Every book begins with an idea...

Author Celia Rees tells us about the inspiration for her latest book This is Not Forgiveness - and how research helped to bring the story to life

Every book begins with an idea and ideas can come from anywhere: books, pictures, places, newspapers, conversations. The idea for This is Not Forgiveness came from a film: Francois Truffaut's Jules et Jim. I've always loved the film, the story of two boys and a girl. The boys are old friends and they both fall in love with Kate, played by the captivating Jean Moreau. She is an extraordinary girl, unconventional, a free spirit who won't be owned by either of them. While I was watching, I suddenly thought, 'You could update this. Make it now.' Although my recent titles had all been set in the past, I knew that this one had to be contemporary.

As the book is set now, there was not as much research to do as there would be for a historical novel. Rather, it is a different kind of research, into characters, their potential lives, place and setting. I always like to set my books in real places. I will visit different locations, make notes, take photographs, then change and twist them into what I want them to be like in the book. As for the characters, I think about who they are, what their lives would be like, what interests them, makes them tick, then I make sure I know enough about them to make them real. When I'm writing historical fiction, like Witch Child, Pirates!, Sovay or The Fool's Girl, I'm interested in how historical events could impact on my characters' lives: witch persecution, the sugar trade and slavery, the French Revolution, Elizabethan fear of Catholic spies. In This Is Not Forgiveness, I was interested in how contemporary events, things happening now, can affect and shape our lives. Today's events are tomorrow's history and we live in interesting times.

There is still research to do, whenever a book is set. One of the characters in This Is Not Forgiveness, Rob, is a soldier, a sniper, who has been wounded in Afghanistan, so I had to find out about the Army, life on active duty, sniping, weaponry, Combat Related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and so on. I read a lot of accounts of soldiers engaged in warfare, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but other wars, too, like Vietnam and the Second World War. The effect war has on those fighting doesn't change. I also watched films, like The Hurt Locker, TV documentaries, series like Generation Kill, and 'soldier vision', footage shot by the soldiers themselves.  As I worked on the book, the ideas within it seemed to become more and more relevant. The other characters are more 'normal' in a sense, although one of them Caro, is interested in radical politics, so I had to discover her obsessions. As for what she gets involved with, all I had to do was follow that on the news.

The relevance is still there. Just this morning, I noticed that the local newspaper had a story about a lad killed in Afghanistan. The banner across the top of the national paper was advertising a feature on the inside pages which showed a boy filming a riot, back lit by fire. Over that now familiar image, the black type title was asking: WHY IS IT ALL KICKING OFF?

Celia Rees will be talking about This is Not Forgiveness at Hay Festival alongside fellow young adult author Melvin Burgess next week.  You can also listen to an audio recording of Celia talking about the book with author Nick Lake at an event at London Book Fair 2012: