Lindsay's Christmas Viking - or how I was inspired for one of my romances

In the days before covid, when I would go to speak at Women's Institute meetings, I would often be asked, "Where do you get your ideas from?"

This blog explores where and how I develop my story ideas.

Where do I get ideas from?  Everywhere. But the main triggers are:

1. What if so-and-so happened? 

2. What happened next?

3. I tend to think in pictures and scenes, as if watching a frozen film. Sometimes a scene comes into my mind and won’t go away, and then I play with it and start from there.

4. I like to be interested in everything and everyone. As I write, I try to keep in mind that everyone has a story, that everyone can be a hero or ant-hero, even if they themselves don’t know it.

How I develop ideas.

1. Start with a scene, a frozen incident.

2. Develop characters I’ll enjoy writing about, often with interesting jobs.

3. Place the characters in a setting I can relate to.

4. Give them a plot that stretches my people.

5. Mix all these together in a chapter by chapter outline.

6. Write!

An example of this process is how I came to write my Christmas Romance, "Carrie's Christmas Viking." In this case, my inspiration came from an object, the figure of a Viking that had once belonged to my father-in-law. It was known in my husband's family as Eric, so I called him Eric, too.

As you can see from the photograph, Eric is wound about by a "chain", a silver-gilt necklance that was my mother's and that I playfully draped over Eric as a means of keeping the strands from tangling. Eric stood in my window for a long time and I knew I wanted to write about him, but had not found the driver of any story.

The chains of the necklace gave me an idea. A Viking bound, a Viking trapped, that was a powerful image, a heroic, romantic image. So my next thought was "Why is he bound? How is he trapped?"

The answer suggested to me was "Magic", and after magic, the craft of a witch. A witch whom Eric had angered for some reason. Since the witch in question was a good witch, my Elfrida from "The Snow Bride" "A Summer Bewitchment" and "One Winter Knight" I knew that Eric had tried to work against her and Magnus, her warrior companion. 

Those thoughts gave me the seed that became "Carrie's Christmas Viking," a story of romance and redemption.

To read it for free, see it on KindleUnlimited.

Or buy for just 99cents or 77p.

You can read "The Snow Bride" as one of six full length medieval historical romances in the box-set "One Perfect Knight." Only $2.99 for over 2000 pages, free with KindleUnlimited and just £2.25!

Happy Holidays!

Lindsay Townsend