Travels in the land of my imagination: the forests and mountains

I live in the city, but I'm not writing about city or suburban life -- I'm writing about a land that's been partially terraformed by humans and is essentially a medieval-type landscape and society. My characters are riding around on horseback, through forests, on beaches; they live in castles and in underground homes. In my imagination, I dwell in these places while I'm writing, but it helps to remind me of what that means by researching, by visiting places that are as close to the ones in my novel as I can find.

Perhaps one of the most famous writers maxims is to "write what you know". To me that doesn't mean I have to write about suburban life, but that I must try to capture emotional truths. I know what it is to be frightened, to feel horror and loathing and joy and love and embarrassment. Frustration is often a parrot on my shoulder. I know these things, and I try to give them to my characters: I try to write my characters from the inside out.

Visiting forests, walking through the leaf-litter and hearing the soft pad underfoot (not so much the crackle of leaves because of the dampness), feeling the cool air lace fingers through my hair, smelling the dankness, experiencing the quiet, the sense of being alone in the world, in a world that could be medieval helps me to know my setting too, to bring it to life (I hope) for my readers.

We've just come back from a family holiday in Tasmania, where I got to inhabit quite different forests to the Victorian ones I'm more used to. Below are a few of my holiday shots, all of which could be part of my novel. They remind me of what it was like to be there, what it's like for my characters, and help me enter that place in my imagination where I do know what it's like to be a soldier or a king or any other thing I want my characters to be.

Freycinet National Park

Looking across to Freycinet

near Strahan

Dove Lake & Cradle Mountain

Enchanted Walk, Cradle Mountain National Park

En route to Cradle Mountain

En route to Cradle Mountain

Drawing on imagination

What I love about rewriting is that it's so easy to slip back into the world: the scene is set, the details are down, the real world melts away and I become someone else. Funny how it's usually a twenty-five-year-old male soldier who is tidy. Wouldn't my mum love that! Maybe I should channel him when I'm in my "real" life. And it is like having two lives.

Ever since I've been a kid, I've had an active other life happening. Often it's been based around a movie I've developed an obsession for, a book I've loved and read; more often it's based around my novel. I sometimes think people would think me (and probably all my sibling writers) very odd if they could see what was going on inside my head. Perhaps they would find it scary. I can slip away while I'm driving -- oh, don't worry: I do keep the driving details with me -- into a sort of auditory other world, where I'll talk to characters. I'm sure the other drivers think me mad. Maybe they think I'm listening to music. When I go to bed at night, that's where my mind will slip off to. Maybe it's best my husband doesn't know just how many people share our bed.

In my medical scientist days, I drew blood from elderly folk in end-stage renal failure, and talked to them through their hallucinations. I wonder what my hallucinations would be -- would I slip into the world of my novel. Would I talk of setts and coarsebark trees and eaglons and venipers? Or would I focus on becoming one of the characters? Goodness knows what I might say -- rather a daunting thought really (and perhaps I should be glad I don't write crime!).

Society is funny in its view of creativity -- we value it as long as we can separate it from reality. But perhaps that's a good thing -- and a survival tactic. Strange, though, how it makes me feel the world is a poorer place -- especially for all those poor sods who never "waste" time going to an imaginary world. How much richer their lives would be if they only had imaginations that drove them to write. (Yeah, yeah, I know: the world has too many writers and not enough readers. Still, the thought intrigues...)