The Inspirations for A Place Where We Belong

Slowly but surely, I am working my way back through A Place Where We Belong. It’s been lovely jumping back in to this particular journey as there’s so much of my home and my greatest loves in there. So, after a month of expanding what was already there, and discovering more about who my lead characters are and what makes them tick, I’m really feeling positive about finishing the book this year as planned. As I mentioned when re-starting this quest, I also wanted to post more about my process again; both to provide you, my audience, with some early glimpses into what’s ahead; but also to help me write through some of the challenges everyone faces when writing.

To begin, I want to dive a bit more into what inspired the story I’m writing in A Place Where We Belong.

Theatre

The Burning Ash was my love letter to video games and the stories that formed so much of my childhood and teenage years.

The plan for the series that’s been in my head for a long time was always to use each novel as a love letter to something that has been foundational to who I am as a person. It was inevitable that I would eventually turn to theatre. My twenties have been entirely formed by my interactions with theatre and musicals. From the mass of student theatre I got to experience at University, to my first two jobs post-graduation at the Theatre Royal and Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham, to my experiences in amateur dramatics, and all the trips to London and the West End in between. I listen to musical theatre songs day in, day out; and I’m eternally fascinated by all the different facets that lead to the final show you see on stage.

As a result, it just made sense for me to make my second novel a love letter to theatre. To name my chapters after songs from musicals, to name my characters after composers, to physically set parts of my novel in theatres, and to find as many ways as possible to drop in theatrical easter eggs wherever I can. That intertextual relationship between my story and the vast collection of stories that have come before is one of the things I admire most about literature from the earliest epic poems all the way through to contemporary novels.

And that is also where the title of the novel originated from. Originally, I was wanting to call it For Now after one of my favourite songs, from my favourite musical Avenue Q. But that never felt like it fitted right for the story I was telling. As a title it was too focused on the idea of time, and that just wasn’t the vibe I was going for. Then I landed on A Place Where We Belong which forms part of the name of the final song of the show, Out of the Darkness (A Place Where We Belong) from Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. And that just stuck. This story is about the relationships we have with each other, about finding our place in the world, about finding our people. And that feels like the perfect theme for a novel that’s a love letter to theatre.

Nottingham

While London would have been a perfect setting for this type of novel with its plethora of theatres, but the spark of an idea was much closer to home. Having worked at the Theatre Royal and Royal Concert Hall, knowing its history and its ghosts, exploring all the different bits of the theatre that nobody ever gets to see, all of that led me to knowing I had to set A Place Where We Belong in my hometown of Nottingham.

There were two stories in particular that shaped the idea behind the novel: The Wronged Chambermaid and The Man In The Frock Coat.

The Wronged Chambermaid is one of the ghosts which is said to haunt the Theatre Royal. Her story is a sad one. She worked at the County Hotel which was once attached to the theatre and frequently housed travelling actors who were performing at the theatre. The story goes that she fell in love with one of the actors, but one day when she went to see him, he’d gone without even saying goodbye. She then found out that she was pregnant. As a soon-to-be young unmarried mother, she knew what would happen to her, so she climbed to one of the highest rooms of the hotel and hung herself. Ever since she is said to have walked the corridors of the old hotel, and once it was demolished, the backstage areas of the theatre which were built on the same site.

The Man In The Frock Coat doesn’t have a story behind him, but he’s a ghost that multiple colleagues I worked with had actual encounters with. There is little information about him, other than that he’s a man and he wears a frock coat; but every time he’s been seen he’s been a threatening presence that has seriously unnerved the people who have seen him.

Those two ghosts led to the story that I’m currently writing, in no small part because I wanted to write a story where my characters could meet The Wronged Chambermaid and the Man In The Frock Coat and to explore that. Plus, in looking into that bit of Nottingham’s history, it’s also an opportunity to explore other areas of the city’s history.

I then get the joy of writing a love letter to theatre and to my hometown and to share that with the world.

What next?

Right now, my lead characters have just met and are about to meet a rather mysterious figure. I’ve already had the chance to include lots of little stories from a lifetime in Nottingham, and soon I get to take them to the Nottingham Playhouse and then finally I get to take that trip back to the Theatre Royal. At that point, I’ll have reached the point I got stuck previously and then I’ll finally be on new ground. I can’t wait to get there.