What inspired Docklands
A long time coming
If you missed the original post, it is linked here.
My ideas rarely come quickly. This is one of the few exceptions. I used to bike to work when I lived in London. Biking is fantastic for writers. If you have any common sense, you don’t listen to music while you do it, so for an hour each way on my commute, my mind would wander.
For about two and a half years, I’d bike from Ilford to Caledonian Road. It’s about 11 miles, and part of it would take me from Stratford (East London, not Shakespeare’s birthplace) and into Bow. Once you’re in Bow, you’ve done most of the hard work on main roads, and I would ride across the flyover, knowing that the rest would be less stressful.
On one occasion, I glanced to my left and saw Canary Wharf. I found myself wondering what everything looked like when London was a port city, with its skyline filled with ship masts. The idea germinated, and I began to research. What I found is a side of London you never see in fiction. All the stories I knew are set in Whitechapel, Soho or the City. I paid a visit to the Docklands museum, which recreated “Sailortown”. I learned about the tiger that escaped into Commercial Road. Characters flowed out of me, driven by my research. The first image that appeared in my head, inspired by the tiger story, was of a middle-aged man standing in the center of a gloomy warehouse. All around him, exotic animals waiting to be shipped to clients hooted, screeched, and howled. I got to work, writing a radio pilot and recorded it with the help of a university student, plus some amazing actors. I tried to get a tv pilot going (spoiler, it didn’t go anywhere). When I moved to BC, I wrote it up as a full novel and tried submitting it to agents. No one bought it. So I put it aside.
Around 2019, I joined a writers group, which I am still a member of. Inspired by the members' example, I studied craft for the first time. I read books on writing novels. I tried things out. I blocked out time to write instead of writing when I felt like it. I read in my genre. I subscribed to youtube channels that gave me tips. I read my work aloud. I listened to feedback whilst ignoring the ego death, and made improvements. When I finished my first big project (currently being reviewed in full by an agent) I moved on to the next. I had a shiny object, a story set in Naples that would require tons of research and would be a fun romp. Then I went back to Docklands. In January 2025, I applied everything I’ve learned over the past few years. I gave the story a new protagonist that we could root for. I kept many plotlines and discarded most of the 75,000 words I already wrote. This is the first few pages- currently at about 60,000 words.
It’s probably going to change again, and that’s ok
If you’re interested, here are the books I read for research
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6957458-london-s-docklands
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20424238-inside-dickens-london
And this if you want to fall down a fun rabbit hole
https://www.victorianweb.org/