Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. 

Today’s guest for the WHAT is Eleanor Shearer, author of River Sing Me Home, a redemptive story of a mother’s gripping journey across the Caribbean to find her stolen children in the aftermath of slavery. River Sing Me Home releases on January 31

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

Almost 10 years ago, I went to an exhibition in London called Making Freedom, put on by an Afro-Caribbean community organization. The point of the exhibition was to show all the ways enslaved people in the Caribbean resisted and rebelled against slavery. It was there that I first learned about the women who went to find their stolen children after emancipation, and from then on I was obsessed with the bravery of what these women did. That became the seeds of my first novel, River Sing Me Home.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

My protagonist, Rachel, a mother searching for her children, was always clear to me. So the main choices I had to make were – who are her children? And what has happened to them? The novel ended up being set across three different Caribbean countries, and this was in part due to needing to find a historically plausible way that Rachel’s children would have been sold away from Barbados even after the slave trade was abolished by the British in 1807. I chose British Guiana and Trinidad because these were recent British colonies and they desperately needed more plantation workers, so a lot of enslaved people were moved from other islands to these places. 

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Yes! River Sing Me Home has quite a few side characters who Rachel encounters for a few chapters before she moves on and leaves them behind. There was one side character who, as I was writing him, I realized I didn’t want to let go of – Nobody, the sailor that Rachel meets on her way to British Guiana. So I decided I’d have him come along with her, and he ended up being one of my favourite characters!

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

I have new ideas all the time, but especially when I’m drafting something new. Ideas are easy and writing is hard, so in the hard slog of being halfway through a manuscript I’m always tempted by something shiny and new. The skill is parking that new idea and trusting that you need to keep going and see through the one you’re already working on.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

I’ll go with the one where I have the clearest idea of how it ends. I can’t start a book without that final image – often that final sentence – in mind, and I propel myself through the draft by wanting to earn that ending.

I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting?

My cat, Trixie, was such a stalwart writing companion that she actually gets a shout out in the acknowledgments of River Sing Me Home. Sadly, she passed away last year, but my new cat, Biscuit, has stepped up to fill the role!

Eleanor Shearer is a mixed-race writer who lives between London and Ramsgate on the English coast so that she never has to go too long without seeing the sea. For her Master's degree in Politics at the University of Oxford, Eleanor studied the legacy of slavery and the case for reparations, and her fieldwork in St. Lucia and Barbados helped inspire her first novel.