Babel Clash

Out of the Mist

Yesterday Glenda wrote a fascinating piece about how her world building is influenced by the many and varied places she has lived, and the differing physical and social landscapes she has found herself adapting to. It got me thinking about how much of our internal landscape we bring to our work. I know that universities discourage ‘biographical’ reviews of literature (where you try and decipher a novel based on the life of the author) and I think this is good because we can never truly know a person via their biographers – certainly we can never know them any deeper then the surface events of their lives or the colouring that their biographers may bring to those events. But I think it is reasonable to assume that all writers bring a piece of themselves to the novels they leave behind.

Some elements of my world building are deliberately chosen from life. My settings for example, are chosen because they are places which have resonated with me in the past. The Moorehawke Trilogy is deliberately set in the South of France. In my graphic novel, the detrimental properties of Hull’s atmosphere are based on the bad effect the air in Pheonix had on my health and that of many of my colleagues when we worked there (the Irish are very prone to respiratory problems and the air there is unnaturally laden with pollen and dust). My current novel is partially set in the old theatres and run down Georgian buildings of Dublin where I used to study ballet in my youth. But these are just trappings – they mean nothing if the world I have built around them doesn’t breath, and if the characters I have placed into them don’t vibrate with life. That’s where the writer’s interior landscape comes into it, I think.

As writers we sit for months at a time dragging words and sentences from the chaos of our brains and forcing them into order on a page. By doing this we hope to make others believe in the existence of a place which has never exist. When they read our words, hopefully they will see and feel and hear a world where shadows have never moved across the grass, where the rain has never fallen, where birds have never opened their throats and sung. More than that, we hope to make others fall in love or hate with characters who have never lived; who have never spoken a word in anger or love, never smiled frowned or shed a tear of pain. All this from the turbulent and insubstantial fog of our own thoughts, feelings and memories. When you think about it, it can’t actually be possible to do so without strip mining our own interior world and reproducing it in some form or another on the page.

That’s not to say we vomit wholesale our lives and experiences onto the page – that’s not writing a story, that’s keeping a diary. But I suspect there’s more than a grain of the writer in each of our characters, there’s more than a splinter of biography in our stories. I can’t see how it’s possible for there not to be.

*photograph reproduce with permission. copyright Grace Kiernan.

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