The Writer’s Notebook

Images as Information;
Images as Inspiration

It is a writer’s habit to note what is going on around her – quality of light, buildings, objects, sights, sounds smells – all of which, eventually, find their place in some novel or other.  

In my case, one instance of this is the pile of six packed notebooks completed on a visit to Moscow. In those pages I scribbled notes and impressions as well as drawings of what I could see. There is one drawing in there, of a woman on a shopping street holding up a second hand coat by the shoulders offering it for sale. She is standing beside a man offering a single shoe. Five years later those scribbles, those images were a powerful element in the writing my novel, The Self Made Woman, which is set in Moscow in 1991. 

These days I have a digital camera which is also a useful notebook tool. And recently I have spent some time in the Langue D'Oc in France. I just look at my photographs and I am back there, breathing the air, blinking in the bright light,  hearing the burr of southern speech. 

So, here are just some of these images that will, in time, inspire and inform another novel, perhaps in five years time!