Research and Imagination

Sometimes I am accused of having a vivid imagination. At other times I feel like I have no imagination at all. I don’t come up with these story ideas on my own. My imagination requires an outside stimulus. Like the rainy day a group of Ramblers took me to see Water Break-its-neck Falls near New Radnor (‘new’ meaning in the eleventh century). A mossy rock hung over the ravine and immediately I knew that was where she was when… But in that case… and suddenly there was a whole part of the story that I hadn’t known about before.

From my reading, “Sir” is not an inherited title, and there were very few in Wales at this time who bore it. But I’m stuck with Colin’s father being “Sir Stephen Hay” since I called him that in Glastonbury Tor. So how does a brute like him come to have the title, and what does it reveal about the man he once was, or might have become? My imagination is still working on that one.

Being in Wales has been very stimulating. Words and phrases come to me, and I write them down—things like “Bits of blue shone like satin through rents in the dirty rags of cloud.” (I missed the exit to Llancaiach Fawr trying to remember that one and ended up in Merthyr Tydfil, which I always think of as Minas Tirith even though they aren’t anything alike.)

On the coast near St. David’s I wrote: "It was something in the quality of light that I noticed first, something more open and exposed that said somewhere in the last few miles I had stepped off the porch of the world and onto the front lawn. Beyond the meadow that sloped away to my left was not a mere valley before another green, grassy hill, but something completely Other--the Sea." Since Colin’s story doesn’t have anything to do with the sea, I’m sure I won’t be able to use that one. Sigh.

That will be the challenge—to let all that I have researched inform the background of my story without taking over and turning the book into “See what neat stuff I learned in Wales?” It can be hard for a writer to leave out the pet passages whose only fault is that they don’t happen to be relevant. It’s the story that must come first, and in all this spectacular country, it is the story that my imagination must find.