If it's excitement you're after from a book what's your character criteria?  Some crave urbane secret agents armed with panoply of ingenious gadgets who indulge in a host of even more innovative sexual encounters, others will settle only for otherworldly goblins imbued with alchemical powers and a path that has already been foretold by the ancients.  Whatever pops your corn certainly depends on how high you want to raise the bar of your belief suspension but lately I've come to realise that it's the world of the everyday that interests me most as a writer.

The mundane and the characters that populate it is a great starting place for a story because, let's face it, we're all so damn familiar with it.  No maps need to be drawn, no scene embellishment necessary - just down to the serious business of finding something intriguing, eye-popping or deeply unsettling within it.

I've devoured books of all genres out of choice and, having read a bounteous amount for a literary talent scout, many I wouldn't have chosen but ended up being pleasantly surprised by.  Out of all these, however, it's always that first page that dumps me slap bang in the middle of familiar territory and then twists it or pulls something entirely unexpected from behind its facade that makes me want to read on.

This isn't me being pejorative about writers of any genre.  I've been transported to some bizarre places by some very capable hands but I suppose I admire more the work of writers who can create an alluring premise from a believable setting.  If you're presenting your reader with the everyday, however, the skill is introducing a plot that's exciting but still as plausible as the backdrop.

Personally, I've always been intrigued by my neighbours and the people you convivially nod at in the street and what goes on away from the those outwardly socially acceptable patterns of behaviour.  What are they really doing behind their front doors?  Who are they pretending to be when they log onto the Internet?  Everyone harbours secrets to different degrees and you've only got to turn on the news to hear about the extreme activities that are being perpetrated within ostensibly normal neighbourhoods.

It was these questions that interested me the most when I was writing STOP ME.  From Leo Sharpe, a normal Londoner who has to suddenly question the fabric of a life he assumed was secure when his wife vanishes during a Christmas shopping trip to John R Bookwalter, the character he engages with via the Internet who claims to be holding her captive even though he's never left his native Louisiana.  The biggest challenge was NOT turning them into bigger characters.

It's easy to be tempted towards cackling stereotypes for literary convenience but the concept of an everyman character like John R Bookwalter running his own website - a private, carefully calculated world of online commercial psychosis - was more interesting to me because it highlights a very real and worrying global situation where a society of outwardly civilised and polite people have an ongoing romance with the exploits of serial killers.    

These obsessives are the people we all sit next to in bars, the individuals who stand too close to us and breathe on the backs of our necks as we stand in line.  They're just like us and when writing about them it's a fine line to tread between the pedestrian that we can all readily identify and finding something at the heart of it that makes for a good story.  But carefully stripping away their manners and public personae is where some real intrigue lies. 

For the most part they're just as normal as you (?) but I wonder if you've ever held the door open for or shook the hand of a killer?  Odds are you just might have.  It's this probability that I believe keeps the belief suspension low and the potential for a gripping read very high.  So next time you're looking for story inspiration, consider the humdrum and what darkness lurks behind its repressed respectability.  It's often more terrifying than anything in fiction.