Writers Ultimately Live in Imaginary Places

2005

Within New Hampshire I've lived in many towns, from the seacoast area into the mountains, and in my novels I select what I want from various places and mix them up, as Virginia Woolf did when she moved a lighthouse from her childhood Cornwall to the Isle of Skye. This can get very confusing for my husband, who knows that a certain house is actually in Dover but I've moved it to Laconia, or vice versa.

Writers ultimately live in imaginary places, no matter how real the original inspiration was, and they know the floorplans of imaginary houses and geography of imaginary towns more vividly than their actual surroundings, at least for the duration of the book. When a novel is finished, I have to make a conscious effort to blank out the place where I've been living in my mind.

And gradually, in floats a new place to be written about, and once again, as Virginia Woolf describes, "I walk making up phrases, contriving scenes; am in short in the thick of the greatest rapture known to me."

© 2005 by Ruth Doan MacDougall 
All Rights Reserved

Privacy Policy

This website does not collect any personal information. We do collect numerical data as to traffic to the site, but this data is not attached in any way to our visitors' personal or computer identities. Those clicking through to other websites linked from this page are subject to those sites' privacy policies.