From Linda Evangelista to Little Women: The Origins of My Creativity

Jan 20, 2025

We all see things over the course of our days and months and years that spark the creative parts of our brains and inspire us in some way, whether it’s to simply buy a new cushion to add a touch of colour to a living room or whether it’s to do something more grandiose and start an oil painting (okay, the latter one has never happened to me—yet!). But there are some things that do more than just spark our creativity—they’re fundamental to shaping it, to our creative outlook, and to our outlook as a human being.

In that spirit, I thought it might be fun to share some of the things from my own history that have left their creative mark on my life—and they aren’t always books or theatre or the more usual sources of creative inspiration.

Little Women

I was gifted this book when I was probably around seven or eight years old and I still have my original copy. I loved the illustrated cover of the four girls almost as much as I loved the story. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t a clue what the Pilgrim’s Progress was or why the books that the girls got for Christmas delighted them so much. I didn’t need to have a clue because there was something about the story that utterly captivated me and had me re-reading it time and time again.

Perhaps it was the anecdotes of a life so different to mine—pickled limes (what were they?), iceskating, snow, blancmange, turquoise rings, a char-a-banc. I loved the specificity and the strangeness and I especially loved Amy, the artistic pragmatist who lived happily ever after.

I can’t define exactly how Little Women left its mark upon my creative psyche, I just know that it did—and probably still does. It’s perhaps the first book I read that touched on feminism and women making their own way in the world. It was both small and large—much of the action revolved around the March’s house, but the story also took me to Europe and to New York, where the girls learned to be women away from their families and their usual quotidian life.

While I can see some of those things in my books, more than that, I think Little Women made me dream, and it made me lose myself in a story. And those two things are essential for any writer.

Linda Evangelista

Onto something much less straightforward as a creative inspiration. I can see your raised eyebrows and can definitely hear the question: how can a supermodel be a source of lifelong inspiration? Maybe it’s tenuous, but Linda Evangelista was a gorgeous woman who valued herself and who told the world exactly how much she was worth. She wouldn’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.

It was so ballsy to say that as a woman back in 1990. Women were still (and are still) fighting for equal pay. They weren’t meant to stand up and declare to everyone that they deserved a substantial amount of money for the work they did. It doesn’t matter whether or not $10,000 was too much money to pay a model. What mattered is that she could earn that much and she wasn’t afraid to ask for it.

I hate that she’s felt she had to apologise for saying that in the aftermath—do you think a man would ever have felt the need to apologise if he ever said something like that? I don’t know.

So her inspiration for me was of a more indirect kind. It made me understand that there were women out there who were very different to the kind of women who were primarily in my life at the time. It was the first time I put together the equation woman + ambition = not a bad thing. And that’s a formative moment in anyone's life life.

Living in London

In early 1998, I set off to London with as many clothes as could fit in a suitcase and my copy of the Complete Works of Jane Austen. I found a studio apartment right by the river in Richmond, which I didn’t realise at the time was such a big score, and I landed a job in Richmond, working in the marketing department of Harlequin Mills & Boon. (This was back in my marketing days before I became a writer).

It wasn’t so much working in a publishing house that was inspirational to me. It was living far away from home. Yes, it was scary and challenging, but it was also immensely liberating. I chopped off all my hair and dyed it a strange kind of platinum blonde/pink hybrid. I shopped hard in all the fabulous department stores in London. On the weekends, I went to the theatre, or to museums or to Bath or Paris. Everything was just a short ride away on the tube or the train or the ferry.

When you’re living away from home, everything is new. So you tend to observe a lot more, be more in the moment because you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t want to miss anything—and you also expect there will be something unmissable around every corner. You don’t expect things to be ordinary in the way you do when you’re at home in a familiar suburb and you see the same things every day.

So London was formative inspirationally in that it’s where I could really explore my love of travel and history and fashion, all the fledgling passions that were hard to develop into something bigger in the rather culturally starved and isolated Perth of the 1990s.

Joan Didion

I went back to university in 2003 to study a postgraduate diploma and then a Masters degree in Creative Writing. In one of those postgrad classes, the tutor assigned us a piece to read by Joan Didion—On Keeping a Notebook. Reading that short piece was a bit like falling in love.

I’m not sure if this is a frisson only writers get or if other people get it too, but sometimes you read a sentence and it lodges under your skin and in your heart and you can quite literally admire that sentence for hours, in the same way that other people might stare at a painting. I had that feeling for not just one or two sentences in Didion’s essay, but for almost the entire piece.

I immediately went out and bought Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Thus began a lifelong love of her work and a striving within me to always, always write the best sentences I was capable of writing. She taught me that a piece of writing grows out of beautiful sentences—that it isn’t enough to write a great story; you have to care about every sentence that supports the story too.

The Blind Assassin

I was so obsessed with this book by Margaret Atwood that I managed to come up with a research question for my Masters degree that enabled me to basically spend a year or so just analysing The Blind Assassin! In all seriousness, this book is where my love of historical fiction and dual narratives came from. I still think it’s one of the best examples of a book that weaves together multiple narrative strands in a way that keeps you guessing right until the very end.

I used to re-read it every couple of years and haven’t done so for a while, so maybe it’s time to pull it out and do a re-read. Perhaps it’s something I could look at doing here on Substack if anyone else is interested in joining in a group read of the book.

There are so many other things I could add to this list—a pair of black velvet Fiorelli high-heeled shoes that I danced through my late teens in and that, to this day, remind me how important a piece of clothing can be in making a person feel like they can take on the world; Graeme Murphy’s interpretation of the Swan Lake ballet, which is still one of the most visually spectacular things I’ve ever seen and proves that we don’t need AI to spark awe and wonder.

I think it’s important to stop and remember our inspirations every now and again. In a world full of information and stimulation, there are many things we forget, but there are some things we never will. They’re the moments of magic that help us create magic.

I’d love to know some of the things in your past that have inspired you in some way, or left a lasting impression, or sparked some kind of creative experience or curiosity. Please share them in the comments!