When I was a child, in idle moments I often used to stare up at the ceiling ask myself – WHAT IF all the buildings in the town turned upside down? I’d imagined myself walking from room to room on the ceiling, which would now be the floor, opening upside-down doors and planning how I would climb the stairs. It was always the beginning of a exciting adventure story for me.

What if … is always a great question for author and you can use it to generate an idea for story, or ask it even half way through the novel if you get your characters stuck and don’t know what to do with them next. When I first had the seed of an idea for my medieval thriller ‘THE RAVEN'S HEAD', one of the questions that popped into my head was – What if Vincent tries to blackmail the alchemist? And it was that question that led me straight into the heart of the action.

But last week I was one of the tutors on week-long residential writing course on Historical Fiction. It was a brilliant week because of creative sparks that began flying round the group and when I read some of the students' work, I was in awe, wishing I could write anything half as good as some of those pieces. But listening to how the students had got their ideas for novels, it began to strike me that for many historical novels based on real characters the question is not so much WHAT IF ...? but HOW DID THEY ...? or WHY DID THEY ...? And when you read some historical novels that ask these questions, the first thing that hits you as a reader is why has no one thought to ask such obvious questions before about this historical character?

This has just happened to me when I read Manda Scott’s new novel ‘INTO THE FIRE’, a split time novel, alternating between a police investigation into series of arson attacks in Orléans set in the modern day, and a historical thriller about the warrior Joan of Arc, set in 1429.

Having read about an extraordinary discovery by a orthopaedic surgeon who examined the bones of a woman at the basilica in Cléry-saint-André in France, Manda Scott found herself asking the question – HOW DID an ordinary peasant girl, who legend claims Joan of Arc to have been, learn to ride a warhorse in full armour and fight battle-hardened knights in just a few days – skills that would take anyone years of intensive training to achieve? And if Joan wasn’t a simple peasant girl, WHO on earth was she and why was her true identity kept secret?

I have great empathy for the novel because both in ‘THE RAVEN'S HEAD’ and in‘THE FALSE VIRGIN’ which I co-wrote as one of the MEDIEVAL MURDERERS, I was exploring how legends are started and what the consequences might be as the legend grows and gains a life of its own. The science of spin-doctoring was born in the Middle Ages. We think of it as something new, but the medieval spin-doctors were just as skilful as any of the modern ones.

If you haven't yet read Manda Scott’s novel, 'INTO THE FIRE', do try it. Whether you agree with her theory or not, you’ll certainly never think of the Joan of Arc legend in the same way again.

And now I find myself wondering what tiny seeds of legends are being sown today without us noticing, which in a hundred year’s time will have grown in a huge tangled forest. You see, I just can’t help it. I’m already off again on another story – WHAT IF …?