Writing landscapes – places to love and hate

The location for my latest novel is Tintagel. It’s a wonderful place that I visited many times, both through stories and on holiday. Before anyone thinks I am on commission from the Cornish Tourism Board, I’m going to explore the perennial writing advice of ‘write what you know’.
Research is a big part of writing anything and research skills from other parts of life come in very handy. I’m a psychologist by profession, so I have applied what I have learned about identity in characterisation. However, it’s easy to focus on the people in your novels and to miss out on the place.

In many classic novels place is almost a character. In ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne Du Maurier, the house where she lives, Mandalay, and the cove nearby, ground the story, increasing its dimensions. Location can convey so many unwritten aspects of the novel such as class and status, but it is easy to overstate the locations so the novel reads more like a travel brochure.

My decision to use Tintagel as my location hung loosely around stories I had heard from being a teenager. The legends of King Arthur entered my consciousness through Glastonbury Tor and a throwaway comment from a traveller who mentioned magic. Although I am a scientist, I am drawn to the mysterious and fascinated by how stories of magic are constructed, so I read everything I could around the legends, and came out the other side dreaming of love, knights and crusades and, on the darker side, seething about infidelity and lust. The moral aspects of the stories are laden with religious motif, and subject to both Pagan and Christian influences.

I didn’t visit Tintagel until fairly recently, and as I stood on that beach for the first time, I was reminded of the novels of Fay Sampson, about Morgan Le Faye and her life at Tintagel and of the work of Mallory and Geoffrey of Monmouth. Was this where it all began? The caves beneath Tintagel Castle, and the headland, which is rumoured to be the birthplace of a King of England, brought to me a sense of what it means to be English and steeped in history, something so often lost to me in the cosmopolitan rush of the City.

I knew at the time, as I reflected on the eerie likeness of the pictures I had painted of a place that I had never visited, that I would one day write about Tintagel, but I knew I would not write about the legends or about Arthur, because my understanding of the stories are a a deep part of my psyche and not for public view. However, I am very interested in how the various stories are constructed, by who and with what influence, so in my current novel I have let this flow through the main story and, hopefully, created a sense of belonging for the main character.

So the landscape of this story, which is about a woman who loses everything and becomes a bag lady, comes complete with its own set of stories and its own natural beauty. I tried to link my main character with the location by embedding her in it, and finding a reason why she would make her home there. I also tried to capture some of the historical feelings of a long trodden land, which is difficult to do in a contemporary novel. Previously, I’ve set novels in cities, which, for me, are more containers than landscapes. I prefer to let the character experience the place, to discover it, rather than to write pages of description so that the reader can love the landscape and the sense of belonging through the character. To do this you have to know a place well and have a ‘feel’ for it – it doesn’t have to be love, it can just as well be hate or fear.

Fiction has lots of made-up places, and this is another interesting aspect of writing for me. The imagination is capable of many things, yet still subject to joined-up thinking, especially when applied to fiction writing. I would contend that the imagination is still organised in schema and still subject to ‘paths’ where, although they end up somewhere fantastic and fictional, begin in experience. So it would follow that even though your landscape is fictional, it is based on a spark of experience somewhere, or at least some knowledge of that experience. This, of course, could be based in someone else’s fiction, but stored as knowledge in a schema, so therefore still experience (in this case of reading fiction). Confusing? Maybe, but also interesting and why we are able to suspend out disbelief and buy into fiction, perhaps?

So, as I finish writing and polishing and honing and my novel goes out to readers, I’ll be entering the submission stage of novel writing which is much more scary than the writing stage! It been lovely to be in Tintagel for a while, even if it’s only in my imagination.