Much of my life is spent in imaginary places. When I was a child, I loved to stare into space and simply be—elsewhere. As an adult, novel-writing has given me the best excuse in the world to indulge this pastime, far beyond the age when it might have naturally come to an end.
When I close my eyes, I imagine my own mind as a cottage, low and weathered, with splintered clapboard siding, half submerged in a colossal garden. A narrow path out the garden gate takes me to a lake with a misty far shore, or else curves round into a mossy forest, spiderwebbed with paths.
My stories—the ones already written and the ones still in my mind—are waypoints in this fanciful landscape. A muddy path, edged with spring ephemerals, leads to the house in the fir-grove from my first book, The Bear and the Nightingale. A rocky ramble along the edge of the lake takes me to the castle of Never-Was, a place of climactic challenges in The Unicorn Hunters.
I realize only writers and madmen grow gardens in their own mind, let alone set them among imaginary water and imaginary trees, and then plant stories amidst it all. But the truth is when I get too invested in something I’ve made up, I find my life beginning to echo my imagination in good, bad, and disconcerting ways. The subconscious, apparently, isn’t adept at distinguishing between is merely imagined. Sometimes I just think that the two are closer together than we like to think.
But insisting to myself that a story is just a waypoint in an imaginary landscape keeps it manageable. I’m not sure why it works, but it does.
When I’m working on a new project I can spend hours—days—walking fictional paths, but once the book is written, there is a jarring moment when I am expected to step away and look back at this thing I have made, as though it were a mere object, and answer questions about it.
At first, I don’t know the answers at all. Figuring out responses to common book questions is a laborious act of repetition. The answers are always true, but it is just one truth, and a book contains many.
And my answers, well-rehearsed as they become, are rarely satisfactory. A novel’s journey from initial impulse to writing the end is full of strange byways; doubts and criticism, triumph, fresh ideas, false starts. When I am writing, the days blur together in a cloud of possibilities, eliminated one at a time as the book comes close—or as close as any piece of art can be—to completion.
Trying to speak honestly about this process, instead of mouthing pat answers, is like trying to describe a handful of sparks. I can’t talk about my books at all when I’m first working on them. Their existence is the merest gossamer, as spiderweb between two trees that aren’t really there. Being perceived is enough to ruin all.
But by the time the book has been turned from imaginary spiderweb to actual ink and paper, the strange alchemy of it—the forest, the lake, odd images, memories, things overheard, things read in childhood, the whole scrapbook of self that is a novel—is tidied away and only the result remains. At that point, I can almost convince myself that this result has actual solidity, and I have conjured true reality from that handful sparks.
Then I remember that a story is both ephemeral and real, that it is a contradiction that I will never understand.
But it is a healthy and important part of the writing process to think of your book as an object, to step away from it and consider it, answer questions about it. That is the easiest way to separate the story from your inner life, confine the characters to their place at the end of a well-laid path, turn away from that byway, and go down another.
Coming into writing The Unicorn Hunters, I knew I wanted to write a fairy tale. My prior book, The Warm Hands of Ghosts, had turned into a bitter wrestling-match with cruel and immutable history. I wanted this new book to exercise one of the prerogatives of fiction, which is to twist reality into a new shape. I had been fascinated by the life of Anne of Brittany since age sixteen, when I, a student in Rennes, ducked out after class to hang out in a bar-café called La Duchesse Anne. As a student in Rennes, I also discovered the real-life forest of Broceliande, its castle and pond, ancient trees and standing stones, a haunt of unicorns and of fairies, if ever there was one. I had read, as an insatiable devourer of folklore, the Breton story of the King of Comorre, a precursor to Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” and seen the famous painting and heard the tale of Ker-Ys, the Breton Atlantis. These various notions were the starting points for what become The Unicorn Hunters.
These were the handful of sparks that began The Unicorn Hunters. But a book is only a little the product of inspiration. It is largely the result of work. The Unicorn Hunters is me, sitting with snow falling outside, hunched on my favorite cushion beside the wood stove, amid a scatter of cups and papers, drafting in a notebook, my fingers ink-smudged, scribbling away in my awkwardly upright, looping cursive or editing madly on a laptop, squinting and surly, with a headache always threatening and deadlines hanging over my head. It is summertime work too--typing the handwritten manuscript, outside on the porch of my favorite coffee shop, ice settling as it melts in the coffee, my dog asleep under the table.
Sometimes it seems that any finished book is only the pale echo of the life and the work and imagination that went into it. The highest goal of my writing life is to reproduce without loss, the inchoate light and color and motion I see in my mind when I’m writing. To bring someone, without faltering, down the same ways I wander in my own mind, so they can also see the lake and the forest and the garden, and the pebbled path along the shore of the lake, to—if I have the skill—the castle of Never-Was, and further yet, to the great and beautiful unknown that lives within us all.
