Finding inspiration in strange places

Many writers are asked the question: where do you get your inspiration from?

The answer may be different for everyone. I've answered the question about the inspiration behind Eye on the Ball so many times in blog posts and author interviews. I think a better question would be to ask where did I get the idea for the series Playing for Glory from? The answer to that is totally different.

The first seed for writing romance novels about rugby might have been planted years ago while I listened to radio broadcasts with my father and the rest of the family. It might have been spending Saturdays driving from one game to the other watching my three brothers until we ended up at Loftus for the big game of the day, Northern Transvaal against whatever other team. It might have been planted on a cold and miserable November day in Edinburgh, cheering on the Springboks played against Scotland at Murrayfield. Or getting up early and staying up late to watch the World Cup, fighting with my team and for them.

No, that is also not the answer. Those were just hours and hours of research.

I believe that the first seed was planted while sipping champagne on the Fourth of July in 2016, on a boat cruise down the Hudson, watching the fireworks. A chance meeting with a young rugby player from Jersey who was my fellow passenger on the cruise, might have been the instigator. I don’t know his name but when he learned I’m South Africa, he mentioned the Springboks and that set us off talking about rugby. I discovered that night that rugby had become a global game.

I still did not know then that I was going to write about it, or that there was a romance novel somewhere buried in me. That only came on the flight from New York to OR Tambo when I could not sleep. After a couple of days overcoming the jetlag, I seemed to unpack the muse with the rest of my luggage. For six months I wrote almost non-stop until I felt brave enough to show my work to a writing coach. I still needed to do a few re-writes before I submitted Eye on the Ball and the series, Playing for Glory to publishers. But now, only eighteen months later, Eye on the Ball was released on 19 March 2018.

It just proves that you need to keep your eyes open. Be receptive. You may never know where you'll get your inspiration from.

Guest Post: Scribblers's Sojourn

Monday, March 19, 2018

The inspiration behind Eye on the Ballby Francine Beaton

Maybe years of following rugby and the increasing popularity of the game, had been the inspiration behind, or the reason for the series, Playing for Glory, of which Eye on the Ball is the first book to be published.

When you meet a fellow rugby enthusiast on a boat cruise on the Hudson during the Fourth of July celebrations, there had to be a reason why such a meeting made an impression. It was only on the long flight from New York to Johannesburg that the idea of the series started to form. Before then, I never considered writing about my beloved sport, not even romances. For the eight months since that New York trip, I plotted and wrote the first six books in the series and outlines of several other books. None of them was Eye on the Ball.
The first scene of Eye on the Ball came while watching a Six Nation’s Rugby Match on television. I got up, went to my study to type it up. When I was finished, I had the names of the two characters, Jakes and Ange, and I had the first scene of the book, but that was it.

When I plotted the series approximately eight months before, I created a team list. I planned the first six books, and built the team around the characters in those books, which I’ve written in that eight months. The only character that I had on my team list who might have been Jakes was the eighth man, JJ du Plessis, who didn’t have a story. He was just a number in the team. After I wrote that first scene, I thought it was going to be a Christmassy kind of story and called it, Under the Mistletoe.

After writing that first scene, Jakes kept on popping in my head and I spent more time thinking about him than I did the manuscript I’ve been working on. A few days after I’ve written that scene, the rugby world was shocked by the passing away of the Wallaby Dan Vickerman. There were many panel discussions and articles about his passing, but a discussion on a New Zealand talk show about Dan’s death and the struggles of professional sportsmen and women, really caught my attention. One panellist said that it was not uncommon that men in a macho environment don’t talk about their emotions and fears as they don’t want to appear weak. That phrase caught my attention and stuck.

I thought about it constantly. The only research before I continued writing was what could cause men in macho environments to fear that they were weak—or any man for that matter. I had my story in a matter of minutes.The following morning I woke up at four, went to sit at the computer and started writing. It was amazing. It just flowed. The rest of the research I had to do along the way or afterwards. When I finished with the first draft barely a week after I’ve started, I had more than 130000 words.

After writing Eye on the Ball, I realized that this was not going to be the typical sports romance I envisioned when I planned the series. Jakes was the catalyst, I guess. Although Jakes had the looks, the physicality, macho male image, the intelligence and other attributes to make him an alpha male, Jakes wanted to highlight important issues that had nothing to do with his looks. I had no choice other than to comply.

Eye on the Ball is about a man who struggles to keep his focus on what he felt was important—his teammates, his team and their end goal. It is also about a woman who is strong enough to deal with Jakes’ fears and insecurities, although it may not sound like it. It sounds like Jakes’ story and it mostly is but Ange is one of those women who doesn’t need the limelight. It doesn’t make her weak.http://terrirochenski.blogspot.com/2018/03/guest-post-inspiration-behind-eye-on.html