If I were to describe a model of how my novels are made, I would call it the big bang theory: my science is a little hazy but it’s a useful metaphor. There is always a material-gathering phase, a slowly swirling mass of ideas that builds as I start reading around the topic, doing odd bits of research, writing the occasional scene – and thinking thoughts. There’s a lot of thinking thoughts. This phase can sometimes last several years.
Even when I’ve started writing, I do it in a very random fashion, whatever scene might come into my head on any given morning – the dust ball is growing. Then there’s a point, often quite late in the first draft, when something happens that feels like a big bang. The novel coalesces, comes into being.
Other authors call it “the lightbulb moment”, the moment when a switch is flicked and you are no longer stumbling around the landscape of your book – the vista feels illuminated at last. In the case of Apple Tree Yard, that moment came courtesy of a police officer who was giving me a tour of the Houses of Parliament. He was a tall, friendly chap, who knew the buildings intimately and had already acquiesced to my request to see the hidden rooms, the back corridors, the disabled toilets … I had neglected to mention that I was looking for locations where a pair of lovers might have secret sex. It didn’t seem tactful, somehow.
Towards the end of the tour, he took me down into the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft, beneath the Great Hall of Westminster, which MPs can use for weddings and christenings and where Margaret Thatcher would lie in state the night before her funeral. After showing me the gargoyles, the piles of gold-painted stacked chairs, he beckoned me to the back and opened the broom cupboard where the suffragette Emily Wilding Davison hid on the night of the 1911 census, so that she could register her abode as the Houses of Parliament at a time when women weren’t even allowed to vote. The lightbulb went on. I knew I had the location for chapter one of my novel, where my main character Yvonne, a leading geneticist, has sex with a man she has only just met. A high-achieving scientist and respectable mother of two performs an act entirely motivated by the desire to do something irrational and the whole of her life spins out of control as a result.
The police officer became a friend, and he later wrote his own novel. I hope he got his own lightbulb moment, for they are moments of great joy. All that work – all those thoughts – then you see or hear or read something that makes it all come together. That’s the moment you know you are really on to something.
• Louise Doughty’s latest novel, Platform Seven, is out now in paperback from Faber.
