Writers constantly get asked about inspiration. Where do ideas come from? What makes us pursue this arcane craft, so full of pitfalls and failures? I guess an honest answer is that most of us write because we have to. We don't know anything else. We like to get those stories out of us into the world at large if possible.

But inspiration's different. That's a strange and wayward beast that rears its head at the least likely of times, unbidden, unexplained. When I was younger and desperate to write it drove me near crazy that I found it impossible. I made excuses: no time, too busy with other things. But they <em>were</em> excuses. The truth was I had nothing to say, no base material to work with.

Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, was once asked how budding writers should get started. He said they should wait for the moment to arrive, not try to seek it out because that was impossible. If it was going to happen, it <em>would</em> happen. If not...

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As I explained yesterday that moment popped into my head when it was the last thing I was looking for and had pretty much forgotten about the idea of becoming a writer at all. I was carving out a pretty successful career as a freelance attached to the <em>Sunday Times</em>. We'd made enough money to take a holiday in Andalucia one very wet Easter in 1994. The village had a <em>Semana Santa</em> procession, full of those strange and rather threatening costumes and the intensity that comes from such religious events in the Mediterranean. And the final element in the mix popped up too. In the middle of the downpour I went to the bookshelf and picked up a paperback by Ed McBain. The catalysts were in place.

The first was that McBain book (one of the 87th precinct series -- I forget which now). It reminded me that story-telling was what I was supposed to be doing.

The others I mentioned yesterday. The image of those kids playing by the banks of the river in Seville. There was something so atmospheric, so very <em>different</em> to them, and something very convincing too. They were behaving as if this was the most natural thing in the world: not being at school, not preparing for the future. They were committed, absorbed, obsessive. And obsessive people are the building blocks of an awful lot of fiction.

Finally there was that picture by Valdés Leal which I showed yesterday. A computer screen can't do it justice. The only way you can appreciate it, and its equally scary counterpart known as <em>In Ictu Oculis,</em> which I'll show here today, is to walk through the doors of the <em>Hospital de la Caridad</em> in Seville and see them. Google won't do. That great Sevillian painter Murillo used to say that he couldn't look at these two paintings without wanting to hold his nose to hide the smell. They're about life and death, though death mainly. And so was the book I came to write.

<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/ictu.jpgwp-content/uploads/2009/11/valdes_leal_jd_ictu_oculi.jpg"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/ictu.jpgwp-content/uploads/2009/11/valdes_leal_jd_ictu_oculi-tm.jpg" alt="valdes_leal_jd_ictu_oculi.jpg" width="450" height="457" /></a>

<em>La Caridad</em> was a hospital for the poor set up in 1661 by a remarkable man, Miguel de Mañara. Mañara was a Sevillian rake and playboy who was subject to a miraculous conversion to piety. Some say this was grief over the death of his wife. Others claim he is the inspiration for the story of Don Juan, and converted to a charitable life upon seeing a coffin in the street one night, after some debauchery, and realising that the corpse inside was none other than his own.

Today this place is still a charity working as a home for the elderly. The chapel attached to it was Mañara's creation, a lesson to those who follow in the need for human charity in the face of the inevitability of death, a lesson made by a series of works of art commissioned for this small, dark place. I must have visited Seville in 1988 for those travel books. Six years later, thinking about McBain's story-telling powers, the Holy Week celebrations in the village where we were staying, and those kids with their trumpets by the Guadalquivir, a story began to emerge in my head. One in which a painting very like Valdés Leal's would play a key part.

What strikes me now, looking back over this sequence of events, is how very unplanned they were. I never came to Spain looking for material for a novel. I never went to Andalucia that Easter thinking of writing fiction either. Clearly my unconscious had been storing this stuff up and filing it. But I hadn't noticed. Bertrand Russell was right. If it was going to happen it would. Perhaps, if I hadn't come to Spain, I would have written something else. Though perhaps not. Who knows?

Still, I returned from that holiday determined to try to write a novel one final time -- and give up if that effort failed like all the others.

There was only one problem. I was an overworked freelance business journalist. I couldn't drop everything to go back to Seville to research it for real. That would have been a step backwards, and for a book that would probably never get finished let alone appear.

Enter the myth of location... of which more tomorrow.