E is for Egypt

In hindsight, Paula should have taken far more notes on her trip to Egypt.

When I set off on my trip to Egypt in October 2010, creating a novel set there was the last thing on my mind. I was far more excited at the prospect of visiting the Valley of the Kings, which had been on my ‘100 things to do before you die list’ for many years, ever since I first became fascinated by the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb there. As the bus took us into the valley on our first day in Egypt, I could hardly believe I was finally there—and I’m happy to say it exceeded all my expectations. The Valley of the Kings was once of those places that seemed special, almost spiritual, to me (in the same way that Connemara also captured my soul!)

 

The other place that did the same was Abu Simbel, the huge temples which were moved stone by stone in the 1960s so that they would not be submerged by the waters of Lake Nasser once the Aswan Dam was completed. We had to get up at 2.30am (hardly worth going to bed!) to catch the early flight from Aswan to Abu Simbel, but it was well worth it to see the sun rise over Lake Nasser and turn the sandstone of the temples from grey into a glorious gold.

After five days of sightseeing and eventually being ‘templed out’ by visiting so many different ancient temples, it was good to relax on Friday afternoon on the sundeck of our cruise ship, moored at Aswan. And that, as I’ve recounted before, was when, in a few moments of idle reflection, I imagined the hero of a novel vaulting over the rails from the sundeck of one cruise ship to the one moored next to it.

I’ve always said I know the exact moment when my novel ‘Her Only Option’ was conceived, and that was it. By the following day, I knew my heroine was a cruise ship tour guide and my hero was an archaeologist (in the Valley of the Kings, of course)

I started writing the story during the following week when we stayed at a hotel on the banks of the Nile at Luxor, but once I got home, I had another novel to finish before I could turn my mind to my Egypt novel again. When I did, I realised there were thousands of questions for which I needed answers. Not the archaeological details, as I could research those, but the other details.

Egyptian names, for example – why hadn’t I made a note of the names of all the staff on the cruise ship and in the hotel? Why didn’t I ask our tour guide for information about his job? Why didn’t I make a note of what time the sun set? Why didn’t I look out in Luxor for modern apartment blocks where my heroine might live? Why didn’t I take note of villas on the west bank of the Nile? I could have done all that during our week on the cruise ship – but I didn’t realise until the end of the week that I might have a story germinating in my mind!

I think the moral of this is: wherever you go, take notes about your surroundings and the small details that will help you to bring a story alive – even if you don’t actually have a story in your mind at the time. Once I was writing the story, I would have given anything to go back to Egypt, if only for a week, to absorb or research more specific details, but by that time Egypt was a no-go area for tourists, as the big revolution took place just 3 months after my visit.