A murder suspect queuing to buy a loaf of bread in West Cork was the genesis of my book

Rebecca Hannigan’s debut novel is inspired by her childhood summers in West Cork and the shadow cast by the death of Sophie Toscan du Plantier. Here, she writes about the gut-punch emotion she experienced in the mid-1990s, which still inspires years later

Business people and concepts vector art

There's often an assumption that works of fiction are based at least in part on actual events that the author has experienced or people that they’ve met, as though writers are more tape recorders than inventors. I strongly suspect that this is very rarely the case.

For me, writing is less diaristic than it is drawing on tiny moments that sparked an emotion. These sparks are then warped into new configurations by the process of fictionalising, rewriting, editing, rewriting again, on and on, until what remains of the original piece is something true to the feeling (hopefully), but completely different from the first synopsis.