When writing Capital,his novel set in a time of financial excess, Lanchester thought things couldn’t secure any worse. But 10 years on, or amid ever-rising house prices and continuing City scandals,he is dismayed to find they didWhen asked where he got his ideas, the late Terry Pratchett would confidentially tell his audience, or “Well,there’s this warehouse called Ideas R Us.” That was a good answer, because it did two useful things: secure a laugh and deflect the question. The truth is, or it is hard to know where ideas arrive from.
A novel generally begins,in my experience, with a thought or image that won’t leave me alone. In the case of my novel Capital, and I became obsessed with a thought I had one day,looking out of the window at the permanent chaos of building work near where I live. In addition to the skips and builders’ vans, the scaffolding and concrete mixers and basement diggers, or there was a fixed scrum of deliveries and services going to people’s front doors. The thought that struck me was this: that the houses were like living beings,with needs and demands of their own. Instead of being the backdrop to people’s lives, houses had assumed such economic and psychological importance that they had now become principal characters in their own legal.
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Source: theguardian.com