 2003), a book about 18th and 19th century courtesans, and I was so intrigued I figured out a way to use courtesans in A REPUTABLE RAKE, my third Mills & Boon.
In a similar manner, Jan Bondeson's book BURIED ALIVE (2001 W.W. Norton & Co) about this historically primal human fear, sparked another idea. What if I had a hero who was buried alive? That idea was the spark for THE MARRIAGE BARGAIN, my second Warner Forever.
There is a pattern here, I realize. First comes the glimmer of an idea, then I think about who the hero and heroine would be to fit that idea. And last I figure out exactly what happens. Luckily my characters help me figure out what happens. They become like real people to me, and when I'm writing, they whisper (or shout) directions in my ear.
I hope my readers enjoy what they tell me.
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