As I mentioned in my last blog, my reward to myself for finishing the second draft of Novel 6 was reading some fiction by other people. This was my first opportunity to read Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry. He is a writer I admire immensely and this novel was just amazing, a perfect example of how to combine exquisite writing with suspense and mystery. However, as much as I would recommend you to read it, that’s all I’m going to say about the novel in this blog. I might write a review of it at some point in the future, but for now, it has inspired me to write about geography.
One thing Barry does really well is use real locations in his novels. The actual highways and byways of Sligo, Dublin and Dalkey are so realistically portrayed that reading his novels is like walking around the streets for myself. It feels so real and clear that it must draw on personal experience, brought alive by the author’s love for those places. I have never been to Ireland, but I feel like I have been to these places.
I know this is something that other writers do, but it is not something I have ever tried to do for myself. The locations of my novels have all been completely fictional. When I first started writing, that even meant fictional countries and worlds for my fantasy novels. Inspired by Tolkien and C S Lewis, I drew elaborate maps of my worlds, with all the usual features you would expect in a fantasy world, complete with fanciful names. That’s the picture at the top – it goes with the very first novel I ever wrote, and this is the most anyone will ever see of it. Creating a map was just as much fun as writing the stories, and I do still love a good map at the start of a novel.
These days, my novels are contentedly confined to the world we know, and for the most part, England. But I still made-up the locations: Witherham, the home town of Dan and David, in an unspecified midlands region; The Priory, the holiday home of the Westwoods, in the fictional village of Priors Norton in Devon; The Levinson Estate in Wiltshire, a short carriage ride from Salisbury; a village in another unspecified midlands region, so small and insignificant that it is never named; and now, in my latest novel, the market town of Tadford, in yet again an unspecified midlands region. The good thing about making up my own towns and villages is that I can make them fit my needs. There’s no need to research real places, or worry that other people will question whether such a thing could happen within the restraints of a real location. However, it still requires a certain amount of logistics to be worked out; which roads go where, how big is a certain property and what are its neighbours, how long does a journey from A to B take? Sometimes, I need to know this in detail. Scenes that happen easily in my head need precise mapping before the character takes any steps on the page. That was the case for Witherham, the town I created for The Most Beloved Boy. David’s home is at one side of the village, Dan’s at the other, and Dan spends quite a bit of time walking between the two locations. In this case, an actual map was the easiest way to plan the routes those footsteps needed to take. It was never intended for publication, but I thought it might be nice to share it here, to show the working out behind the words.
I did the same with the garden in After the Rain, and the village in The Hawthorn Bride. It’s quite easy to do with small places. But for Novel 6, the town of Tadford is relatively larger. Plus, the part of the town where my characters live is a huge, sprawling council estate with labyrinth-like streets. Even if I could have started mapping that, there wouldn’t be any point as the place is supposed to feel ensnaring and disorientating. I left it as a mystery, hoping it would add to the sense of danger the place is meant to have.
And this brings me to the other element of world-building. To me, creating a town or a village or a house is like creating another character. Dan and David feel shaped by their upbringing in the town of Witherham and their return there is a momentous event for them. Therefore, it had to feel real to me, not just in street plans, but the personality of the place. Planning has helped with that; I have spent so many hours walking through the streets of Witherham with Dan that I feel as if I have been there and I know how it makes him feel. This is the case with all my made-up locations. And not just the towns and villages but also the houses where my characters live. Across all my novels, I took great care building the right homes for my characters; Dan’s oddly shaped cottage, David’s grand mansion house, John’s cottage on its journey from derelict to cosy. My characters know and cherish these places and it was important to me to be able to visualize what they were seeing, and feel the connections that they were feeling. These properties are just as important to the novels as the characters themselves and like the people I create, they have backstories and unique quirks. I wish I was a better artist, so I could draw these houses and see them beyond my mind’s eye. I just have to hope that I have done the same job with language.
Of all the places I have created, none is more central to the plot than the garden in After the Rain. About 85% of the action takes place within the boundary of the garden, which is fitting, considering that it is the garden that brings the characters together. In fact, it is falling in love with the garden that leads to Marianne discovering new passions and talents in herself that changes her forever. To her, it is not just a garden. She feels an attachment to it like she would to a person, possibly more than she has ever felt with a real person. In her mind, it alive and sentient; at times, she can almost imagine what it would say to her if it could talk. It is hard to say whether it belongs to her or if she belongs to it. And in creating this for Marianne, so it came to be for me also. I had to do enough research to make the horticultural descriptions realistic, but before that, I had to know every inch of the ground, from the formal gardens, the croquet and tennis pitches, the kitchen gardens and potting sheds, to the protective, encompassing woods and the more relaxed meadow with its lake and summer house. I have walked around the garden in both winter and summer, seen it transform from wild and unkempt to stunningly beautiful. Of all the places I have created, it is the one I would most like to go to, if such an opportunity were ever possible.
Still, at least I can go there in my imagination. I have been reading about Aphantasia this morning – the inability to visualise anything in the mind’s eye. I’m sure people who have this condition don’t know what they’re missing, but it seems very sad to me. The worlds in my mind’s eye are so precious to me. And it is a privilege to be able to bring them to life with words, so other people can visit them too.
M J Schofield 