#sj Watson

[nanowrimo]

How to Choose the Right Story Idea

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Scrivener, a 2023 NaNoWriMo sponsor, is an award-winning writing app containing all the tools you need to get writing and keep writing. They’ve teamed up with S J Watson, bestselling author of Before I Go To Sleep, to get some tips on deciding if your story idea is a good one. 

If you’re writing fiction, the thing that must come first is the idea. Without that we have nothing. But what are ideas; how do we get them; and crucially, how can we choose which ones are good enough to sustain a long piece of fiction? 

These are big questions, so let’s consider them here. 

What is an Idea?

I came across two interesting dictionary definitions of what an idea is:

Something such as a thought or conception that is the product of mental activity; and

A sense that something can happen, a notion or expectation.

The seeds of ideas are everywhere. Everything we see, hear, read or watch can spark a thought, and we need to remain alert to those sparks, as some might become useful ideas. But being alert is not enough. Rarely do ideas arrive fully formed. Usually we have to actively work on promising nuggets in order to turn them into gold. We can’t just sit around and wait for the lightning bolt to strike.

Instead, get used to actively, and playfully, interrogating your daily musings. Ask yourself questions. ‘I wonder what would happen if…’ or, ‘Why did that person just..?’ etc. Don’t censor yourself. Let your mind take you to wild and fanciful places. You can always reign it back in later. Fill your notebook.

Choosing an idea to work on

Not all ideas are created equal. So how do we choose? Look at the second definition above. Some ideas seem exciting at first but they’re limited. It’s hard to see how they can lead to interesting characters and high-stakes conflict. Others invite you into a world brimming with possibilities. They seem to open doors. These are the ones to work on.

The best, most fertile ideas, are magnetic. They grow by attracting other ideas to them. You’ll notice connections, and find yourself asking ‘What if..?’ and ‘I wonder why..?’ more and more. When this happens, you know you’re on to something, but at this point it can still help to ask yourself some questions.

First, which ideas excite you?  Are there any that you can’t quite believe no one else has written? If so, go for it! If not, then perhaps proceed more cautiously. Don’t reject them outright, necessarily. Maybe you just need an extra ingredient or two. Give it time and wait until you do get that glimmer of excitement. 

Next, can you see a protagonist with a goal and obstacles that stand in their way? If not, maybe you have an idea for a situation, but not an actual novel. ‘What if a totalitarian regime came to power?’ is not an idea for a story, but ‘What if two people fall in love in a world governed by a regime that has outlawed romantic attachment?’ is. Again, keep going, stir the pot until you can come up with characters and conflict.

Also ask, are the stakes high enough to maintain a reader’s interest, and if not can they be raised? Are their problems, if not universal, then at least relatable? A professor searching for the key to immortality is one thing, but a professor searching for the key to immortality because his wife is dying is suddenly something else. Keep going until you feel that tug of universality. 

Finally, does your idea seem original?  This is important, but beware! Almost everything has been done before, the key is how you combine ideas and what you do with them. Don’t reject every idea that is reminiscent of something else, but instead look for how you’re going to make it your own. 

In short, daydream, be playful with your thoughts and observations, and sooner or later something will come along that seems on fire with possibility. Congratulations! Now the hard work starts…

SJ Watson is author of Before I Go To Sleep, which was turned into a film starring Nicole Kidman. He has since published two further psychological thrillers, Second Life and Final Cut, and has set up The Writers’ Lodge, which aims to help and support writers at every stage of their creative writing journey. S J Watson recently launched a public novel writing project called The Experiment. He writes using Scrivener.

All NaNoWriMo participants receive 20% off Scrivener for macOS and Windows from now until December 7, 2023, with the code NANOWRIMO23 .

Top photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

[captainknell]

*BOOK REPORT*

By Command of the Emperor, by SJ Watson

(my copy is plain and blue, but I'm guessing it once had a book jacket like the one on the right)

I initially did not know very much about Marshal Berthier but through @gabrielferaud I began to learn of the abuse he endured from Napoleon and I remembered I had this book.

I was surprised to learn that Berthier was 16 years older than our Emperor, and already had an accomplished life before Napoleon came into the picture.

In 1779,

Alexandre was now twenty-six years old. He had served as a topographical engineer, as a lieutenant in the infantry, and as a cavalry captain; and he was now on the personal staff of an army commander.

By the next year, he was serving overseas under General Rochambeau in the American Revolution alongside Washington and La Fayette! After three years in America, he returned to France.

And so Berthier - a cadet at the age of twelve, a general at thirty-nine and a private at forty - quietly resigned himself to the end of his military career, the more so because he had never held any personal ambitions other than to do his best.

Berthier would have been better off if he had retired at forty and had never met Napoleon Bonaparte. He would have disappeared into obscurity, but fate would have different plans. Alternately, Napoleon was very lucky to have found Berthier. I'm going to go out on a limb and say without Berthier, Napoleon wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful as he was. Yes, he was a great general, a great leader, a genius, but he needed someone who could understand his intentions and make sure his plans were executed with precision. That man was Alexandre Berthier.

For 18 years, Berthier served Napoleon. He was the chief of staff and the first to be made a Marshal of France under Napoleon. He endured Napoleon's temper and unjust scorn. Napoleon called him, "Uninteresting" and "no good" and "in the way". Napoleon hardly ever let Berthier take credit for his success but was quick to blame his own faults on Berthier. But Berthier was loyal through and through. When warned of Napoleon's temper early on, he said, "But remember that one day it will be a fine thing to be second to that man."

It was a very good book with only two things I thought were odd. 1) Napoleon forced Berthier to marry and it was later mentioned that he had two young sons. Nothing was mentioned about his wife being pregnant or the birth of his sons, or even their names. 2) Berthier died from a fall out of a window. The book implied that he was dizzy and fell out or that Caulaincourt (his friend!) had him murdered. I think he either fell or jumped on his own. I don't think anyone - especially Caulaincourt - had anything to do with it.

But all in all, it was a very good and informative book. I learned a lot about Marshal Berthier and saw another side of Napoleon that I am not used to seeing. Like with most books that aren't a general biography of Napoleon, I would definitely suggest having some background knowledge as things that are going on are not always explained fully.

[captainknell]

I didn't even realize this was from the book I'm reading

*edit to add that it was on the same page I had stopped reading on the other day and just found it. How odd 🤯

Berthier's paternal pride, however, contained a portion of paternal jealousy, and he strongly resented any imitation of his uniforms by the other marshals. It was, for example, in Madrid that one of Ney's aides-de-camp had the temerity to report to General Headquarters wearing scarlet overalls. Berthier ordered him to remove the offending garments on the spot; so the culprit had a chilly and, perhaps, a painful ride back to Guadalaxara in his underpants.

By Command of the Emperor by S.J. Watson

Though on a quick google, ADC to Ney didn't show up with red pants? Did the guy lose a borrowed pair of pants?

[jaanjahan]

being left behind

aristos the musical / m.k.poet / unknown / everything is illuminated, jonathan safran foer / fairycosmos / before i go to sleep, sj watson / all too well, taylor swift / m.k.poet / heavensghost / the waves, virginia woolf

[elizabethplaid]

Sunday reading - Sept 8, 2024

"Girl Talk: Welcome to Junior High" by LE Blair

"Galactic Empires, vol 1" edited by Brian Aldiss

"Before I Go to Sleep" by SJ Watson

Dug out a bin of books and selected these books to try today. These came from the library, leftover from the tag sale in July 2022.

The "Girl Talk" book was chosen for its cover. It's set in 1989, and they name-dropped some actors who are still in the headlines today. A silly read, indeed. And the gal with the short black hair is named Randy!

There were a few compilations of sci-fi short stories. I picked up one of the thinner ones and said, "That's tiddies on the cover!" Knew I needed to share that with tumblr, because we're such a classy bunch, haha. The cover art is by "Karel Thole, the world's foremost cover artist of science fiction," according to the jacket flap.

"Before I Go to Sleep" seems to be about a character with memory loss. Again, the cover looked cool. I thought the cover and dust jacket design was interesting. Jacket design by Richard Ljoenes; front cover photograph by Stephen Carroll, Trevillion; back cover photograph (not shown) by Roy Bishop, Arcangel Images.

[justforbooks]

A farce, for heaven’s sake! Everyone knows farce is dead.” When a character says these lines on page eight of Janice Hallett’s latest whodunnit, The Christmas Appeal, we can practically see the author tipping us an outsized wink. Hallett, after all, is one of today’s foremost exponents of cerebral, knowing crime. A swift 180 pages later, Hallett has slain another victim and shown that farce was never really dead in the first place. Literary murder – especially the cosy sort – has always been comic. The real mystery is: why is it so popular now?

Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, in which laughs, foibles and irony figure far more prominently than bloody murder, has topped the charts for four years running. The Crime Writers’ Association has just launched a new Whodunnit Dagger to honour the year’s best cosy, classic or quirky mystery. This Christmas, production company Mammoth Screen will bring us its latest Agatha Christie for BBC One, a reworking of Murder Is Easy that, like its predecessor Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, plays up the love and laughs – moving away from the grittier cynicism of its earlier adaptations.

But then, this is the production company that made Blandings – based on the PG Wodehouse Blandings Castle stories – and Agatha Raisin. The latter, an affectionate rendering of MC Beaton’s none-more-cosy crime capers, is a reminder that the genre has always been popular. Trace it back from SJ Bennett, whose sleuth of choice is Queen Elizabeth II, and Hallett, through Beaton and Simon Brett, with his wisecracking Charles Paris mysteries, and you find an unbroken link to the golden age of comic crime.

Christie herself wrote laughs aplenty, especially when it came to Poirot; her contemporary and fellow queen of crime, Ngaio Marsh, excelled at badinage. GK Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, written in the early 20th century, have a profound and gentle humour – or not so gentle in the barbed parody The Absence of Mr Glass, which pokes fun at Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle also made space for jokes amid the pea-soupers and arch villainy, not just in surreal escapades such as The Red-Headed League, but in the everyday interactions of Holmes and Watson. And there are links between the generations: as a producer on Radio 4’s classic adaptation of Dorothy L Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey series, Brett revisited the pinnacle of comic crime from the 1920s and 30s.

In Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited, the aristocratic Catholic family at its centre turns in times of crisis, not to sermons, but to Father Brown stories. Read aloud by the matriarch, the scene is at once absurd, touching and completely understandable. Part of the solace stems from the benign humour of the tales, and that explains why comic crime is resurgent today – amid planetary and economic crises, that promise of escapism is more beguiling than ever. Especially at this time of year. From Hercule Poirot’s Christmas to PD James’s Mistletoe Murders, authors as well as readers have been drawn to fatal festivities.

We’re all familiar with gallows humour, the need to find laughter in the grimmest places. Yet the appeal of truly comic crime is less about professional detectives doing a grisly job than dilettantes playing a game. Literature has few laughing policemen, but an awful lot of quipping amateurs. Even Marsh gave her best one-liners not to handsome Inspector Alleyn but to her Watson figure, the journalist Nigel Bathgate.

Games, puzzles and mysteries are by definition playful. And it’s not just the sleuths who are playing. Reader is always pitted against author in a test of wits – can we solve the crime before the detective? Like every game, there are clear rules: detective author Ronald Knox set out his not entirely serious 10 commandments of fair play in 1929. This is what makes these stories such perfect escapism today: readers can lose themselves in the contest. Every true whodunnit is a work of metafiction, as the reader flits in and out of the story, constantly trying to estimate the author’s intelligence or honesty in setting trails and leaving clues.

For my money, today’s greatest exponent of playful detective fiction is Alex Pavesi, whose Eight Detectives is a gloriously original, intricate and often very funny series of practical jokes played on the reader. Dann McDorman’s new novel, West Heart Kill, as tricksy as they come, uses a jigsaw puzzle as cover art, while the cover of my own Helle & Death tips its hat to Cluedo. This playfulness puts us in the right mood, but the classic whodunnit has other weapons, many of which it shares with farce: plots like clockwork, exquisite choreography and perfect timing. Sayers’s Peter Wimsey has been called “Bertie Wooster with Jeeves’s brain”.

The most important comic quality of both murder mystery and farce, however, is the meticulous arranging of cause, effect and misunderstanding. The detection of a murderer involves paying minute attention to what people say and do. The reader is given privileged access into the lives of others, replete with dramatic irony and a degree of omniscience. And what could possibly be funnier than the everyday idiosyncrasies of human beings?

The Christmas Appeal is packed with hypocrites and exhibitionists. Mrs Ruddle, in Sayers’s Busman’s Honeymoon, is a world-class gossip. As for the sleuths themselves, from Holmes, to Poirot, to Torben Helle, the more seriously they take themselves, the sillier they become. Snoop on anyone for long enough, and their habits, sayings, priorities start to become hilarious.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[jeanyjanez]

61. Buch 2023: SJ Watson: Ich.darf.nicht.schlafen

[gaykarstaagforever]

Tonight's Halloween Party Playlist (2023) [Minus the ones that are on every list ever]

"Mysterious Mose" - R. Crumb & His Cheap Suit Serenaders

"Ghost of Stephen Foster" - Squirrel Nut Zippers

"Demon Kitty Rag" - Katzenjammer

"My Drag" - Squirrel Nut Zippers

"Minnie the Moocher" - Cab Calloway (from The Blues Brothers movie soundtrack)

"Hell" - Squirrel Nut Zippers

"Come On In" - The Bridge City Sinners

"All Hail" - The Devil Makes Three

"Man from the Moon" - Dean Barlow & The Crickets

"Butcher Pete" - Roy Brown

"Paint It Black" - Rolling Stones

"Time Warp" - from The Rocky Horror Picture Show

"Dragula" - Rob Zombie

"Wake Up" - Biggie Smalls feat. KoRn

"Lecher Bitch" - Genitorturers

"A Smaller God - Darling Violetta

"How Soon is Now" - the Kai Watson cover

"Flowers on the Wall" - The Statler Brothers

"Green Door" - Shakin' Stevens

"Go-Go Godzilla" - the Brian Setzer cover (?, I don't know if it's a weird instrumental cover of the BOC song or just it's own cool thing)

"Corn Rigs" - Magnet (from The Wicker Man 1973 soundtrack)

"All Souls Night" - Loreena McKennitt

"Procisson, apuis baile" - Galandum Galundaina

"Orchard Fair" - Wye Oak

"Verni Coronaberis" - Mediaeval Baebes

"Schottische Fran Havero" - Lothlorien

"Lil Jon's Palace" - Mashup by oneboredjeu of Lil Jon's "Get Low" and Caravan Palace's "Dragons"

"Reference Point" - Acoustic Alchemy

"Unda" - Faun

"Song of the Witches" - SJ Tucker

"St. James" - Rag'N'Bone Man

"Moon" - Omnia

"Lone Digger" - Caravan Palace

"Hermetico" - Balkan Beat Box

"Daemonos" - Daemonia Nymphe

"Sitting on the Moon" - Enigma

"Witch's Rune" - SJ Tucker

"Vampire Killer" - Castlevania theme cover by banjoguyollie

"Mahalagaesca (Bucovina Dub)" - Shantel feat. Mahala Rai Banda

"T'ain't No Sin (To Take Off Your Skin)" - Fred Hall

[whathannelblogs]

Do you enjoy reading thriller books? Since I have always been a fan and S.J. Watson is also one of my favorite authors (especially after reading Before I Go To Sleep), I was very excited to read this book. Please click the link located on my highlighted stories under the category of books to read my full review of this book. Otherwise, please copy the link provided below... Thankyou!

URL: https://www.booksreadbyhannel.com/2023/02/book-review-second-life-by-sj-watson.html

[tomesofthetrade]

“What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?”

- Before I Go To Sleep

[appleinducedsleep]

the best things come in three, right?

[practicallynonsensical]

Before I go to Sleep

Horror Movie Mini-Review: Movie 2 of ??

IMDB Summary: A woman wakes up every day, remembering nothing as a result of a traumatic accident in her past. One day, new terrifying truths emerge that force her to question everyone around her.

(kinda spoiler alert)

Nonsensical Thoughts: Well, I thought this was a horror movie. I was wrong??? This felt like being in a time loop, but without any of the fun. The twist was a good twist, ruined only by the fact that the guy was creepy from MINUTE ONE. I will say, the acting is good. Everyone sure did their best, but this felt real Lifetime melodramatic at times and it got laughable.

[pplydm]

ePUB#86

Title: Before I Go To Sleep

Author: S.J. Watson

There are people desiring to reset their lives aiming to start anew in their every waking day. Christine Lucas was almost granted that; she had a rare case of amnesia. Each sunrise she witnesses, carry a forgotten yesterday, literally. Christine's tedious circumstances were told in Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson.

The common "Don't Forget." paragraph was given much more meaning in this read. Christine's agony totally tortured me too that my forehead is oftentimes creased during reading. My favorite persona, Claire, aced the best friend character. Claire was ever present when necessary. Despite featuring an unoriginal antagonist, a violent obsessive psychopathic maniac, this book will teach anyone how vital facing the hurting truths in life is. I wonder why the protagonist opted for journaling her memories instead of recording it via a digital camera or voice recorder, I just presume it'd be handier and quicker to accomplish. Also, Mike bringing the notebook's torn pages along with him in their last trip together was somewhat pointless for his schemes. However, S.J. Watson excellently illustrated raw human emotions in this writing. A trigger warning though, this was apparently for the adult demographic hence inclusions of explicit sexual content. I honestly expected more mystery and not misery to gather from this. Bummer

[wordsandpeace2u-blog]

Throwback Thursday: November 2011

Throwback Thursday: November 2011

#ThrowbackThursday Revisiting what I posted 10 years ago, following the idea I found at The Chocolate Lady’s Book Review Blog (click on this link or the logo to see where the idea started from, and to post the link to your own post). On the first Thursday of the month available on my site, I’m planning to post about the previous month, 10 years before.   📚 📚 📚  Today, I’ll be revisiting November…

[papercoffeebookmark]

Before I Go To Sleep - Book Review

Before I Go To Sleep – Book Review

Title: Before I Go To Sleep Author: S.J Watson Rating: 4/5 Review: A suspense filled psychological thriller weaved around a woman named Christine suffering from acute amnesia on account of alleged car accident. Every morning when she wakes up (following a deep sleep), she cannot remember the man lying next to her, her own reflection in the mirror, her name, family, wedding or her past. Every…

[darklingaleks]

books in 2017  22⁄? ➵ before i go to sleep  |  bibliothon  #5  a book that’s been adapted  |  booktubeathon  #1  has a person on the cover

“What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?”