I love Loch Ness. I’ve spent many a day along the banks, particularly when I was researching Darkest Hour. But I’ve never seen anything like this.

This is the first in an occasional series of things that inspired me while creating a book. Any story is more than just a collection of words, and the pieces that go into the original making can be diverse and many - a fragment of conversation, a song heard on the radio late at night, an image viewed briefly from a train window… All those have been part of the strange and sometimes incomprehensible process of imagining that eventually results in one of my tales, long or short.

Many of these inspirations are not apparent in the finished product. Some are more overt, and in occasional cases designed as such to create resonances, for instance Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now and the long, difficult boat trip in the Far Lands in The Queen of Sinister.

A lot of influences went into the bubbling cauldron for my next book The Burning Man, but one of the most powerful was Songs from the Victorious City, a mysterious and evocative blend of Middle Eastern sounds and westernised constructions by Anne Dudley and former Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman. It’s a fantastically powerful musical poem about Cairo, and was an effective backdrop while I was writing a long sequence set in that city, even with the odd scratch and sizzle of my old vinyl version.

Worth a listen.

Yes, I did.

“THE NEWTON stone is a small, rather unassuming pillar in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. On one side is faded, ancient writing, on the other a curling snake and cylindrical patterning. Many would say that it is a typical example of a Scottish standing stone.”

One, shall we say, creative opinion, for the meaning behind the designs is detailed here. The truth, of course, is being defined in The Kingdom of the Serpent.

All writers are privy to a big secret. They rarely talk about it among themselves, but when someone foolishly raises it, there are embarrassed smiles and nods and a few mumbled words of agreement. The reason is simple: to admit the big secret would mean admitting intellectually dangerous things to yourself and to risk the rest of the world calling you a crackpot.

So I’m going to tell you about here.

Writers are deeply troubled about the genesis of their stories. Not only that, they have nightmares about the reality of said stories, and their meaning and potency beyond the words on the printed page.

To illustrate, I’ll give you some examples from my own work. In World’s End I wrote about the main characters visiting Glastonbury Abbey where they uncovered secret knowledge encoded in the design of the ancient Abbey’s floor. Due to the vagaries of the way I work, I’d already semi-written this scene before I went to Glastonbury to conduct the research on the detail of the setting. While I was there, I came across a book which discussed how secret knowledge had been encoded in the Abbey’s floor, but the knowledge and much of the pattern had been destroyed in a fire almost a thousand years ago.

Now I had never come across this before. I swear I made it up. It’s just coincidence, right? It’s the kind of thing that could have happened, so no reason why it shouldn’t have happened.

Except the same thing happened again when I was writing Darkest Hour: something I was convinced I made up, came to light while I was researching Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh.

And it happened again during the writing of Jack of Ravens. Three times I have written about real things that were completely beyond my knowledge.

Most writers will tell you this happens all the time during the creation of a story. Stephen King has spoken (in On Writing, I think) about how he has come to consider his creative process more like archaeology: how the story is already fully-formed somewhere and he is simply digging it out of the sand.

Other authors have told me in very concerned tones about how what they have written has somehow started to affect the ‘real’ world. Graham Joyce speaks eloquently about near-supernatural happenings on a Greek island that echoed the story on which he was working, House of Lost Dreams. Robert Graves has written about the strange pile-up of coincidence and synchronicity during the writing of The White Goddess when books would mysteriously fall from shelves, open on the correct page with the information for which he had been frantically searching for days.

Both Alan Moore and Grant Morrison have spoken about the use of the imagination during the writing process as an act of magic, and it’s difficult for many writers not to believe that. Strange, irrational things happen during the creative process. There’s a sense of tapping into something else, and once tapped that something else coming into your life to haunt you for a while.

So now I’ve got this out into the open I’d be interested to hear about the experiences of others…

The guys at Memetherapy have published an interview they did with me recently. They asked a bunch of intelligent questions about how I approach writing and research, like “Writing novels has been described as hard and emotionaly brutal. Is that true for you? What was it like writing Jack of Ravens?” and I gave them answers.

1) Crawling along a tunnel barely bigger than a coffin more than two hundred feet beneath the ground, one person in front of me, one person behind, around one hundred feet from beginning to end - impossible to back out if you got stuck. It linked two main tunnels in a now-defunct coal mine in North West Leicestershire. The sense of the vast weight of rock and earth above my head was palpable. The claustrophobia reduced my throat to a pipe-cleaner.

2) Interviewing gangsters. Not the most psychologically stable of people, at one point they got paranoid for no visible reason and held me in the back of a locked shop at gunpoint.

3) Watching an autopsy (or Post Mortem if I want to use the Brit terminology). However much you prepare yourself, it’s still traumatic to see a once-living person reduced to component parts.

4) Interviewing a family who have undergone an exorcism and hearing tapes of same. However much of a rationalist you might be, those sounds and images will still pluck some ancient dread from the deep unconscious.

5) Travelling in excess of 240 mph in a race car. Exhilarating? Not when you haven’t got a seat belt and there’s a madman at the wheel…