I recently put the finishing touches on the first draft of an 82,000-word novel I have been nibbling away at for three years. I mentioned this to a friend of mine while we were standing around having a beer at a backyard party last weekend and he asked me how I came up with the storyline (it’s sort of a crime drama – highly atypical for me).
I consulted my brain and it offered up nothing but static. I had been working on the manuscript for so long that the original inspiration was gone – or so I thought.
It came back to me a few days later. Sometime in 2014, I was listening to Metallica’s Master of Puppets album and was singing along to the song ‘The Thing That Should Not Be’. I had never looked up the lyrics, though, and there was a line that (to me) sounded like ‘Fearless Rex’. I doubted they were the actual words, but I quite liked it as a phrase, which could translate to ‘king of the fearless’.
Who, I wondered, would be Fearless Rex? Why would he have that name?
So began my three-year novel writing saga and, for about two-thirds of that time, it had the working title ‘Fearless Rex’. As more avid Metallica fans than I will know, however, the real lyric (which I had to look up this morning) is ‘fearless wretch’ – an interesting phrase in itself, but a far cry from the one that inspired my novel.