Lisa Jewell was born in London in 1968. Her first novel, Ralph’s Party, was published in 1999. It was the best-selling debut novel of the year. Since then she has published another sixteen novels, most lately a number of dark psychological thrillers, including her latest novel Invisible Girl, an engrossing, twisty tale of betrayal in which an outsider is accused of murder.
Today, Lisa’s on the blog to tell us all about where she finds her ideas as a novelist. Read on …
‘Where do you get your ideas from?’
This is, as we all know, the question most commonly asked of authors by non-authors. And as all authors would reply, there is no simple answer to this question (though I have an author friend who says they go to a website called ‘ideasforauthors.com’).
Every book has a completely different genesis, but they all end up as books, much as every mother has a completely different birth story, but they all end up as children. Some of my books began as ‘what if?’ questions, often inspired by feelings of discomfort I’d experienced myself after a close brush with something terrible happening to me and my family. Other books began as themes I wanted to explore; hoarding, donor conception, multiple marriages, as some examples. But a lot of my books are inspired by people I glimpse on the street, people who look like they have stories to tell. Invisible Girl was one such book. I saw a man walking through the snow, close to the street in north London where I was living with my family while our home was being renovated. He looked lugubrious, awkward, unloved. He also looked like a nice guy who could be pushed to the edge by circumstances. I imagined he’d never had a girlfriend and I thought how that might make him feel and I realised that I wanted to write a book about him.
I also felt a need to write about the area where we’d found ourselves living. It’s only half a mile from our own home, but in the way of London, half a mile can separate the super-rich from the common people. Our temporary apartment was on one of the smartest roads in the area, a road full of detached houses with electronic gates and security cameras. I thought we’d enjoy the experience of living in such upmarket surroundings, but strangely, we hated it and I put this down to nothing more than the nebulous concept of ‘atmosphere’. There was something intangible in the air, something dark and anonymous. A sense of being amongst people who, while sure of their social standing, were quite not sure where they belonged or who they were meant to be. I got a sense that bad things could happen in these quiet streets amongst the wealthy and unhappy people who lived there.
And so I started my book and I made bad things happen; sex attacks, unhappy marriages, scared girls walking home alone at night, loneliness, bitterness and in the midst of all of this a lost teenage girl called Saffyre Maddox who disappears from outside her therapist’s house and the last person to see her alive is my strange loner, the man I first saw walking through the snow one January afternoon, the man I’d called Owen.
—Invisible Girl by Lisa Jewell (Penguin Books Australia) is out now.

Invisible Girl
LONDON: On a fine avenue of grand houses, big cars and electronic gates, lies a neglected urban wasteland. It is nearly midnight, and very cold. Yet in this dark place of long grass and tall trees where cats hunt and foxes shriek, a girl is waiting...
When Saffyre Maddox was ten something terrible happened and she's carried the pain of it around with her ever since. The man who she thought was going to heal her didn't, and now she hides from him, invisible in the shadows, learning his secrets; secrets she could use to blow his safe, cosy world...
Comments
August 13, 2020 at 1:38 pm
I love the first spark – ‘I saw a man walking through the snow’!!