It’s no surprise that writers steal elements of their own lives for their books. No, before you ask, I haven’t been embroiled in a relationship with a woman like Valerie, but I did draw on scenes and emotions that I’ve personally experienced in order to write crucial elements of the novel.
Take the first chapter, for instance, when Max stops in the rain to help Valerie change a tyre. I got the germ of this scene from a personal story. Around eight years ago, I was travelling back from Wakefield to Lincoln late at night with a friend. The rain was pretty bad and, as anyone who has travelled along Doncaster Road heading towards the A1 will attest, the roads wind around a lot along there. We must’ve scraped the tyre against something because we started wobbling and pulled down the nearest street to get away from the main road.
Stupid mistake #1 – Going down a hill and parking up at the bottom. Rivers of water were following us down there.
My friend dutifully got the spare out of the boot and set about trying to change it. However, he was having difficulty getting everything working (hey, I don’t drive, I had no clue what was going on). Probably more to offer a voice of encouragement than anything else, I got out of the car and proceeded to be soaked to the bone by the persistent rain. I ended up standing with the torch from my phone trained on the tyre while he tried unsuccessfully to change it. We’d been there for quite a while before a local resident came out to see if we needed help. This is where I learned something.
Stupid mistake #2 – Not removing the handbrake when trying to change a tyre is rather silly.
So, yeah, we’d been standing there doing something that wouldn’t work in the pouring rain because we’d forgotten to do one little thing. With the help of that nice man, we got on the road again. Needless to say, we were both freezing and it was late. We pulled in at the next service station and I vividly recall standing in the bathrooms and just looking at my bedraggled self in the mirror.
That night stayed with me, right from the way the water battered down on my neck until I gave up trying to stay dry through to the way my body felt when everything was starting to dry out. I knew I had to use that somewhere in a novel, and it found its place in the gloomy opening scene to Valerie.
