A town built from small details

Rowan Bay began with a sound. I was staying near the coast, in a room where the window would not quite close. At night, a loose rope knocked against a mast in the harbour. The rhythm was so regular that I started waiting for the next knock. A place had become a presence before I had written a single character.

Borrow the feeling, change the map

The town in the novel is not that harbour. Its streets run in a different direction, its lighthouse belongs to another coast, and its bakery owes more to a conversation than a building. Fiction lets you move things until they tell the truth of the story. The useful question is less “Is this accurate?” than “What does this detail let the reader feel?”

I keep a notebook of small, stubborn observations. A front step worn more deeply on one side. A notice that somebody has carefully corrected in pencil. The particular silence after a shop closes. Most never reach the page. They help me recognise the few that belong.

Let the room remember

Mara’s childhood house needed to feel familiar and unfamiliar at once. I started with objects she would not have thought to remember: a key that turned too easily, a cup left unfinished, the sound of the clock. Each gave her something concrete to respond to before she could name how she felt.

If you are reading The Shape of Leaving, notice how the house changes without being rearranged. The rooms stay where they are. What Mara can bear to see in them does not. That was the detail I kept returning to while I wrote.

A question for your next walk

Choose a street you know well and imagine arriving there after ten years away. What would you look for first? What might you hope had changed? Sometimes a whole story is waiting in the distance between those answers.