Intro
Where
do a novelist's ideas come from? What order
do they come in? Where does imagination get its first toehold? Often,
it seems, the first scene. Often, also, the climax.
Some writers work through from first page to last, more or less in order. Others - Shakespeare is a famous example - write the scenes that interest them, then fill in the gaps in the story.
For me, with my last novel Labyrinth, it was a character, half-seen, glimpsed in the corner of my eye, on the battlements at Montségur.
Titles are sometimes difficult to find. Perhaps it is because it seems so wrong to reduce the complexity of the tale to a word or a phrase. Or maybe people who like to take their time with their storytelling find it difficult to be pithy. After all, the person who writes the feature for the newspaper isn't necessarily the person who chooses the headline.
I think that the title of this novel -Sepulchre - was my agent's suggestion. It has always seemed to me, well, right. Since my first inkling of an idea for the plot, I've had an image in mind of the half-ruined chapel in dark woodland.
But I don't know which came first - the chapel glimpsed in my imagination or the ruins in Charles Baudelaire's poem Sépulture, which I have long admired. (Click these links for the original French and an unrhymed English translation.)
I always knew, though, the period of the historical setting for Sepulchre - the 1890s, the end of an extraordinary century for French society, from the Revolution, through Empire, Restoration, to Prussian Invasion, the Commune and, finally, Prosperity.
As the story grew in the back of my mind, I found other influences - the music of Claude Debussy, the Tarot.
Inspiration is everywhere.
