Where do ideas come from anyway?

By Kim Moore

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The first day of March in Hebden was a beautiful one - clear blue skies and even a bit of sunshine. I walked with my daughter and her friend, and her friend’s mother to Heptonstall and then back to Hebden with a diversion along the river. I spent most of the day walking through the woods, or sitting on a park bench whilst our daughters played together. It was such a beautiful day, and just what I needed after a busy week.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a short story which will be published in Anna Chilver and Clare Shaw’s Give Peat A Chance: A book of bogs. The anthology of poetry, fiction and non-fiction is being published to raise awareness of the campaign to protect Walshaw Moor against the proposed development of England’s largest wind-farm. You can find more information on the wind farm and the damage it will do over at Save Restore Walshaw Moor

I’ve been working on this story whilst teaching full time at the university, finishing my marking, mentoring, judging competitions, giving poetry readings, hosting poetry readings etc etc. It’s been a hectic month, but now I look back, I’m relieved that I had to get on with some writing amongst it all because of the deadline for the book.

I’ve written one poetry pamphlet, two poetry collections and two non-fiction books, but I am just at the beginning of writing short stories. In fact, I’ve only completed two - my first “little fish” was a finalist in this year’s Mslexia short story competition, which was a wonderful and unexpected surprise. And the story for the bog anthology is my second.

Both short stories have women characters who are coming unravelled from society, or from family in different ways and for different reasons. I am tentatively starting to imagine an anthology of short stories about women who are unravelled, untethered, who are breaking away or perhaps being cut away from the conventions and expectations of society.

Writing my first short story taught me about plot, and about cause and effect. I still have lots to learn about this of course, but I think that was what I was grappling with. In this second short story, I was wrestling with the development of voice. It’s in the voice of a man and a woman who are husband and wife, Leah and Bill.

The idea came from something I found in an old notebook. It was something I’d written during the 2022 National Poetry Writing Month (in April for those of you wondering!). During National Poetry Writing Month (or NaPoWriMo for short) the challenge is to write a poem a day. I’ve done it every year for the past three or four years, alongside Clare Shaw and Amanda Dalton and other friends. I usually post the results briefly on social media before taking them down so I work on them if I want to, and publish them properly later.

Anyway, I found one of the things I’d written which never developed into a poem, but has been nestling at the back of my head for a while. Here it is as I typed it up from my notebook:

DAY 25
When the sky-woman came to me       she was hard-faced       hard-skinned       her hands rough from years of work       her eyes dark from all her days       her mouth a twisted berry       I asked her where she stayed      where she slept       where she lived       she smiled but didn’t answer       she was a hawthorn tree walking       she was wild garlic in the air       she was so familiar I thought maybe in another life I’d loved her       in another life I’d been her        when I opened my mouth to scream       she put her finger to her own lips      and held up the other hand       my body mirrored hers       my finger shushing my own bitten off voice       my hand a shield a leaf a nothing against hers       when we touched it was cool water running through me       it was knowledge closing down my mind       I know where she has been       coiled like a spider inside me       now if anyone notices me       and I open my mouth       I can feel her        the spiderlings she carefully wrapped in silk        start to hatch        they pour from my mouth       from my nose       some from my eyes       they don’t care who is watching        but they are see through        glass spiderlings       so nobody notices       I have to gather them all up        make sure they are safe       she shows me how to work       how to keep working        how never to stop        she has given me leave        to pass from one world to the other         from my life to hers         and I must do the same to her        my body is the door       her body is the floor I walk on  

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Since 2022, I’ve tried to work on this as a poem a few times and it has come to nothing, I couldn’t get anywhere with it. Perhaps this is because I didn’t really know who the sky-woman was myself, but she did stay with me. I kept thinking about this little bit of text from time to time.

Fast forward to 2025, and thank goodness for my absolutely inability to delete any files or throw bits of paper away, and I decide I’m going to try and write a short story about the sky-woman. I then realise that perhaps this short story is not just about the sky-woman, but about the speaker, who meets the sky-woman (whoever she is) and is changed by her.

So here is the start of the short story as it currently stands:

LEAH
When the sky-woman came to me        she was hard-faced       hard-skinned       her hands rough  	from years of work       her eyes dark from all her days       her mouth a twisted berry       I asked where she stayed      where she slept       where she lived       she smiled but didn’t answer       she was   	an alder tree walking       she was bog myrtle in the air       she put her finger to her lips      held up the other hand       my body mirrored hers       my finger shushing my own bitten off voice     when we touched     
                       it was cool water running through me       it was knowledge 
 					           closing down my mind

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You can see some of the original lines in there, but everything is, I think much more concise, and I’ve cut back on the explanations I was trying to reach in the original first draft (maybe in another life I loved her, maybe in another life I’d been her). I don’t need those because now I’ve got a whole story to explore these questions in. In this final version, it is much more about the relationship between the speaker and the figure of the sky-woman.

The whole story alternates between the voice of Leah and Bill. So the idea for Leah came from this random bit of text from a NaPoWriMo exercise, the details of which is lost in the mists of 2022. But the voice of Bill, I developed as a kind of counter weight to Leah - to her strangeness, her wildness, her refusal of logic, of cause and effect.

Here is Bill, being utterly sensible:

BILL
It started, of course, with this house.  We thought – I thought - yes, it’s on the edge of the moor, but it’s close enough to the town, to civilisation.  We can get to the shops, get to work.  We used to walk down to the train station together to go into the city. It was a routine, but it was one we built together, and if she ever complained about it, I always thought it was a joke. I thought we were both in on it, that we were both laughing at ourselves – settled down, married, all the things we swore we never wanted.  I didn’t know…I didn’t know until it was too late that she was unhappy.  Or restless. Yes, I think that’s a better description. She was restless.

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I had great fun writing Bill and Leah. With Leah, I know I am moving in the same land as poetry. Leah connects disparate things together, she makes jumps back and forward in time and space. Leah knows everything is connected to everything else, that a person can make you feel as if you are part of a thousand year old landscape. Leah doesn’t use punctuation, thinks only in words and silences. Bill is eminently more sensible and I am using the part of my brain that somehow manages to do admin by using paths that go in one direction, the part of my brain that makes lists and breaks tasks down into tiny parts so that I can do them, the part of my brain that believes in behaving oneself and not doing anything surprising.

I am fascinated about where ideas come from - the strange twists and turns that mean we write this thing, and not the other, and how long some of my own ideas take to come to fruition. It’s not like I had great faith that this piece of writing could be made into something one day - but obviously some part of my brain did! Otherwise why would I have remembered it? The first day I sat down to write, I spent about an hour searching through my laptop (my filing system leaves a lot to be desired) for that little fragment of text from Day 25 of the 2022 NaPooWriMo, and then once I had it, I began.

Is three years to finish an idea good or bad? And what happens to all the ideas that we don’t allow to come to anything, because we don’t have time, or we think they are terrible? Are they still sitting in a folder within a folder within a folder on our laptop, fizzing and buzzing away like tiny bees, waiting to be released?

I am fascinated by the often seemingly haphazard nature of creativity, the strange twists of fate and accidents that bring books into being, or festivals, or anything that is a resting place for our energy and time and love.

I would love to hear about your tiny bees - perhaps yours is waiting to be developed - you can tell me about it in the comments and then perhaps writing it into being will start to make it exist more solidly in the world. Or perhaps your tiny bee is a bee no longer - after months or years of neglect, perhaps you have worked it up already into something totally different. A bird. A woman. A piece of moorland. Please feel free to share thoughts/ideas in the comments.