The Pleasure Trap
The story behind the novel
I’m often asked if I ever suffer from burnout after
having published twenty-four novels and two novellas in the last twenty years.
My
answer is “No, but . . .” It’s not burnout I worry about
but producing the same old same old year in and year out. Writers need change
(and so do readers) so that their stories stay dynamic and fresh.
Some writers introduce fantasy elements or science fiction or vampires into
their novels. Others switch genres. In my latest historical novel, The
Pleasure Trap, I introduced elements of the paranormal. It was a real challenge, though
I’d done it once before (You Only Love Twice). But it’s the challenge
that keeps a writer on her toes.
I’m also asked where I get my ideas for my books. There is no one answer
except that each book is sparked from some very small incident and evolves
from there. Start small—that’s my advice to beginning writers.
Don’t become overwhelmed because you can’t see the big picture.
Only a few writers have their complete books come to them in their dreams.
I have never been that lucky. For me, writing is like learning to knit. You
start out thinking you’re making a pen wiper, and lo and behold, it
turns into a muffler!
That’s how The Pleasure Trap got its genesis, from a small incident,
when my good friends Alison and Elmer Preece suggested that my husband and
I might like to visit the quarry garden in Hamilton, Ontario. It had been a
make-work project of the Depression era for men who were out of work. Needless
to say, that quarry garden captured my imagination. When I got home to Winnipeg,
I did a search on the internet and found other fascinating quarry gardens that
had been created in various parts of the world.
“What if?” I thought, and I came up with a prologue—a woman
who falls to her death from the top of a quarry twelve years before my story
begins. The prologue raises questions that will be answered in the very last
chapter of the book. That’s all I had—the prologue. I had no idea
what would come next. There are two characters in the prologue, a mother and
daughter, who are both psychics. Eve, the daughter, is fated to be my female
protagonist, and waiting in the wings to make his entrance is my male protagonist,
Ash Denison.
Ash was a given because he finishes off my three book Trap series. Readers
have already met Ash in The Marriage Trap and The
Bachelor Trap. They know
that he is the darling of society. He has no driving ambitions, no need to
prove himself and no unfulfilled dreams. He dedicates himself to enjoying the
good life.
So where do I go from here?
Books are built around conflict and drama. Readers don’t want to read
about characters who are so well adjusted that they never say a wrong word.
When two characters meet, the sparks must begin to fly. That’s what grabs
a reader’s attention—tension and conflict.
I think you see where this is leading. I needed a heroine who would be in
conflict with the hero, someone who would shake him up a bit and make him question
what he is doing with his life. Eve is the opposite of Ash. She is the one
with goals and ambitions. Since I’m a writer and understand the ups and
downs of a writer’s life, I decided that Eve should be a writer, too.
In this era, Gothic writers were all the rage, so that is what Eve becomes,
a writer of Gothic fiction.
Of course, it cuts both ways. Ash wants to convert Eve to his way of thinking.
He wants to teach her about pleasure, in all its manifestations.
This friction between hero and heroine was to become a recurring theme in
my novel. It’s based on the eternal question that comes to us all – Who
am I and why am I here? In other words, what gives us our identity? What world
view is right – Ash’s or Eve’s? They work on this conflict
of character as the book progresses. This is what drives the romance.
I decided to add a twist here. Ash and Eve are poles apart in their thinking.
How can I advance the romance? Eve has psychic abilities, remember, and much
as she decries Ash’s way of life in her waking hours, in her dreams
she becomes an entirely different woman. She finds Ash utterly irresistible.
At this point, I needed to give my characters backstory to explain their different
points of view. It’s quite vague as yet, but slowly, as I write the story,
more will become clear to me and their characters will become set. There’s
more to Ash and Eve than meets the eye.
So far, I’ve been working mainly on the romance. The only part of the
story that is on paper is the prologue. Everything else is in note form.
Before I can begin on chapter one, I have to know how the story will end,
more or less. What I need now is a special kind of energy that will drive
my novel from beginning to end. In other words, I need a plot.
After much brainstorming, I came up with a symposium where all my Gothic
writers get together to promote their books. One writer, however, Angelo,
a sinister character who hides in the shadows, is publishing murder stories
that are more truth than fiction and may have a link to the accidental death
of Ash’s brother years before. Ash suspects that Eve may be Angelo.
The hunt for Angelo becomes Eve’s quest as well because she knows he
is a murderer. With her fledgling psychic powers, she gets glimpses into his
mind. She knows something else. She and Angelo are connected. This goes all
the way back to the prologue.
Now I’m ready to begin writing my story, though, of course, only the
essentials are in place. I still have to work on scenes between my hero and
heroine that will tempt my readers to read to the end of the book.
I’m not finished yet. I still need a cast of characters as suspects
and to help move the story along. They’re a given – the other Gothic
writers and their associates from the symposium.
Odds and ends come to me as the story progresses. The Gothic writers are sequestered
in a lovely estate close to the new Bedlam. I wanted to ignore Bedlam (now
the Imperial War Museum in South London), an asylum for the insane, but a character
kept jumping out at me, one of the inmates, a young girl called Nell and she
wouldn’t leave me alone until I’d worked her into my story.
Something else worked it’s way into my story. I read in the papers about
a wealthy English aristocrat who turned her estate in Cornwall into a safe
haven for abused and abandoned horses and donkeys. As an animal lover and advocate,
I was really touched by that news item. Hence, donkeys found their way into
my plot, as did Sheba and Dexter, in memory of two fabulous black labs who
have a special place in my heart.
One last thing. My stories always end with a twist, something unexpected that
the reader didn’t see coming. I never know what that twist will be till
I’m in the last act of my story. When I get to the twist, I have to go
back to the beginning of my book and foreshadow it.
And that’s how The Pleasure Trap finally came to be written.
What’s next? More paranormal stories with a Scottish connection and,
a first for me, set in the Victorian era. I know my readers love the Regency
era of Jane Austen, but as a writer, to keep my writing fresh, I need to be
challenged.
Some interesting links relating to The Pleasure Trap:
Quarry Gardens
Writers of Fiction—Gothic, Vampire circa 1816
Bedlam—The Royal Hospital of Mary of Bethlem
Donkeys & Donkey Refuges
Kennington, circa 1816
Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens
Reading Group Questions & Discussion Topics
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Elizabeth Thornton, July 2007:
All Rights Reserved.
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