ANNA MACKENZIE

Story Behind the Story – Anna says:

Writers are magpies. We gather up ideas and images, both gaudy and dark, then pluck a few from the pile whenever it suits. The Sea-wreck Stranger has its roots in the gleanings of decades.

As a youngster I loved dystopian fiction. I liked to think about where the world was heading and the role people play in bringing about change; about how we deal with the fall-out from those who went before. When I was quite young I watched a BBC TV dramatization of John Wyndham’s sci-fi novel ‘The Triffids’ – I was absorbed by it, even though much of it went over my head (and despite, by today’s standards, the special effects being atrocious!). I liked the sense of surviving against the odds, the warning it offered about the unexpected nature of disaster and the fragility of the status quo. Even more, I was fascinated by the different ways various groups approached surviving the crisis and rebuilding the world. Add to that a moment on an island in the bleak North Sea looking at the abandoned remnants of an insular and isolated community, the planned dumping of toxic waste into our oceans, and an afternoon on a lakeshore where my children were searching through flotsam and jetsam and making up explanations for the things that they found, and you somehow have the elements from which a story would be born.

Of course, a lot more than that goes into the making of a novel – or in this case a trilogy – but each of those stored memories added a thread to the weave, some as warp, some as weft. The characters, setting, family and community dynamics all gelled in that brief moment of watching my children play. I was writing something else at the time, so I really only intended to sketch out the idea that was forming, but the story took me over. By day’s end I’d written the first four chapters, and from that point on there was no holding the story back.