Vashti Farrer

A character in one book can end up in another.

George MacDonald Fraser took the revolting prefect, Harry Flashman, from Tom Brown's Schooldays and created a new series. He became Sir Harry, V.C. He's been to the Ivory Coast, Crimea, Afghanistan, and India and he's still a cheat, a liar, a coward and a womaniser, but he's always in the right place at the right time when the medals are handed out. It's hardly surprising that men love and women loathe him.

Jack Absolute, from Sheridan's play, The Rivals, has appeared in a novel and there are sequels to Pride and Prejudice (Pemberley), Wuthering Heights (Heathcliff) and Gone With The Wind (Scarlet).

The only rule in lifting characters is copyright. The author must have been dead more than fifty years. J.K. Rowling will be cross if you lift Harry Potter. There's a book out called Barry Trotter, but he's probably nothing like her Harry.

Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is based on courtiers in Shakespeare's Hamlet. It uses some Shakespearean segments, but the minor characters have made the play theirs. Recycling characters is nothing new. Shakespeare did it. Hamlet (1603) is believed to be based on Thomas Kydd's The Spanish Tragedy. Only fragments remain, so we don't know how much Shakespeare used, but it's thought Horatio was the main character and Hamlet a minor player.

As for sources, Shakespeare used history, legends, the classics, witchcraft, fairies, fantasy, and the Elizabethan Court. Some plays were influenced by his age at the time, for instance the rhyming couplets of Romeo and Juliet belong to his youth, whereas Cymbeline, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale so-called 'comedies', dealing with death, reincarnation, remorse, regret, and second chances and were written much later.

Arthur Miller's The Crucible used history as allegory for America in the 1950's with the McCarthy 'witch-hunts'. Miller couldn't have attacked the problem directly, but by using historical material he could criticize what he saw as modern persecution.

Writers sometimes rework their own themes, for instance, Paul Gallico wrote The Snow Goose for adults with a sad ending and Thomasina for kids with a happy one. Both portray social outcasts with a huge capacity for love, especially for animals.

The Bible has provided more material for art, literature, musical theatre and opera, than any other source. Think Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's Joseph and His Technicolour Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar, and where would Hollywood and Cecil B. de Mille have been without The Bible?

A short story collection, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by English author, Julian Barnes, is based in part on The Bible and includes stories on Jonah and the Whale and Noah's Ark, the latter being told by a stowaway woodworm.

And the Ark is not exclusive to the Bible. The legend was common in the region and helped to explain a huge flood, for which there is archaeological evidence. The Epic of Gilgamesh is an ancient Sumerian version. In it, a man is told by the gods to make a reed boat and take on board as many animals as possible to save them from the flood.

The miracle of the loaves and fishes feeding the 5000, is echoed in the idea of food and drink reconstituting themselves. Think of the Eat Me cake and Drink Me bottle in Alice in Wonderland and Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding. No matter how much is eaten there is always more. And Margaret Atwood's science fiction The Handmaid's Tale, is based on the Old Testament, when Abraham's wife, Sarah, believing she's childless, sends Abraham in to her handmaid, Hagar.

As a small child I was often asked by old ladies if my name came from a Victorian novel, Vashti or Till Death Us Do Part.  It didn't. It came from Charlotte Brontë's Villette which my mother won as a school English prize. In it is a chapter called Vashti describing a performance of Racine's Esther, which Brontë saw in London, but the name originally came from the Old Testament's Book of Esther.

Years ago, the radio personality, Keith Smith, wrote a children's book about a First Fleet mouse and later, Meredith Hooper wrote one about a First Fleet rat called The Journal of Watkin Stench, the title being a parody of the First Fleet journal of Captain Watkin Tench.

Gloomy subjects have always provided scope for writers. John Keats's Ode to Melancholy was written after he nursed his brother Tom, who died of tuberculosis and he would have been familiar with Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621, a 17th century book about depression and other conditions. I have the dubious distinction of being able to claim four, possibly five, suicides in my family and even without writing about family members, I've written five stories on suicide, two of them funny, if you count black humour.

The ultimate "quest" is the King Arthur legend, which is still being reworked. It forms the basis of films like the Star Wars trilogy, Excalibur, and Conan the Barbarian. In book form it has reinvented itself in new and exciting ways such as Felicity Pulman's - Shalott; Return to Shalott; and Shalott - The Final Journey.

Think about the opportunities in pop psychology. Peter Pan syndrome means the boy who never grew up and they're everywhere, gentlemen of a certain age, driving sports cars with a token blonde passenger. My 10 year old granddaughter saw one in a red Ferrari and said, "Wow! Look at that car!" then added, "Why's that old man driving it?" I explained it's usually only "old" men who can afford such vehicles.

Pop psychology produces books like Women Who Love Too Much or too little, the wrong man, the right man, who turns out to be the wrong man. It's been suggested women suffer from the Cinderella Complex, but for every Cinderella there's a Peter Pan and Cinderella rarely marries Prince Charming, she usually ends up with Peter Pan, who in turn avoids Wendys, because they remind him of his mother and instead, hankers after Tinkerbells, who end up like his mother anyway. All this provides scope for marriage guidance counsellors and authors of marriage novels, like Fay Weldon's She-Devil. Read the personal columns of newspapers and try your hand at matchmaking.

Marriage has produced masterpieces such as Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, George Eliot's Middlemarch and Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.

I mentioned Cinderella in Part 1, as the underlying theme of Jane Eyre. It's also the basis of all Mills and Boon. No matter who Cinderella is or how she meets Prince Charming, she always gets him in the end.

Many authors have used domestic incidents. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and the Brontës all wrote about such situations and many children's stories start out that way.

And remember the family stories we heard as children? Whether fact or legend, it doesn't matter, so long as they translate into fiction. But the story Aunt Maude told so often may not interest the reader, unless it's also a good yarn.

A line of poetry, a quotation, proverbs and fables can all trigger ideas. The title of the film Bright Stars, about John Keats and Fanny Brawn, came from a line in one of his poems.

Newspaper articles and tiny paragraphs are also worthwhile. The films Dog Day Afternoon and Chinatown came from newspapers and I've used pars in papers for three adult stories and a children's book.

And don't ignore 19^th century newspapers which have notices such as: 'As from the 25th May I refuse to pay any more bills incurred by my wife!' Imagine Henrietta presenting Archibald with yet another milliner's bill. He rushes out to place the ad, and then what? Does she try tears? Or threaten to deny his conjugal rights? How long does it take her to win him over?

Old photographs provide details of earlier times from street ads and business names. And there's always a little boy who couldn't keep while the photo was taken and so his face is blurred. What does he get up to? What's in his pockets? Marbles? String? A penknife? A bird's nest? A frog?

Modern photos from magazines (including digitalised ads which are sometimes quite bizarre) I've also found useful.

Jeffrey Smart's painting Expressway became the cover for a collection of short stories of the same name, each suggested by the painting. Conversely, old prints and paintings show what people wore, how they lived, and there's sometimes a story thrown in as well. There's a painting in the Louvre of two sisters, both beautiful, both nude to the waist, and both with deadpan expressions. The oh! so French touch is that one sister is delicately holding the other's nipple. Why? Because one was the mistress of the king, until her younger sister  was suddenly promoted to His Majesty's bed, which meant her older sibling was being tossed out with the chamber-pot. Talk about one sibling rivalry!

Books of rules and regulations of 19^th century institutions such as orphanages, gaols and asylums show the kind of life inmates led and a Master's thesis on juvenile convicts at Point Puer, gave me the idea for a novel. Needless to say I gained permission to use it first, before starting work.

Beware of therapy as a source. Yes it can tell tales, but the author needs to stand back and write objectively. A former editor of Southerly once said she was sick of reading stories about bad marriages.

I've mentioned travel journals before as a source of place, but they're also a good source of stories. One provided me with a travel article, two short stories and kids' story, all from one journal.

ALWAYS keep a pen and paper handy. You never know when an idea will occur to you. I wrote a story about a gay couple sitting at a nearby restaurant table because they seemed so romantic. And remember, to authors, overheard conversations don't count as eavesdropping, they're homework.

The late Joyce Grenfell used snatches of overheard conversation for her comedy sketches. Her favourite was a cockney charlady who said to a friend, 'I don't like them black chiffon nighties. They show yer vest.' And one author I know overheard a woman on a bus saying, 'Of course, on Fridays he brings home the lion.' Lion? Why? What was he? A vet? A lion-tamer? A zoo-keeper? Finally, she couldn't stand it and had to ask, only to be told the woman's husband was in the Army and it was his job to bring home the regimental lion cub mascot on weekend 'agistment'.

I'm always hoping but I've never dreamt anything as spectacular as Frankenstein or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but I have woken up with ideas for stories, titles and even solutions to endings. One title for a pop group called Captain Mothballs and the Flying Napthalenes didn't work as a story, but I later sold it as a  nonsense poem. On another occasion I woke my husband at 5 am to tell him a terrific idea I'd had about a pigeon talking a man out of suiciding from the 30th floor of an office block. He wasn't amused.

Truth is indeed stranger than fiction, but it must sound believable. If the shark arm murder had been written as fiction, no one would have believed it, and yet it happened. The writer must convince the reader that a story is plausible. That's why Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights and novels dealing with horror and the like, employ "normal" narrators that the reader can trust to tell the truth.

So the sources for writing all around us, and the possibilities are endless. All we have to do is keep our eyes and ears open and ask Who? Why? How? What if? And then what happened? till we end up with a really good yarn. 

Copyright Vashti Farrer 2009